With the New Year just underway, it’s time to reset and rethink what you want to accomplish in your life, as a person and as an authority in your niche. True thought leaders are strategic, and map out a plan before getting into the weeds. So start setting up goals today, and make this one of your best years ever.
The importance of setting goals
Around 95% of people that set New Year’s resolutions don’t follow through, and 25% abandon them in the first week! This means you likely need to take setting up goals to another level, because even if you set them, the chances you will follow through are not in your favor.
Why set goals?
Mindtools.com puts it this way:
Top-level athletes, successful business-people and achievers in all fields all set goals. Setting goals gives you long-term vision and short-term motivation. It focuses your acquisition of knowledge, and helps you to organize your time and your resources so that you can make the very most of your life.”
And Melody Beattie adds another inspirational goal setting quote:
The new year stands before us, like a chapter in a book, waiting to be written. We can help write that story by setting goals.”
The amount of famous people that talk in detail about setting goals is almost endless, including personal development expert Tony Robbins.
Tony Robbins on setting and achieving goals
One of my biggest takeaways from going to the Tony Robbins personal power conference was the importance of writing down your goals.
Setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible into the visible.” – Tony Robbins
The clearer you become on what your goals are, the more likely you are to achieve them. In addition, you must also understand why you are motivated to achieve them. Tony Robbins calls this getting leverage.
Leverage can happen when you have a true belief in your mind of what will happen if you do not achieve your goal, or when you can truly envision the positive outcome of achieving one. Envisioning the positive and the negative can give you an incredible amount of motivation to persevere even when you feel like giving up.
Tony Robbins often takes people through a series of visualizations where he has them imagine what their life will be like in 5, 10 or even more years from now, after they have failed to reach their dreams.
When you can truly imagine the nightmare you would be living, you can then use that as leverage to motivate you. He then takes you on a highly emotional, positive visualization as well. After going through this exercise with thousands of people at Tony’s conference in Florida, there was barely a dry eye in the crowd.
The power of your thoughts
If you continually imagine your goals coming true, it propels you forward into a positive future. The movie The Secret talks about this in great detail, as does the book Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill.
The premise is that when you envision yourself being successful at any of your goals, it draws them into reality. A simple example of this is an athlete envisioning themselves at peak performance and then winning a gold medal. This repetitive exercise is said to unleash the incredible power of the universe. Having faith and truly believing that you can accomplish your goals can be the differentiating factor as to whether or not you follow through fully.
As Napoleon Hill puts it “Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe he can achieve.”
It may sound hokey, but you would be amazed at how many rich and famous people have used this technique. In fact, Napoleon Hill, initiated by Andrew Carnegie, spent 20 years of his life interviewing over 500 wealthy people in regard to what the key factors were in helping them achieve their goals. Overwhelmingly, they cite imagining the positive outcome as a critical factor.
Must-have versus want to have goals
It is only when we turn our wishful thinking goals into must-have goals, that we accomplish lasting results. Are your goals for this year casual, or are they things that you deeply desire, and are willing to sacrifice to achieve? It’s time to create a sense of urgency and put a deadline on achieving your goals. As Napoleon Hill says:
A goal is a dream with a deadline.”
Setting up SMART goals
Achieving your goals is more difficult than simply setting them. That is why many people use a system called, setting SMART goals. Smart goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely.
The act of writing down your highly specific goals seals them in stone, and yet so few people take time to do this exercise. Use the worksheet below to guide you. I suggest doing it for at least your top 3 goals.
SMART goal setting worksheet
List your most pressing goal for the coming year by printing out this post or goal setting PDF. Steps to setting goals are as follows:
List your most pressing goal:
Specific: List specific action steps on how you will achieve this goal:
Measurable: How we measure your progress?
Attainable: What will help make your goal attainable?
Relevant: Why you absolutely must achieve your goal?
Timely: When will you attain your goal?
Now that you have your goals documented, stop reading and take at least one small action towards creating a better future.
