In the common “success” vernacular of our day, the phrase “Set Your Goals!” is much overused and abused. Too often it’s treated as if the “setting” of goals is the goal itself – like set and it’s done. Setting your goals is important, but it’s GETTING YOUR GOALS that changes everything and makes all the difference – in your business, relationships and personal life. Setting your goals is like a dream. But getting your goals is the dream come true. Although it can be as elaborate and complex of a process as people can make it, there are a few steps to simply the process, gain perspective, and put yourself in a ready-set-go-get-it mode.
While I’ve developed what’s proven for clients to be a very effective and powerful “Set and Get Your Goals” system, here are four simple keys to helping you achieve your goals:
- Classify – is it truly important? If it’s not, or if it’s not YOUR goal for yourself, you’ll find any reason necessary to justify not working on it and to justify why you don’t, continuing to give it an artificial sense of meaning and letting it continue to be a burden, distraction, and possible cause of a sense of failure. If it’s not important to you, why put yourself through this? Get off the merry-go-round of the unimportant!
- Clarify – get absolutely crystal clear and specific about exactly what the goal is. It’s impossible to hit a target if you don’t know what or where it is. It’s sad to work with clients and see their frustration and pain to trying to achieve “something important” only to find down the road they’ve already achieved it but didn’t realize it, because they hadn’t clearly defined what “it” is when they started.
- Connect – with your goal emotionally. In addition to clarifying “what” it is, grab hold of a BIG reason “why” you need to achieve this. As #Stephen Covey taught, if you have a bigger “YES” burning inside of you, it will be much easier to say “NO” to those things that will distract and discourage you.
- Commit – this is where a lot of people fail. They fall down, which is fine, but don’t get up. They essentially give up. You’ve got to decide if this is just a wavering wish, or a real, committed decision. If it is the latter, then you’ve got to treat it that way. Cut off all means of retreat, backing out, or wiggle room. By all means, don’t ever tell yourself you’ll “try” to do it. By definition, “TRYING IS NOT DOING”. Trying is inseparably connected with loopholes and a mandate to fail. If you don’t succeed, you don’t have to feel like you failed, because you really didn’t expect to do it, but only to try – even try your best. I’m reminded of the inspiring words of Winston Churchill that helped save his nation when England was being battered by Germany during World War II. He said, “sometimes your best isn’t good enough. Sometimes you must do whatever is necessary!” Are you truly committed, because if you really are, pity the person who gets in your way!
What are some of your thoughts, experiences, challenges and successes in your Goal-Getting efforts? It would be great to share here and I’m looking forward to your insights.
In the mean time, here’s to your increasing success!
Larry
