You’ve created your mind maps and identified your goals. Now it’s time to create a ‘to do list’ so you take that first step on your journey and keep going. Without a practical step-by-step action plan, it’s easy to slip back into having a ‘general idea’ of where you’re going and not take action to start to achieve your goals.
Once you have identified your goals, it’s important to keep up momentum – to continually take action to reach your goals. The momentum will create a rhythm, keep you positive and keep away seeds of doubt. If you stay still, doubt will creep in. Time will pass and you’ll find that you haven’t been standing still but in fact you have moved backwards.
Keeping up momentum falls into two categories – passive and active. Passive momentum is reading books or Internet research and learning new skills. It’s important, but not as important as active momentum – initiating, communicating and disseminating your plan. This is where you are actively looking for people to contact and opportunities to help you on your way. When I am coaching under 25-year-olds I tell them to make a new contact each week who can help them on their way.
Goal-setting can be a very positive and even liberating step – but you may find writing up the action plan confronting. Not only do you have to find time to do what’s on your list, but you have to move out of your comfort zone as well, doing things you haven’t done before. It’s important to overcome that discomfort if you are going to successfully change your thinking and live a goal-orientated life.
Enrolling people into your life to achieve your goals can be daunting. Most people hate ‘cold calling’ but you can turn it around to be something you like doing. For example, when I first started in real estate at 17, my boss George would make me go out every morning to knock on doors to get a listing – and I wasn’t allowed back in the office until I had one. People were often rude and angry and I hated it. After about three weeks, I decided to turn my cold calling into a game. I said to myself, I wonder if I can get a listing by 9am. The other thing I decided to do was if someone was grumpy, I’d do something to turn their day around. It worked! I become so good at it that before long, I had the most listings of any real estate agent from Surfers Paradise to Burleigh.
Break your list down into realistic actions and timeframes. If you don’t feel you can commit to doing something weekly, at the beginning of each month, decide what you want to achieve by the end of that month and stick to it.
If you’re going to set powerful, effective goals – goals that make a future – they need to be in tune with your core values. What are your core values? They are, quite literally, whatever you would ‘die for’ – the things you think are most important in life.
If your family is the most important thing in your life, your goals for financial success will need to include them or your heart won’t really be in it, or worse, you’ll pay too high a price for your success.
Think about business. If your integrity is important to you, are you setting goals that might lead you where you don’t want to go or where you wouldn’t respect yourself for going? Your core values define who you are and who you’ll be happy to become. They define the things you think are worthwhile going after and the kind of effort you’ll put in to get them.
>>> Coming Next: So What is Success About?
Please note: This is an extract from the Goals Workbook– it may not contain the exercises from the full version of the book/audioset, for full version please contact us or follow our blog for more.
Thank you,
The team@Custodian
