Setting & Achieving Goals: 8 Steps to Success!

Everyone has at least one goal in life; To be rich, to be happy, to have a family, to be a CEO, to have that car or that house.

But not many have set their goals in writing with a deadline, to be exact about 2% of all adults have set their goals in writing.

The interesting fact is that those 2% make as much money as the other 98% put together. If you want to succeed, setting goals firmly in writing isn’t an option, it is a requirement.

The First time I set Goals

When I was 19 years old I was working for a very successful sales company. We were doing very well, but because of some senior employees leaving morale was a little low, the managers decided they were going to teach us to set our goals, which would make us motivated again.

We learned the step by step process for setting goals and followed them one by one.

For many it became a great source of motivation to see their goals in writing and to be able to see how their actions today were moving them towards their goals.

For me, it had the opposite effect, not that they didn’t motivate me, but I realized that the things I was doing weren’t moving me towards my goals.

I quit my job and started working with other things more in line with my dreams. The goal setting exercise had the wrong affect for my employer, but it changed my life for the better. With a focus I had never before experienced I started working on my goals and moving towards them faster and faster.

The 8 steps of goal setting:

1. Long term goals in all four major areas of your life.
The four areas are Family, Health, Career and Finance.  You need goals in all areas.

Imagine your life as perfect, as if you already had the perfect family situation, were in perfect shape, had your dream career and had accomplished your financial goals.

Write down those goals.

2. Short term goals in all four major areas of your life.
A short term goal is like a milestone on your way to what you are really striving for.  Generally they are about one year down the line, and they will help you follow your progress on your long term goals. Make sure the short term goals motivate you to work hard on their completion. Write down a short term goal in each area of your life.

3. Deadlines
Set a deadline for each goal – both short and long term. By what date do you want to have completed your goals?

4. Measurable
It is important that all your goals can be measured.  You need to know when you have succeeded. For example don’t write “I want a lot of money” instead set an exact figure “I want to have one million dollars” or “I want to win this competition”.

5. Write your goals in the positive, present tense and add your deadline.
Now, rewrite your goals.  Write them as if you had already completed them.
In other words “I have one million dollars”, instead of “I want one million dollars” and then add the deadline.  “I have one million dollars by the 31 of December 2014.”

This activates your subconscious mind to start pulling events and opportunities to you. It also helps you follow your progress and gives you a definite target.

6. Read your goals, listen to yourself, what do you feel?

Do you feel motivated to start working on your goals at once? Are you motivated to take action? If not, the goal isn’t worth your time. Go back and set one you really want.

7. Make plans for your goals completion
Write down how you plan to complete each goal.
For example:

“I have one million dollars by the 31 of December 2014. I have made this money by selling a company that does “this and that” and sells “this and that”. I will first start the company as a part time job until I have enough customers to start working full time. When that is achieved  I will ….” and so on until you have a comprehensive plan for the completion of the goal.

You will not get your plans right the first time

Every time you fail, go back to your plan and revise it. Use the knowledge you have acquired and make a new plan to take action on.

8. Put the paper somewhere you will see it every day.
Either tape it to your bathroom mirror or put it beside your bed. What is important is that you read it every morning and evening.

Conclusion

Goal setting can be a powerful source of motivation and it activates universal laws like the law of attraction.  It is a wonderful tool.

Try out this exercise and become one of the top 2% in the world.

Roland Gilbert

With over 20 successful years in corporate America, Roland Gilbert is now living his passion through helping others find and live theirs! Roland is a personal coach working with a wide range of clients’ issues through helping them change their thoughts and actions about their worlds – both personally and professionally.

Roland works one-on-one – via phone and face-to-face – and with MasterMind Groups. Through Couples Coaching Roland helps clients communicate better, find the love they want, and create relationships of significance.

Contact Roland at 800-974-3692 or rgilbert@perennialgrowth.com  to determine if coaching is right for you. www.perennialgrowth.com

Want Better Results? Shift Your Focus!

In some of my workshops, I run a short activity which provides the audience members with an immediate and practical example of how and where we focus our attention and energy – and the potential consequences. It’s a pretty simple process used by plenty of facilitators.

How it works:
I ask my audience to spend sixty seconds looking around the room and to take note of everything that’s red. Any shade of red will do. Crimson. Fire-engine red. Burgundy. Maroon (are they the same?). If I’m feeling generous, I’ll even allow hot pink. I then tell them to commit as many red things to memory as possible. I tell them not to over-think the process, not to try to figure out the point of the exercise (and thereby miss out on the benefit), not to talk to anyone else, not to write anything down and to use whatever memory or recall method they feel will give them the best result. That is, optimal retention.

Turning Cogs

For sixty seconds there is total silence. An intense silence – if that’s possible. I can almost hear the cogs turning and the competitive juices flowing as each person scans the room frantically trying to absorb and remember as much (relevant) information as possible. Talk about focus – sometimes it’s as though they’re looking into the face of a loved one for the last time. And why competitive juices (I hear you ask)? Because men can make a competition out of pretty much anything; that’s why. We men have the ability to attach ego and winning to almost any activity; no matter how much of a competition it isn’t!

At the end of the allocated time I ask the group to keep their eyes closed. I then ask them a whole bunch of irrelevant and (seemingly) pointless questions for about two minutes. At this stage, the quantity and quality of their responses (to my questions) is pretty underwhelming as (1) their eyes are still closed and (2) they are desperately trying to retain the required information (the red stuff in the room) and to dispense with my stupid and annoying questions without being too distracted from their mental list.

But You Said….

Just when they’re about to storm the stage and punch me in the head, I ask them if they’re ready to share their memorised list with me. I place myself in front of a whiteboard with a marker in hand and say, “okay, keep your eyes closed and give me a list of everything in this room that’s… brown.”

At this point, I can literally sense the frustration in the room.

“But you said red?”
“I know, but now I want the brown list – keep your eyes closed.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Life’s like that.”

Over the course of a few minutes, with all eyes still closed, the group begins to shift its focus and to review the room (in their mind’s eye) in a different way. Typically, most people will recall less than a quarter of the brown things in the room while being able to recall almost one hundred percent of the red.

“But you all studied the room before you closed your eyes”, I tell them.
“Yeah, but we were looking for red, not brown.”

A New Perspective

After a few frustrating minutes, I allow them to open their eyes and to instantly see what they hadn’t before: all things brown. It’s amazing what becomes apparent when we look at the same thing (room, relationship, career, business, opportunity, person, health) with a totally different focus. What was once invisible, becomes immediately apparent. Obvious even. When we shift our attention, we can find gold. We find ourselves with a different level of consciousness and a new appreciation for, and awareness of, what has always been there. In some ways, it’s like we’re opening our eyes for the first time.

This brief activity (looking for red) is a simple, yet effective, one – we find what we’re searching for. When we have a narrow focus (which we often do), we don’t see the entirety of what’s there. The potential. The gifts. The joy. The fun. The good. The opportunity. When we look for bad, we’ll find it. When we expect rejection, we’ll find that too. If we’re constantly searching for problems, we’ll never see the solutions. As the saying goes "whether you think you can, or think you can't, either way you are right!"

Our focus becomes our reality and we wind up creating the very thing (situation, outcome) that we desperately want to avoid.

Sometimes we’re so obsessed with, and fearful of, the bad, we miss out on the considerable good in our world. Sometimes we’re so preoccupied with finding the red things in the room that we don’t notice (enjoy, celebrate, appreciate) any of the other amazing colours. Today I’m encouraging you to consciously take a look at your world through the eyes of optimism, gratitude and greater awareness.

Consciously find the good. It’s there.

So now it’s your turn to share a thought, idea, story or experience relating to this post. Have you ever shifted your focus to shift your reality? Tell us about it.

Roland Gilbert

With over 20 successful years in corporate America, Roland Gilbert is now living his passion through helping others find and live theirs! Roland is a personal coach working with a wide range of clients’ issues through helping them change their thoughts and actions about their worlds – both personally and professionally.

Roland works one-on-one – via phone and face-to-face – and with MasterMind Groups. Through Couples Coaching Roland helps clients communicate better, find the love they want, and create relationships of significance.

Contact Roland at 800-974-3692 or rgilbert@perennialgrowth.com  to determine if coaching is right for you. www.perennialgrowth.com

Personal Success & Unconscious Beliefs - Part III

This is the final post in a continuation for personal development and personal success. I’d like to talk about my favorite subject…beliefs!

In the Personal Success & Unconscious Beliefs–Part I, I discussed ‘beliefs 101’.  In Personal Success & Unconscious Beliefs–Part II I talked about were beliefs come from…now I’d like to continue with…

Unconscious Beliefs in Life

Self awareness is the key to personal growth and personal development. By being self aware we can understand more about ourselves and this will support us in determining our vision in life and areas that we wish to grow in. This can be the very first step to knowing more about your beliefs and unconscious beliefs – just through awareness.

Awareness is the first stage of change. It is the first stage of bringing something from our subconsciousness into our consciousness. Through seeing something consciously we can determine more about it. We can start to ask ourselves questions about our behaviors. We can start to unlock truths about our beliefs. We can determine what beliefs we are committed to.

The best place to look for an unconscious belief is within the situation in which you are confronted. In other words, by looking at the outcomes or the results we have in our life, which we don‘t want. Going back to our original premise, which is: whatever a person truly believes in they will create and experience. We can use these unwanted results to define what the unconscious beliefs are in life. The connection is simple and direct.

For example, if a person says they want to save money and they have been trying unsuccessfully for a substantial period of time, then there is something they believe in which causes something else to show up in their life. A person with this kind of challenge may have an unconscious belief called, “I don‘t deserve to be wealthy” or “I don‘t value money” or “there‘s not enough resources to go around.” Any one of these unconscious beliefs could support the behaviors that result in the person not saving money. It does not take too much imagination to think of childhood events that may have resulted in someone developing this kind of unconscious belief.

In order to create a greater level of self-awareness around our thoughts and beliefs, it is important to also develop awareness around our emotions. When exploring unconscious beliefs, we may find it difficult to monitor and identify our specific thoughts and beliefs. When looking to identify an unconscious belief that eludes us, it can be useful to first look at the emotions that our thoughts cause us to feel. Do your thoughts create emotions that are empowering – feelings of joy, excitement, love and gratitude?

Or do your thoughts create emotions that are disempowering – feelings of fear, frustration, sadness or anger for example? Your feelings are a barometer of your thoughts and beliefs. When your thoughts and beliefs serve and support you in achieving your goals – they will leave you feeling good and empowered. When there are unconscious beliefs at work that may sabotage your stated goals, you will find yourself feeling bad, frustrated or dis-empowered.

What To Do Once The Unconscious Belief Is Detected

Once the unconscious belief is detected, you have the power to decide how you will use this new awareness. One of the traps in distinguishing any unconscious belief is to make a judgment about the unconscious belief by thinking that it is “bad or wrong” and reflecting that judgment back onto ourselves and who we are. Making an unconscious belief “bad or wrong” or making ourselves “bad or wrong” for holding a belief is disempowering and will only leave you feeling stuck.

The power of identifying an unconscious belief comes in facing and owning it – that is, by allowing it to simply be, or detect it and not judge it. Identifying an unconscious belief in this way allows you to see other opportunities that apparently seem not to have been there before. Taking action inside these new opportunities, recognizing that you have the power to choose a new belief and new actions, is what will really make the difference.

Basically beliefs (both consciousness and unconscious) are neither “good nor bad”, they are simply supportive or not supportive, depending on your personal goals.  If the belief is unsupportive, then there are various techniques within NLP, K-P-C™, as well as a host of other disciplines, that can assist in releasing the limiting belief.  But the key first step is to identify the unconscious belief so that you can examine and work with it.

Contemplation

• Why bother to discover your unconscious beliefs?
• What are some unwanted behaviors you currently have in your life?
• Using this process, can you now see what might be behind these outcomes?
• With this new insight, what would be an empowering action to take?
• Why is knowledge of an unconscious belief helpful in making constructive choices?

Application

Unconscious beliefs are unique to an individual. The exact wording that will empower someone in distinguishing their unconscious belief will be their own. Although there are common areas where unconscious beliefs tend to show up, such as in money and time issues, the exact wording to each person‘s unconscious beliefs is unique as the individual themselves.

My role as a coach is to empower my clients to discover and name their own unconscious beliefs.

The purpose of perceiving and detecting unconscious beliefs is to simply gain awareness so one can clarify what is behind the patterns of behavior that disempower or empower us. By using unconscious beliefs to define these patterns clearly, we can then have a fresh perspective in order to take action outside of these old patterns of behavior. Therefore, we can create new opportunities where there were none before. It is like shining a light on something that has been lurking in the dark for some time so as to be able to deal with it effectively. It is very hard to address something when it is not visible and clear. However, by detecting an unconscious belief, and facing it head on, it then becomes possible for us to change behavior.

The following question may help you to obtain an understanding of your own unconscious beliefs: “What belief, opinion, or judgment could you be reinforcing by constantly creating this outcome?”

Here the outcome could be what you want or it may not be.  This is a starting point to identify an unconscious belief.  Remember, just because a belief is unconscious doesn’t mean it’s bad or unsupportive.  There are many supportive unconscious beliefs.  The object of asking the above question is to get familiar with your feelings and responses so that you can make a decision about the belief.

When a person discovers an unconscious belief they are able to make decisions from a more powerful position because they have a greater amount of knowledge. They have the power of choice. Take the example above of a person with a stated commitment to save money, who never manages to, because of an unconscious belief that says “there is not enough resources to go around”. By identifying this unconscious belief, the client has more knowledge from which to make choices.

They may decide that a better way to balance their unconscious belief with their stated commitment is to make a donation to charity of one dollar out of every twenty that they save. They may decide to take on some volunteer work as a more constructive response to their unconscious belief than simply wasting money. By understanding their unconscious belief, the individual has agency to actively choose the behaviors that will allow them to respond to their commitments in a constructive way.

How To Best Use The Unconscious Belief Model

The first step to empower yourself with this model, is to use the process to gain access to and freedom from your own unconscious beliefs. By doing so, you will have the practical experience and be able to help others.

Your willingness to confront your unconscious beliefs and create new opportunities for your life will inspire those around you, i.e. family, friends, and coworkers as well as current and future customers (if you own a business) because they will be drawn to what you are creating in your life.

Additionally, by engaging in this process honestly yourself, you will have the compassion to assist others, if this is your calling. This compassion will help you when you are dealing with close friends and family who struggle to meet their stated goals.

“People are complex and multifaceted. Therefore, behavioral approaches that reduce complex human behavior to mechanistic stimulus and response chains will not succeed” – Peterson, 2006.

By understanding the complexity of human behaviors and its drivers, you will have more patience with yourself and be able to create a space to explore why you have issues and problems in your lives that you don‘t consciously choose. You will also have the wisdom to approach a behavior issue from a range of different angles, rather than seeing it as something that you can simply choose to quickly change. By creating this space, and respecting the complexity of your journey, you will allow yourself to make real breakthroughs and achieve sustainable change.

When my client’s are moving through the exploration of their beliefs they hold on to, whether they are working for them or not, they may feel very scared. Removing or changing a belief can place a person into great uncertainty. This is where my role of their coach is critical. At this moment in time I often remind the client of their vision and where they want to go and encourage them into seeing it.

As their coach, I can notice and identify any changes I observe in a client’s conversation, i.e. the words they use, the energy behind the words, state, posture etc.  Then, in the middle of a coaching conversation if I identify a belief, I might ask if they can share a feeling that just came up when they were speaking about that specific topic.  I’ll then share the belief I observed and the behavior they spoke about that reinforced this belief. I’ll then ask them if this belief feels aligned with them or not.

It’s my main job to support my clients in identifying their vision, purpose and mission in life  as well as assisting them reach their personal goals and achieve personal success. Part of this process is to ask them to describe the behaviors they would need to exhibit to achieve this vision…who will they have to become to reach their personal goals.

I ask them, and I suggest that you too, write down as many qualities, characteristics, beliefs, etc. as you can.

How would you walk, stand, do certain elements of each task needed to achieve your vision? Then refer to this list of behaviors as you work to achieve your vision. One of our greatest fears is success, actually being all that we can be. As a coach I observe my client’s successes, acknowledge them all and ‘enthuses’ them to keep utilizing and experiencing those supportive behaviors as often as possible. There are many activities I recommend to stay focused on you vision, i.e. visualization, meditate, write, ignore inner self talk, great supports etc.

Once you have identified what you want and who you have to become to achieve your personal goals comes the process of shifting and sorting through your beliefs. Keep the one’s that will support you on your journey and let the others float away like a bunch of helium balloons.

Final Reflection

• What is the role of unconscious beliefs in your career?
• What role do your unconscious beliefs play in your relationships?
• What are some questions you could ask yourself when you are feeling unable to visualize your personal success?

References

Peterson, David, 2006 ?People are Complex and the World is Messy: A Behaviour based Approach to Executive Coaching?, in Stober, Diane and Grant, Anthony, (eds) Evidence Based Coaching: A Handbook, Wiley and Sons, New York

Well that’s it!  I hope you found this series on unconscious beliefs helpful.  Admittedly, beliefs is a topic that can be discussed and investigated over a lifetime, and there are many individuals that have made this study their livelihood.  So, I know that this series is only scratching the surface of beliefs,  but I hope it gave you something to think about.

If you’d like to explore your beliefs further, especially your unconsciousness beliefs request an Introductory Consultation today.

Roland Gilbert

With over 20 successful years in corporate America, Roland Gilbert is now living his passion through helping others find and live theirs! Roland is a personal coach working with a wide range of clients’ issues through helping them change their thoughts and actions about their worlds – both personally and professionally.

Roland works one-on-one – via phone and face-to-face – and with MasterMind Groups. Through Couples Coaching Roland helps clients communicate better, find the love they want, and create relationships of significance.

Contact Roland at 800-974-3692 or rgilbert@perennialgrowth.com  to determine if coaching is right for you. www.perennialgrowth.com