Goal-Setting: The First Step to Fortune

Posted on November 8, 2007 in Motivation by byronb

A goal is an objective; a desire for a certain event to occur, be that the attainment of a material object, a life situation, or a quality of being. Your goals are you wants. Your wants determine what you draw to you. What you put your attention on you have and become. Put your attention on your wants? What will you have? What will you become? What do you want?

Start a list: a Want List. Don’t worry about neatness, as long as you can read it. Don’t worry about achievability, about being “realistic”, nor are you to concern yourself with method, with “how” you will get it. And most of all, beware of judging yourself for the wants that come to mind.

Consider this your brainstorming session; you’ll organize and edit and better prepare for their fulfillment in a moment. For now, just scribble down all that you desire, large and small, material and immaterial, as they come to mind.

Now, take a look at your list and search for any items on your list that are phrased in the negative, in other words: as something you don’t want, as a problem you want fixed, as something you want to let go of or get rid of or change. For each of those, ask what would best replace those things if they were gone. When that which you don’t want is gone, what is there instead. If your problem was fixed, how would things be? When you’ve let go of what needed letting go of and rid yourself of what needed ridding, what’s there instead.

Instead of changing something from what it is, what do you want to change it to? Replace each of your negatively worded goals with positively worded ones.

Next examine your list for goals that aren’t yours. You may be amazed to find that several of your listed goals aren’t things you really even want at all, but rather are goals imposed upon you by your environment: your upbringing, your culture, and the people around you. You’ll never achieve goals that aren’t your own, only the frustrating treadmill of chasing after someone else’s idea of what your dreams should be. Cross those off the list entirely.

With this more refined version of your list, you can now organize your goals into a realizable pattern for their most efficient attainment. Two useful ways to do this are to take out a clean sheet of paper and do one of the following:

1. Divide the page into 4 categories: My Body, My Home, My Work, My Relationships then pull out the goals from your list and place them in their appropriate category. If a particular goal falls into more than one category, choose the area where you feel most confident approaching it or, alternatively, place it in the category most lacking in other goals (a life fully lived involves passion and purpose in every area).
2. Divide the page into time periods of increasing chronological ranges. In other words: Write down what you’d like to accomplish by the end of 1 week, the end of 1 month, then 3 or 6 months, 1 year, 3 years, 5 years, 10 years, 25 years. There are no set rules to the time chunks you use; choose the ones most relevant for you.

With this list you are now more empowered to engage consciously in the deliberate creation of the fulfillment of your every desire. The number of practical uses for your list from here is the subject of an entire article in itself. For this moment, relish in the fact that you have officially just placed your order with the universe for the life of your dreams.

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