Setting UP GOALS

Setting up goals

Setting goals in life or business is no easy task. We want to achieve everything in life, but in reality, we can’t, or can we?  Setting goals is one way of achieving that everything we desire because it gives us something to aspire to and that added challenge to achieve on our bucket list.  But how do we achieve those goals you might ask? It’s not going to happen overnight and might take years to achieve, but they are achievable.

1)      Thoughts = Reality

The first step in setting up your list of goals is to have faith in yourself and the belief that you can obtain your goals in a timely manner. If for any reason you doubt yourself and the ability you have in making your dreams come true, then stop right now and go find a job that will pay you enough to survive and sustain yourself until you are old and gray. Otherwise, let’s turn your dreams into a reality.

2)      Close your eyes and visualize your desires

Thinks of what you desire in your job, your life, and the potential company you wish to create. Where do you want to be in 3 months, 6 months, 1 year from now, 5 years from now? Have you ever been to a job interview where the prospective boss asks you where you want to be in 5 or 10 years? Well, they’re checking to see if you have set goals for yourself and when you respond, not sure yet? You’ve just blown the interview. If you can visualize your goals, you can achieve them, so start visualizing them now. The more you can visualize your spiritual, financial, social, personal desires the more you can scope out how to achieve them. The more comprehensive you can determine your desire will be, the more you can make it happen.

3)      Ideas and Dreams need to be written down

The key to any successful person is their ability to write down goals, ideas, desires, and planning strategies. When you write them down you 1) you want to remember them, 2) you give them purpose and perspective, 3) they then become achievable. The best place to write them down would be in a diary or journal, a to-do list, or a notebook designated for ideas or goals. If you don’t write them down, you might forget that brilliant idea you had or that goal you never thought of before, which would be a shame because it could be the next million-dollar concept this century.

4)      Not always having a purpose

While many concept ideas have rhyme or reason and purpose to them, some do not. Just because one or two do not seem to have a purpose, write them down anyway, it will become clear to you when the time is right why it was necessary to write them down. If you’re an aspiring writer, it might be a saying, or description of a person, or maybe a historical marker concept to use. It might even be a how-to for a murder mystery, you never know. It could also be a business concept for you to research for later on in your journey. Whatever the purpose it should have meaning and motivation. The motivation could be to take a much-needed vacation, pay off a mounting debt bill, or maybe braces for your child or even for yourself. It shouldn’t be to raise a million bucks just to bank it for a rainy day, because that doesn’t make sense. This isn’t the great depression era.

5)      Commitment to yourself

Once you have a list of goals written down, now it’s time to make a commitment to yourself to make things happy. Take each goal and write down why and how you are ultimately committed to that goal, why that goal is important to you as an individual, and as a business owner. Also, explain why the outcome of said goal is a necessary factor in your success and how you are going to make it come to fruition in the future. This commitment to yourself and your business gives you a stronger connection to that goal so that you will follow through with making it happen in reality.

6)      Concentration and awareness

At this point, you are clueless as to how you are going to reach your goals, but when you concentrate on them as individual or collectively are aware of them on a daily basis, they become so much easier to reach. One important factor about your goal list is this; when your mind and subconscious see the list each day, it begins to realize there is a disconnect between where you are on your journey or in your business and where you should be in order to obtain that goal objective.

7)      Plan of Action

Your plan of action should be a clear road map that encompasses your wants, your needs, your purpose, and the list of goals you created, along with your commitment to them. The plan also allows you to focus on what needs to be done in order to achieve said goals. You might not have known how to create those steps when you first started out, but within a few weeks, you’ll know how to create that plan of action and organized enough to tweak it when necessary. Never look at your list and think you’ve missed the deadline to achieve it, don’t get frustrated or annoyed, just maintain motivation and plan around any road bump you encounter.

8)      Make it happen

In order to prove to yourself that you are truly committed to this process f achieving your goals, make a shortlist of things you need to accomplish, people you have failed to reach out to and called for assistance or just to discuss an important concept with. Make that phone call now. I said make it now. Stop reading or doing what you’re doing right now and make that phone call or accomplish that task. Now that you’ve completed that task, don’t you feel better? Don’t you feel motivated to do more? Every day I want you to make a shortlist of 5-7 tasks that need to be accomplished tomorrow and place that list in the center of your cleaned-off desk. That’s right you need to clear your desk each night so that you have a clean slate to start with each day. It’s called being organized.

9)      Answerability

I want you to remember this one thing if you don’t remember anything else I teach you, times will be tough and you will have to learn to adapt and overcome the adversities in order to get through them. If you are not answerable to your actions that brought you to those tough times, you will be lost completely. Your stress level will skyrocket and you will need to call on someone like me to help you endure the pain of making sense of it all and help you wallow through the muck in order to get yourself out of it. Remember bringing in a life coach is going to cost you money because we don’t come cheap. Be ready to stand on your own two feet and accept that you are answerable to your decisions and how you got to that decision.

10     Conclusion

At the end of the day, it is up to you to achieve your goals and turn your life around. However, you don’t necessarily have to do it alone. Talk with your friends, family and associates, sharing your goals with them, but make sure you share what is not a financial goal for business with them. Some people have more motivation than you might have and are willing to work hard to obtain what you might be lacking in achieving. They might steal your concept idea and run with it, so be careful. If necessary, have a lawyer create a non-disclosure agreement and before you share your ideas with anymore, even your mother, have them sign a non-disclosure agreement. An NDA protects you from their stealing your ideas. If they do steal them, then you can sue them in court because they breached the NDA. In your journal be sure to note the date and time you spoke to them and what you shared with them and any feedback they gave you. That notation will come in handy in a courtroom. No matter what you do from this day forward, protect yourself and your goal ideas. They are yours and everyone around you is searching for things to make money and they won’t hesitate to steal your ideas to make that money for themselves.  Best of luck.

Once you have created your list of wants and needs, we will let them sink in, and then we will tackle the creation of your action plan and how you can adapt it to your business plan. Let's give it a couple of weeks and we will run with that. By then, you should have a good working list of things you need to accomplish so that the plan of action will be easier to create.

Author Elizabeth Kilbride is a former political operative, author, scriptwriter, historian, journalist. business professional, and creative artist, and life coach consultant. Ms. Kilbride holds a Masters in Criminology and a BS in Business Management who stepped out of the loop for a while, but who is now back with a powerful opinion and voice in the direction of this country and our economy. As a life coach, she is available to counsel individuals to enjoy their dreams and a better life. Ms. Kilbride loves to travel, photograph her surroundings and is also a gourmet cook who loves to garden and preserve food for the winter months.