your hands right now?
Asking this question of yourself helps you to clarify what you really want in
life. Most people hold themselves back, and sell themselves short, because
they feel that they are limited or trapped financially. Because of this feeling
of limitation, they never sit down and think through what it is they really
wan. They develop self-limiting beliefs. They begin to see themselves as
victims. According to Dr. Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania
they develop “learned helplessness.” They feel that they are helpless and
unable to change their situations because of their lack of money.
But when you ask yourself what you would do if you had a million dollars,
you are really asking what you would do if you had no fears of failure. You
are forcing yourself to decide how you would live your life if you had all the
money that you really wanted? By imagining yourself free of financial
worries, your mind clears and you see what you really want to be, have and
do in the months and years ahead.
Question Two: Project yourself forward to the end of your life and
imagine writing your own biography. If you could design your life in
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advance, and write your own story, what would you want to happen in your
life? What kind of a person do you want to become? What sort of things do
you want to achieve? Imagine that you could write the script of your own
life, and if you were not happy with the script, you could tear it up and write
a new script.
Imagine that you could write your own eulogy, to be read to your friends and
relatives at your funeral. What would you want it to say? What would you
want people to think about you after you pass away? How do you want to be
remembered by the most important people in your life?
When you ask these questions, and imagine writing your own life story, or
your own obituary, you free up your mind to see what is really important to
you. You develop “long-time perspective” and begin to become clear about
what you really want to accomplish with your life.
Question Three: What one great goal would you dare to set for yourself if
you knew you could not fail? If you were absolutely guaranteed of success
in any goal, short or long-term, big or small, what one goal would you
commit yourself to accomplishing?
Your mind is remarkable. Something amazing happens between your head
and your hand. The very fact that you can write out a goal clearly on paper
means that you have the ability to achieve it somehow. Your desire is the
only real limit on your potential. The only question is, “How badly do you
want it?”
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Your ability to identify the one great goal that you would dare to commit
yourself to if you were guaranteed of success is very often the best single
indicator of your major definite purpose. This is the one goal you are meant
to accomplish, and which can have the most positive impact on your life.
Question Four: What do you really love to do, at home or at work? What
gives you your greatest feeling of importance? What accomplishments give
you your greatest sense of achievement and satisfaction? If you could only
do one thing all day long, what one task or activity would it be?
Psychologists have discovered that the activities that give you your greatest
feelings of self-esteem are usually the tasks or activities that you are ideally
suited to do as a life’s work. You will always love to do the things that you
are most likely to have the natural talents and abilities to do extremely well.
Organizing your life and activities around your special talents and abilities is
the key to peak performance and high achievement. When you find the job
or position where your special skills meet the needs of the situation, you will
make more progress in the next two years than you may have made in ten
years working at something else.
Question Five: Use the “Quick List” method regularly. Take a pen in hand
and give yourself 30 seconds to answer the question, “What are my three
most important goals in life right now?” Then quickly write down your
three most important goals within 30 seconds. When you only have 30
seconds to write down your three most important goals, your answers will be
as accurate as if you had 30 minutes or three hours. Your subconscious mind
quickly discards all secondary goals. Your three most important aims or
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purposes will pop to the surface of your mind and appear on the paper in
front of you.
You can then ask, “What are my three most pressing worries or concerns
in life right now?” Give yourself 30 seconds to write down these answers.
Once you have both sets of answers, you will have a snapshot of your
current life. These answers will tell you a lot about yourself. First, your three
goals will almost always be a financial goal, a health goal and a relationship
goal. Second, your three goals will almost always be the solutions to your
three main worries and concerns. In most cases, your three goals are the
flipside of the coin of your three worries. You can resolve your problems by
achieving your goals.
Analyze Your Life
You can give yourself this exercise in each key area of your life. You can
quickly write down your three most important business goals, family goals,
health goals and financial goals. You can give this exercise to members of
your family or your coworkers. Give them 30 seconds to write down the
answer to the question, “What are your three most important goals in life
right now?”
Your three problems or worries represent your past, or where you are
coming from, and moving away from. Your three goals represent your
future, and what you are moving toward, both consciously and
unconsciously. When you ask yourself these questions regularly, you will
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enjoy ever greater clarity about who you are and about what you really want.
You will get more and more ideas to achieve your goals and solve your
problems.
Question Six: What specific steps will you have to take to achieve your
most important goals? A goal that is not accompanied by a detailed,
organized list of actions that must be taken to accomplish it is like
attempting to build a house without a blueprint. The more detailed your
plans of action, the more likely you are to be achieve your goals, and in a
shorter period of time.
Imagine No Limitations
Here is a simple but powerful exercise you can take to identify your goals
and organize your life. Take out a sheet of paper and write down everything
you would like to accomplish in your business and personal life over the
next five years. Imagine that you have no limitations of time, money, talent,
people, resources or abilities. When you write out your goals, imagine that
whatever you write down is possible for you, as long as the goal is clear.
You can conduct this exercise as a brainstorming session with the members
of your staff, or with your key people. In your business, you can write down
everything you would like to accomplish over the next five years, including
sales, growth, profitability, people, products, services, processes and market
share.
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You can conduct this exercise with your spouse at home. You can sit down
together and write out everything that you would like to be, have or do in
your lives together over the next five years, or even longer.
In the Bible it says, “Let there be light.” The more time you take to write out
every possible goal that you would like to achieve sometime in the future,
the greater light you will have in your life. You will be far more
knowledgeable and aware of what it is you really want to accomplish in the
months and years ahead.
As you write down your goals, think about the things you have always
wanted to do in the past, but which you may have given up on because of
constraints of time, money, marriage or other factors. When you write, let
your imagination run freely. Concentrate on writing out the largest quantity
of goals possible, without worrying about whether they are achievable,
logical or reasonable. Just get them down on paper.
Organize Your Goals by Priority
Once you have written out your list of goals for the foreseeable future, go
back over the list and organize it by priority. Write an A, B or C in front of
each of the goals. An “A” goal is something that is really important to you. It
is a goal that you would really like to achieve and which would make you
tremendously happy if you were to attain it.
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A “B” goal is something that you would like to achieve, and that you would
enjoy acquiring if you were successful. It is important to you, but it is not
quite as important as an “A” goal.
A “C” goal is something that would be nice to accomplish, or nice to have or
do, but it is not as important as an “A” or “B”.
It is only when you write your goals down and compare them against each
other that you develop absolute clarity about their relative importance to
you.
Select Your Most Important Goals
Transfer all of your “A” goals onto a separate sheet of paper. Review these
“A” goals and organize them by writing “A-1”, “A-2,” “A-3,” and so on
next to them.
Select from your “A” list the most important of all goals, the one goal that
could have the greatest positive impact on your life if you were to achieve it.
Ask yourself, “If I could achieve any goal on this list, which one goal would
give me more happiness, satisfaction and rewards than any other?” This
becomes your “A-1” goal.
Work through the “A” list by asking yourself this question. “If I could only
accomplish one more goal on this list, which one goal would it be?” This
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becomes your “A-2” goal. Then ask this question again and again, until you
have organized all of your “A” goals by priority.
Finally, take your “A-1” goal, the most important goal of all, and write it
down at the top of a new page. This goal becomes your major definite
purpose for the foreseeable future.
Make Detailed Plans of Action
The next step is for you to make a list of every single action that you can
think of that you can take to achieve your most important goal. You should
come up with at least ten or twenty different things you could do to
accomplish this goal. When you have written down everything that you can
think of, you then organize this list of activities by writing an “A”, a “B” or
a “C” in front of each of the items. You ask, “If I could only do one thing on
this list, which one action would help me to achieve this goal more than any
other?” Finally, you go back and you write “A-1,” “A-2,” “A-3” until your
list of activities is organized into a plan of action, from beginning to end.
You can repeat this exercise with each of your “A” goals. Write the goal in
the present tense at the top of a sheet of paper and then discipline yourself to
generate ten to twenty specific, concrete actions that you could take to
achieve that goal. Organize each of these lists by priority, using the A-B-C
method. This entire exercise will only take you between one and two hours,
perhaps on a Sunday afternoon. But once you have accomplished it, you will
have a list of clear goals, organized in order of priority, combined with a
series of action steps also organized by priority.
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With this set of goals and plans, you will have moved yourself into the top
3% of people in our society. You will have taken control of your future. You
will have grasped the steering wheel of your own life and turned it in a
different direction. What will happen to you as the result of this exercise will
absolutely amaze you. Try it and see.
Turbocharge Your Goal Achieving Ability
There are five techniques that you can practice to accelerate the speed at
which you achieve your goals. These methods will “turbocharge” your
energies and abilities and enable you to accomplish more in a shorter period
of time than you ever thought possible.
1. Visualize Your Goal as a Reality
Create a clear mental picture of your goal as if it has already been realized.
Imagine your goal as though you were already enjoying the finished result.
Close your eyes and think of what your goal would look like. Think about
how you would be as a person if you had achieved the goal. Think about
how much you would enjoy the achievement of that goal or objective. Your
subconscious mind is only activated by pictures that are presented to it in the
present tense, as though it were already a current reality.
When you repeatedly present a picture to your subconscious mind of your
goal as already realized, your subconscious mind then works to make your
external world and experience consistent with your inner picture. This ability
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to visualize is one of the great powers of the human mind. Your
subconscious makes your outer world consistent with your inner world. To
activate this power, you only need to create a “mental equivalent” of what
you want to see in your outer life. Your subconscious will do the rest.
Activate the Law of Attraction
Like running a movie projector, you should play and replay this picture
continuously, over and over again, on the screen of your mind. This picture
will then activate your subconscious mind and trigger the “Law of
Attraction.” This law says that you are a “living magnet” and that you
inevitably attract into your life the ideas, people and resources that you need
to achieve your most intensely desired goals.
When you play the picture of your goals on the screen of your mind, this
action magnetizes your mind and draws into your life everything you need to
achieve the goal.
Change Your Beliefs
The Law of Belief says that, “Whatever you believe, with conviction,
becomes your reality.” You do not believe what you see, but you see what
you already believe. There is a one to one relationship between how
intensely you believe that your goals are achievable and how rapidly they
