Do you set goals and yet you don’t always meet the target?
Maybe you have set goals in the past, but you’re not consistent or you don’t bother anymore because you’ve never really been able to get why they are so important.
Up until six years ago, I hadn’t a clue why goal setting was so important. These days though, there isn’t a day goes by where I am not working on achieving a goal of some sort or another. Because of this my life is continuously growing and so am I.
So what’s all the fuss about goal setting anyway and why is it so important?
Well, what I have learned is that if we want to have a different life, job, career, relationship, whatever the desire is, then its important to get crystal clear on that desire and write it down.
Tony Robbins said “Setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible into the visible”
You see, we create things twice, first in our minds eye then in our physical reality.
Our mind creates experience with pictures and we filter information according to those pictures. If we only have a clear picture of what we are experiencing right now, then that is all our mind can notice and re create. And this is what we will continue to experience.
Setting effective goals is more than just having an idea and picture in your head or writing a heap of dot points though. There are some common mistakes that people often make that are also the key components that can give our goals a real boost:
Write your goals down as if they are happening right now
One of the biggest mistakes I have seen people make is writing their goals in the future. Our mind filters information according to past and present experience, and will filter in information to guide you, giving you ideas and strategies based on that. If you write your goal in the future your mind will continue to filter in the same way as it is now and you can miss important cues. Because of this, it’s important to write your goals as if they are happening right now, using present tense.
Write about what you do want, not what you don’t want
This is another big one I often see. Many people write about what they no longer want, for example they write about “having less stress” or “not smoking”. Our mind just hears words, it doesn’t hear whether it is less or more or absence of those things and will create based on those words. So if you write, “ I have less stress” your mind will filter in stress and create more of that. In this example to change the goal to what you do want, you must ask yourself what you will be experiencing instead of stress.
Be specific about what you see, hear and feel
Many people set specific goals using dot points, which are very black and white. This is opposite to the way our mind creates experience. We filter information through our five senses, so we see, hear and feel experience. The more our goal feels like a current experience, the more our mind believes it is happening right now and this increases the information filtered in to guide us to achieve it. This means we have more ideas, we have productive conversations and meet people who can help us achieve it. So, see your goal through your minds eye and notice what you are seeing, hearing and feeling, then write it down.
The above three goal setting components are also three of the most common mistakes I see, but there are many more. Are these the mistakes you make? And if they are, just imagine what can you achieve when you change it.
If you want to learn more about how to give your goals a real boost then drop me a line at success@debjohnstone.com.au and let’s chat.