Goalsetting

Setting up goals for yourself properly not only gives you something to strive for, but also a clear path to achievement.  Creating specific, attainable goals for oneself can be a powerful method for transforming your thoughts, ideas, and wishes into actions and tangible results.  

Brian Tracy has said that the act of clearly defining a goal often provides a burst of energy for attaining that goal.   

The Big Picture

We need to be able to process a situation at different levels of interaction for different puposes.  Likewise, our goals often form a hierarchy of levels with different types of goals at each level.  Subgoals make up the different steps and milestones along the way.  For instance, if your goal were to, say, become healthy, some of the subgoals involved in that process might include adjusting your diet, exercising more, and controlling intake of bad stuff.  These subgoals could be broken down further into smaller, more explicit steps, such as steaming your vegetables instead of frying them, purchasing food taking into account nutritional value, jogging in the morning, doing stretches or lifting weights, stopping smoking, drinking less, etc.  

Different factors have to be weighted accordingly and it's usually always to break things down until they are just an ordered list of step by step actions which need ot be carried out in order for success of all your goals.  

It can often be a big help to write these all down.  It has been said that the act of writing out a goal helps to solidify it in your mind, make it more real.  It's like it's harder to lie to yourself about a situation when your own words are staring at you from the paper or something.  

Beyond that, however, it helps to externalize everthing so you can get it off your mind and compare it side by side with everything you've got going on.  

Some tools and Ideas

Goal Sheets - Pages with your goals clearly defined, often broken down into subgoals or actionable items to be performed.  Some people like to rewrite their goals periodically to adjust for life and reiterate the desires to themselves.  

Visualization - Often it can be helpful and enlightening to imagine the outcome of your goals.  This provides a better sense of the definition for success (i.e. what you're really after), as well as inspiration to achieve the goal, and sometimes helps to clarify the steps necessary for implementation.  

Deadline - By providing yourself with a set deadline, you may find yourself with increased desire to push yourself just a little bit harder, and on more long term goals, a main deadline combined with some milestone points can be a terrific tool for measuring your progress toward your desired outcomes.  

Scheduling Tools - Our minds are often random and disorganized, plus we are constantly dealing and interacting with a variety of sources most of every day.  Sometimes it's hard to keep everything straight, and when something's on your mind, but you can't do anything about it right then, it'll drive you crazy.  Proper scheduling and the use of tools to augment your organization abilities can drastically improve your productivity.  Examples of scheduling and organization tools our numerous in our society, including calendars, alarm clocks, tickler files, day-timers, handheld computers, cell phones, and on and on. 

Desire and Perseverence

When it gets right down to it, no matter how clearly defined your goals and the steps to get there are, there are always going to be a lot of challenges to overcome.  From our own laziness and procrastination to the distracting inluences of society, there are a lot of things that can hold you back.  

To achieve any goal, big or little, you have to want it enough to overcome all of the opposing forces of the situation.  Willpower.  

Recommended Media

• Getting Things Done: The art of stress free productivity -- by David Allen
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done
• http://www.davidco.com
• http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/08/how-to-set-goals-you-will-actually-achieve/