Do you have dreams that you are trying to make come true? Do you have a goal that you are trying to crush? Success doesn’t happen by chance. You don’t have to get lucky or win the lottery to live the life of your dreams.
Success is a choice; really, a series of choices.
By making the right daily choices, adopting good habits and behaviors, and approaching life with the right mindset, you can make your own dreams come true. You will be unstoppable!
Goal Success by Choice helps you make the choices that will move you closer to your goals and keep you from holding yourself back.
I hope this post helps you get a little closer to crushing your goals.
Amuse Bouche
Before we get to today’s post, I offer you this light “amuse-bouche” to entertain your mind before we get down to business. Like any other amuse-bouche, you may hate my “dad joke,” but it is worth every penny that you paid for it, right?
Did you know that some people have a physical reaction to hearing puns? This condition results in puns making you feel numb. Math puns are even worse and will make you feel number.
What Do You Want?
Decide what you want, decide what you are willing to exchange for it. Establish your priorities and go to work.
H. L. Hunt
In last week’s post (see Feeling Left Out?) I shared how this time of year can trigger your DNA-encoded feelings of being left out. When seemingly everyone is bragging about their big new year goals and how well they are doing, it is hard for somebody who doesn’t have a big goal to talk about. This could lead to us giving into our feelings of FOMO, setting half-hearted goals and setting ourselves up for failure.
A more successful approach is to figure out what you really want to accomplish. Then, you can set strong goals that will lead you right to your dreams instead of the brick wall of failure. I shared a tool that will help you get started figuring out what you want from life, the Wheel of Life (download a free template from the Resources section of OperationMelt.com). This exercise enables you to reflect on the essential areas of your life and evaluate how happy you are with each.
With your Wheel of Life complete, you have started reviewing the current realities of your life. You have likely identified some areas of your life that could benefit from some goals. So, what do you do next?
It is time to explore some alternatives and start figuring out where you want to go.
Crafting Goals, Easy as ABCD
Goal-setting isn’t some mysterious act of alchemy only for some wizard on high. Creating effective goals is a process that anybody can learn to master. Once you do, beware that your life may change, and you may end up making your dreams come true.
To get started setting those big goals, you just need to remember ABCD:
- Assess
- Brainstorm
- Clean
- Decide
Let’s walk through each step of this process.
Assess
The first step to goal-setting is to assess your current situation. You started this effort with the Wheel of Life, which has helped you narrow your focus to the areas of your life that need a little boost with some goals. But, there is a little more work you can do here.
In the Wheel of Life, you have zeroed in on a couple of areas of your life that need a little work to get them to where you want them to be. The final step in the assessment process is to ask yourself why? For each of the lowest-scoring Wheel of Life categories, reflect on why the numbers are low.
What is causing this part of your life to be less-than-ideal?
Spend some quality “you” time by yourself thinking about this question. Grab a notebook or your favorite notetaking app and write. As the thoughts come into your head about the low score, immediately put them on paper. Don’t judge them; just write them down. You are just focused on letting your brain wander here; there are no wrong answers.
When the thoughts slow and conclude, read what you wrote. The trick is to let the thoughts in your subconscious flow onto the paper and then to put them back into your conscious brain. I know this sounds strange, but it works.
Knowing your current reality and why you rate it the way you do is the foundation to the next step when you will start exploring alternatives.
Brainstorm
With your completed Wheel of Life in front of you, and after having explored why you rated things the way you did, it is time to do some brainstorming. This also means that it is time to do a little more writing. Yes, it is essential that you actually put your thoughts on paper. It has been proven time and again that the act of writing your goals makes them more real and more likely to be achieved.
Ready to let your brain work some magic again? Start writing down everything you want to achieve in your life, especially those focused on your lowest ranked Wheel of Life categories. What are the big things you want to achieve? What are the small things? What are those things you’ve never told anyone that you want?
Strive to identify at least 30-50 items and get it all on paper. Don’t judge the ideas as they come out of your brain; just collect them. The more you have on your page, the better.
Once you have fifty items or so, and once your brain has slowed, you can bring your brainstorming session to a close. But don’t rush it. Take your time and really think about all of those things you want to accomplish.
Clean It Up
Take a look at that list of things you just created during your brainstorming. It’s kind of a mess, right? You have duplicate items on the list. There are 5-year goals mixed in with the 5-minute goals. Your list probably isn’t as useful as it could be in its current state.
We need to do a little housekeeping for your brainstorming items before moving on.
The first step in cleaning up your list is to combine, consolidate and eliminate duplicates. There will likely be multiple items that are all really one goal; combine them into a single item. It is ok if that means rewording a little bit to make sure you capture the entire essence of the goal.
Then it is time to make sure that all of the items on the list have similar timeframes. Ideally, each item you have will be a goal that could be achieved in a year or less if it was your top priority. If you have goals that require three, five or ten years to complete, let’s break them into multiple pieces. How much of your super long-term goal could be accomplished in one year? Add that to the list in place of the three-year plus goal. You aren’t saying that the bigger goal is less important, just that you need to start somewhere.
The resulting list will likely be a smaller version of your initial brainstorm. Each of the items on the list will be a goal you could accomplish within a year. And, the list will likely include the things necessary to push those Wheel of Life scores closer to that seven or greater level that you want to achieve.
This is a pretty important list, right? But, there are way too many items on the list for you to tackle at the same time. So, you are going to need to make some decisions.
Decide
In this final step, you will whittle down this big list of goals to the one or two items you will commit to pursuing as your priority. Yes, every item on your list is important to you. But, if everything is your priority, then nothing is your priority, and your goals may die on this list.
The secret to achieving your life goals is to focus on what is most important and be all-in on crushing those goals.
Let’s start by reviewing the whole list and prioritizing everything. Reflect on your assessment step above and think about what will make the most significant impact on your life. Using that lens, review every item on your brainstorm list and assign it a priority ranking of 1, 2 or 3, with the 1s being the highest priority items.
Circle all of the priority number one items on the list. How many are there? More than five or ten?
Repeat the priority ranking process again just for those items you ranked as number one in the first prioritization. Again, rank the priority of all items 1, 2 or 3. You should now have a small number of priority one items after your second pass prioritization.
Finally, it is time to make your decision. Which one or two items will be the big goals that you focus on first? Which one or two items will make the biggest impact on your life and take about a year to achieve?
Have you made your choice?
Write these two items down on an index card or PostIT note and put them in a place where you will be able to frequently see them. These are important items, and you don’t want to lose sight of them.
But, Wait… There’s More
Ok, you have identified your one or two big goals now. You are no longer feeling left out as people share their New Years Resolutions. In fact, you are even better off than most of them because you went through a process instead of setting some aspirational, half-hearted resolution. Great work!
But you aren’t done yet. You want these goals to stick, and you want to crush them, right?
Another essential step might make the difference between success and failure with these new, top priority goals. This is especially true when you start facing challenges along the way.
I will share this next step in next week’s blog.
Until then, I wish you the very best of luck as you follow this process to identify your biggest goals.
So What?
Goal-setting isn’t some mysterious act of alchemy only for some wizard on high. Creating effective goals is a process that anybody can learn to master. If you follow this simple ABCD process, you can take the first steps towards the life of your dreams.
Do you need a little help with your ABCD goal-setting process? I am here for you.
Click Here to learn more about my Operation Melt coaching services.
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