Goal Setting - Reverse engineer for success

Day 12 of 2015 and it feels like a good time to sit down and take a look forward at what one hopes the coming year might bring. Time to set some goals ...

I have long believed that if you keep your eyes on the prize, the path to it will become clear and it becomes easier to make decisions and choices that get you closer to your goal. What I have often struggled with however is staying focused on that goal when life happens - the unexpected events of daily living that cause one to veer off path for a short or long time and in so doing push the goal a little further out of sight.

For goals to have a strong positive effect they need a few defining characteristics.

1. An effective goal will connect you to your own sense of purpose. The actions you take towards the achievement of that goal nurture and expand your sense of self and help to enhance and grow your vision of your goal.

2. An effective goal is realistic. For those of us with grand goals, the setting of smaller milestone goals along the way is essential. Having something to look forward to and a reason to celebrate will encourage the brain to keep going, to maintain enthusiasm in the face of challenge and adversity, which will almost inevitably pop up from time to time.

3. An effective goal must connect to your own deep emotional drivers. If the actions you must take towards achieving your goal enhance your self image and connect to those things that give you a feeling of worth and value, and make you feel fantastic, then again the stickability becomes easy.

It's equally important to give your goals the opportunity to present themselves. When you do your goal setting for 2015 make time and space for yourself to identify the things that really matter to you. It's not always about material success or sporting achievement.

When you want to set some goals find a place that brings out your very best, away from the interruptions of busy day to day life. Take time to brainstorm or mind map all the things that are important to you, all the areas where you want to spend your energy in 2015 and write it all down so you can see it. Then be ruthless and pick out your top 3 or 4 things. It's quite likely that if you have success in achieving your most important goals, other things may simply fall into place or become less important. Then it's time to get specific and get creative. Visualise the outcome of your achieving your goals. How does it look? How does it feel? What does it mean to you? Once you see the outcome it becomes a simple process of reverse engineering - stepping backwards from success so that you can consider the steps you need to take to move forward from today.

Be ambitious and optimistic and always remember the advice of Confucious in goal setting - "when it is obvious that goals cannot be reached, don't adjust the goals, adjust the action steps".

More on that next time when we look at Planning.