Achieving Your Goal

There is no better tool for success in today's world than in a comprehensive goal-setting program.

Too many people have goals in mind but they don't act upon those goals. For example, there are people out there who want to write a book. They really do. If you ask them, they'll tell you that one of their goals is to write a book.

But they're not doing it.

Is it because, deep down inside, they don't really want to write a book?

No.

It's because they don't actually have a plan.

It's one thing to have a goal but it's something else entirely to sit down and figure out a way to achieve your goal.

It can be done -- there's no doubt about that. Just about any goal that you can think of can be achieved with the right plan. (Naturally, this only applies to realistic goals. If you have a goal that is totally unrealistic -- such as playing professional basketball when you're eighty years old in a wheelchair -- there isn't a plan in the world that can get you where you want to be.)

So the first thing that you need to do is set your goal.

Write it down on a piece of paper. Put it there in black-and-white (or whatever ink color you're using) and when it's there, stick it in a prominent place where you are not going to forget to look at it. Most people stick it in their office or on their desk and some have it there on the refrigerator, where it can be viewed every day. It doesn't matter where you put it, though -- as long as it's there and as long as it's visible as much as possible.

Now, one of the reasons that putting your goal down on paper is that it is the first step in a very valuable tool out there -- focus.

Focus is an incredibly powerful tool and yet, there are so many people who don't take advantage of it. The way that I like to think of focus is a magnifying glass. If you've ever taken a magnifying glass out in the sun, you know that you can make the beam sharper and more focused by moving the magnifying glass up and down, right?

What happens when you focus the rays of the sun on a piece of paper?

It gets hot and it burns.

That's what focus does.

When you use focus to define and to sharpen your goals, you'll get hot. You'll ignite yourself and you will see progress like you've never seen before.

Now, focus works best when you have your goal broken down into steps. If you have no clear-cut plan of success, what you need to do is break down your overall goal into smaller goals so that you can focus on the smaller tasks and get them eliminated.

Take your ultimate goal and break it into into a set of smaller sections.

Let's use the example of someone who wants to write a book someday.

Writing a book is AN ULTIMATE GOAL.

This can be broken down into smaller goals:

Outlining the book
Researching the material
Writing Chapter One
Writing Chapter Two
Writing Chapter Three

See how it works? Instead of sitting on the couch and thinking that one of these days, you want to write a book, you can actually focus your attention on a smaller section of the ultimate goal and move ahead with that.

Another aspect of achieving your goal is to set up a daily "movement" goal. In other words, to make your goal happen, you should give yourself one do-able milestone heading towards your goal that you can feel good about. It's important to make sure that this is do-able. Don't set up a goal that you can't achieve for that day -- and in the event that something comes up that you can't ignore, you can skip the daily task. Don't make the mistake of skipping it too often, however, or you'll find yourself right back on the couch and thinking about the goal that you're going to achieve one of these days.

On the other hand, make sure that your daily goal is something that requires you to do some actual work. If you give yourself a daily goal such as, "I'm going to do 10 minutes of research today," that's hardly even worth it. By keeping your goals too low and accessible, you'll never challenge yourself -- and you'll never see any forward progress.

The important thing is that you set down your goal, you break it down into smaller tasks, and you break the smaller tasks down into daily "do-able" tasks. By following these simple rules, you'll quickly find yourself on the road to achieving whatever goal you've set for yourself.

by: Scott Brown