Goal Setting That Works

Success is based on the achievement of 6 things:

1. Peace of Mind (freedom from anger, guilt and fear);
2. High levels of health & energy;
3. Loving relationships;
4. Financial freedom (not worrying about money);
5. Having worthy goals (goals the person believes are worthy .. not ‘inherited’ from someone else);
6. Feeling of self-fulfilment (becoming everything a person wants to be)

It’s important to understand that the most difficult person in the world to manage is yourself so self-discipline in achieving goals is crucial.

Conscious v the Subconscious brain:

1. Subconscious works 24 / 7 (e.g. dreams). Conscious only functions whilst awake.
2. Conscious can discern fact v’s fiction. Subconscious can’t.
3. Conscious can only hold one thought at a time. Subconscious can hold many.
4. The conscious is the gatekeeper to the subconscious… whatever is allowed ‘through’ is accepted as (your) reality.
5. Subconscious is a powerful problem solver and source of ideas
6. Subconscious is prominent in programming (your) behaviours
7. Self-Talk is 80% of what we say… so it had best be what we want our reality to be… therefore only say things about yourself (out loud or in self-talk) that you want to be your reality.
8. The subconscious can be ‘fooled’, e.g. act for 6 minutes that you are energetic, and it will become your actual feeling.

Einstein used his subconscious to solve E = MC ². He held a stick in his hand, over a metal bucket, whilst he sat in a chair thinking so that when he fell asleep the stick would fall and wake him to cause his subconscious thoughts to shoot through to his conscious.

Some studies indicate that less than 5% of people have goals and less than 1% write them down!

In 1953, a study at Yale University was conducted among graduating seniors and found less than 3% had written down goals for their lives and made plans to achieve them. Twenty years later, in 1973, they studied the same group of graduates and found that the 3% who had set goals were worth more in financial terms than the entire other ninety 97% put together! The example and goal setting is not about wealth; it’s about the power of goal setting.

There are four reasons people don’t set goals:

1. They don’t understand the importance of goals…America now has families of 4 generations who have grown up on welfare.
2. They don’t know how education fails them.
3. Fear of rejection from others. So, goals should only be shared with those who will support and encourage you.
4. Fear of failure.

Years ago, research showed that more than half of the world’s millionaires were once bankrupt.

Napoleon Hill wrote the Encyclopedia of Success and he interviewed over 500 successful people in America – every one of them achieved their greatest success one step beyond their greatest failure.

Thomas Edison was the greatest failure as an inventor in history – he lost more money and had more failed experiments than anyone else on the record. He eventually patented 1,097 ideas and made hundreds of millions of dollars for himself and countless others. He experimented and failed over 10,000 times in his attempt to invent the filament for the light bulb. At the time Edison was working on the electric light bulb journalists were writing that he was out of his mind and there was no future in electric light. He was interviewed after 5,000 failed attempts and asked why he continued to waste his time on such a useless venture. He responded ‘You do not understand how the world works. I have not failed 5,000 times. I have successfully identified 5,000 ways electric light will not work and I am 5,000 ways closer to the way it will work’. Edison also experimented over 17,000 times as to how latex could be derived, which now forms the basis of rubber.

The tendency for most people is to stay in their comfort zones and never go into a field in which they might fail, and yet, every highly successful person does that.

Goal setting is about the commitment to try rather than the confidence of succeeding. One certainty in life is change. Setting goals gives you influence over its direction.

Goals must be balanced across each of these 5 areas of our lives:

1. Self (e.g. spiritual, self-development, hobbies, sport, pursuits)
2. Family
3. Health & Fitness
4. Career
5. Lifestyle … and therefore the income/wealth to fund it

They don’t all have to be measurable, time-bound or achievable!

That can prevent the ‘dreams’ and it can make it too practical. Some should be but others not.

There are some vital questions we must consider when choosing the goals, we set:

• What would you do if you won $5M tomorrow? This rids our thinking of financial constraints.
• What would you do and how would you spend your time if you had less than 5 years to live? This leads us to our true priorities.
• What have you always wanted to do but been afraid to attempt? This is most often related to a fear of failure and is often the result of past conditioning.
• Of all the things you have done in your life so far what sorts of things have given you the greatest feeling of importance? This points to true passions in life.
• Is the goal really yours and not somebody else’s?
• If you were guaranteed success what would you do? This, again, rids us of the fear of failure.

There are some vital aspects for the ways goals are set:

1. Make sure your goals are aligned with your personal values.
2. Dream first!
3. Goals must be written down because it programs the subconscious.
4. Goals must be written down in specific terms.
5. Set deadlines for some of the goals … those that obviously need time frames.
6. Clearly visualize the attainment of the goal Morning and Night. ‘Whatever the mind can see and believe, the body can achieve’. This adds to the programming coming from the subconscious brain.
7. Goals must be stated in a personal sense ‘I’, ‘We’. This brings the goal much closer to you (and your subconscious).
8. Goals must be present tense ‘am’, ‘have’ not ‘will be’. The sub-conscious can only understand and relate to the present, not the future.
9. Goals must be stated as if already achieved ‘I am smoke-free’. Again, this will cause the subconscious to program behaviours in this way.
10. Goals must be stated in a positive sense and never in a negative sense (the subconscious cannot relate to negative statements) ‘smoke-free’ c.f. ‘don’t smoke’.
11. Use emotion in the setting of goals … because it ignites the subconscious more powerfully.

It all works like this:

Our Beliefs set our Expectations, which create our Behaviours, which determine our Outcomes. Setting goals influence what we believe and expect.

A most powerful study of 500 successful people found only two common factors in their goal achievement:

1. It had nothing to do with education (in fact, education was inversely related to success in some cases).
2. They were all obsessive goal setters.

So, dream… set goals… write them down… read them every morning (to program daily behaviour) and every night (to feed them through to the subconscious).

You will be amazed at how this all works.