When my clients (I work with pupils aged 9-19 on a one to one basis) say that they don't know what to do, I cajole them into making a decision of sorts, because if they're indifferent to their future, they will become flotsam and jetsam on life. And life's too important to float around. (Something I pick up on in my first novel, Wither This Land, which follows a character who doesn't have any ideas and who gets caught up in an ideological battle between animal rights activists and hunters). Excuse the plug, but I'm in charge of marketing my own novels...:
In a sense, we have lost the childish ability to want things. Children have great way of focusing their attention on something they want and then working on us or themselves to get it. Amazing. What happened to us adults - we were told that it's wrong to want, or we experienced too many times when our wants were dashed by others or life's circumstances. Well - I'm here to tell you: don't give up. A child doesn't give up pestering and we should not give up pestering ourselves until we win.
Now let's focus in on what we're doing: setting goals.
Primary goal: what is the most important thing in 2014 that you want to achieve? If you're stuck on that one, give yourself a year to live. Morbid, I know, but go with it. It's December 31st 2014, and you are just about to pass over. What would you have wanted to experience. It's no good lying there dying thinking, oh, I should have visited the Taj Mahal while I was capable. Use that immediate image of what you think you should be doing and jot it down ... visit Taj Mahal...What else?
As it's the New Year, it's always considered to be a good time to write down resolutions. But resolutions don't really get anywhere unless we take action towards them. Most people fail within a month of attaining their resolutions; they are quickly forgotten and ignored until the next New Year when we confess, as Zig Ziglar notes, what we didn't do this year: didn't lose that fat, didn't get that promotion, didn't get that room cleared...
If you keep doing the same thing and expect the same results ... what do you expect?
So do something different this year. Goals need not just writing down but also revisiting regularly. Hey, if you achieve something early (wow, we get a bargain flight to India and saw the Taj Mahal...) put something new down, don't wait till the New Year.
We're going to work backwards from what we want - and give ourselves a year to do it in. It's also important to set up life goals, ten year goals, five year goals...but since this is a starting place, a year's a good one to get your head around.
Take a blank piece of paper - any size will do but big sheets, like A3 or A2 are great as you can write your goals in large writing, and that makes them important to you.
In the middle, write the year 2014.
Then do a spider diagram branching off into the various areas of life that you live:
E.g.,
Health:
Wealth:
Self-development:
Family:
Acquisitions:
Holiday:
Friendships:
Relationships:
Charity/Church:
Sports:
Culture/entertainment:
For each one write the main thing you want to achieve.
E.g., Health - reduce body fat/weight
Wealth - reduce personal debt and increase income
Self-development - read more books, learn piano.
Family: spend more time with the kids
Acquisitions: purchase new car
Holiday: two weeks abroad
Friendships: catch up with old friends
Charity/Church: give more to charity.
Sports: take up golf.
Culture/entertainment: see opera at Covent Garden.
As they stand, these are not very good goals and are more likely to be ignored. Why? They're not SMART:
SMART is an an acronym used in business to get focused, and in setting goals we need a focus.
SMART stands for:
SPECIFIC
MEASURABLE
ATTAINABLE
REALISTIC or RELEVANT
TIME-FRAMED.
Let's look at each of our targets:
HEALTH: reduce body fat/weight.
So far this is NOT specific, not measurable, therefore we don't know if it's attainable or realistic (it's just so vague) and there's no time frame.
I'll put my own goal here - I want to drop from 15% umbilical fat to less than 10% (SPECIFIC and MEASURABLE) by May 2014 (NOW TIME FRAMED).
Is this ATTAINABLE (within the time frame)? In conjunction with the training programme I'm on it is highly attainable (and I'll check my trainer on that!);
REALISTIC OR RELEVANT? Sure - it's part of my overall goal to be healthy, and it's within my ability to drop the fat levels, since I've managed to drop similar amounts in the past.
WEALTH: to aim for less debt and more money is not yet SMART. So let's change it.
SPECIFIC: how much debt do you want to get rid of? Let's say you reply "all of it." How much is all of it? £5000, you reply. Okay. Now we have something specific.
Next useful question here is - how long do you want to take to reduce this debt? A year. Okay - now, that's TIME-FRAMED, but then we can ask whether this is attainable. Using a debt calculator (assuming £200 monthly payment, interest at 18%), if you increase the payments to £419.51 per month, you'll have zipped the debt in 12 months. Is this ATTAINABLE though? Finding an extra £220 per month means finding an extra £55 per week, or £7.55 a day. Where are you going to get this from?
If you can save it from your budget by cutting back on extraneous spending (on stuff you can live without) then that makes sense: renegotiate the phone contract - say that saves £10 a month; give up the magazine subscription (saving £8 a month); cut back on some luxury groceries (saving £20 a month) - hey, we're up to £38. That means only £17 to go. Can you work some extra hours? What if you can't and you've screwed your budget down as best as you can - well, it will take more than 12 months to kill the debt: 14 months. That's not bad is it? Now we have adjusted the time frame to make it more attainable.
FAMILY: okay, when, how much time, how?
I aim to put an hour a day into my children. When? After work and dinner - I'll make it special daddy time so they get me without interruptions. Is this attainable? Indeed - we don't watch tv, in the evening I can settle down with both children and have uninterrupted play.
ACQUISITIONS: what car? by when? how much?
Specifically, I want a hybrid car, a Honda Jazz, second hand £10,000. By when? October. How will I pay for it? Save £1000 per month for ten months. Is that attainable? Say current disposable income is £800 per month, then again I have to adjust my goal if I want to avoid paying for it on finance (and that is a complex issue, but say that's the goal). Okay, I can put £800 a month - that means the TIME FRAME is now twelve and half months.
Some prefer to use RELEVANT instead of REALISTIC. This makes sense with a car purchase: is it a relevant goal according to everything else I'm doing? Well, if my current car can last another two years or so and I am reducing my personal debt, then I may want to put the £800 a month into debt reduction and get out of debt quicker instead of buying a car. It depends why I want to buy the car - if the current car is on its last legs and I will need a car for work and I'm likely to face increasing bills with the old one, then it certainly becomes relevant.
And so we go on.
Pick up the paper, sketch out the primary goals. Then add in the SMART categories under each goal (another good reason for using a large sheet).
E.g.,
For each balloon, you can add in the specific goals with dates to achieve them. E.g.,
Tick them off as you achieve them or set them into motion.
Once you've got the ideas down, it's time to add the visuals. Without visuals to help, the ideas can remain just words on paper. So time to do some research on the web or in magazines and get the printer going (which is fun in its own right!)
Consider for acquisitions the hybrid car: get a picture and slap it onto the visualisation board you're creating:
Now we can see it our brain starts to understand that we're on a path to get it.
We'll set up a standing order to put money into an acquisition account (or earn more money to acquire it through more work or reducing other bills); we'll automate that process so that in eight months we can go into the market and get the deal. Naturally, we'll aim to pay less than the full price and any reduction can go into another money account to earn interest/be traded/put towards self-development/holiday/debt reduction, etc.
The picture is worth a thousand words - it gets into our subconscious and starts to drive us towards the goal of acquiring what we want. This is the The Secret or Law of Attraction: when you visualise, you train your brain to believe in having what you want, this alters your behaviour and sends out vibes to mirror what you want. Things start coming your way - however we explain it.
Be a kid for a while - write out your proper Christmas list and then build up a visualisation board.
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