Setting Goals for Happiness, Health and Wealth.

Hi

"How does one live a richer life that is filled with ever expanding wealth, health, and happiness?"

All the best athletes, performers and successful people in world begin with an end in mind.

In fact over 80 percent of research suggests that goal setting increases your chances of success.

In this newsletter I will give you the goal setting tools that I use with elite athletes, business professionals and students who are all trying to achieve more success in their lives.

Achieving excellence in your field depends on:

• having a vision (or dream) of where you want to go
• making a commitment to get there
• taking small focused steps to achieve your dream.

Have a vision of what you want in life.

Goal setting is the surest way to make today’s dream into tomorrow’s reality. One of the most important questions to ask yourself is "What do I really want to do with my life?"

When asking this question, think about the different areas of your life - your family, work, friends, health and wellbeing.

When starting with these visions of yourself in each area of your life, they can appear unrealistic, however, goal setting will make them more concrete and realistic - it is a bit like designing a house on paper before you go ahead and build it.

Developing your vision of where you want to go and the person you want to be, can involve some left and right brain work. Try these goal setting activities to spark your thoughts.

Making the commitment to get there.

We all have 24 hours in a day, so if you are working towards a specific goal for a limited time then you may as well put in a 100% effort when you are there.

This involves planning your work and then working your plan. Setting daily specific goals, whether you are a student, an athlete or business professional, increases your intensity and focus on the tasks that you have to do.

One of the easiest ways to do this is to commit to an action plan, which then funnels down into a prioritized to-do list.

For instance, some athletes and business professionals that I have worked with, live and breathe a prioritized to-do list which allows them to focus on the results of getting things done, rather than the stress of having too much to do. It also gives them the motivation to keep going when things get tough.

Taking small focused steps to achieve your dream.

Taking small focused steps to achieve your dream involves setting short term goals that take focused steps toward achieving your long-term goal.

Imagine if you had to build a house. You would first draw up detailed plans of the house, and have a clear outline of how many rooms and bathrooms you may have. As you are building your house, you would consult your plans on a daily basis to ensure that you were staying with the designed plans of the house. These plans would tell you that you need to lay foundations and put up the walls before you can lay the roof.

While it is a no-brainer that most people would draw up plans and follow them, the same does not occur with how we map out our life.

In fact, research shows that only 2 percent of people systematically use goal setting for their lives, yet many of the world’s best performers in their field use goal setting systematically to achieve success.

One of the best ways to achieve goals is to set SMARTER goals. SMARTER goals is an acronym for setting

S – Specific goals

M – Measurable

A – Action-based

R – Realistic

T – Time-bound

E – Energizing

R – Rewarding

For example, you may want to set SMARTER goals for:

• diet and fitness goals to reduce weight or put on muscle or become healthier,
• career goals to achieve success in your chosen field or find that you dream job,
• family goals to spend more quality time with your partner and children,
• financial goals to create wealth and financial independence

Whatever your goals, setting smarter goals increases your chances of success.

Summary

Here we have detailed the ingredients for excellence within your field. By having a vision and being committed to your vision is an essential process of goal setting. Using SMARTER goals is the surest way to make this vision a concrete reality in your life.

In the next newsletter, on the 15th October, I will give you some new and exciting time management lessons that I picked up at a conference last week in the USA.

I will discuss how these time management lessons can benefit you, your work and your family

All the best

Kell and the team at Effective Time Management Strategies