Goal Setting Lite

Wow! That was fast. We just blew through the first week of 2011 and I can't believe it's over already. I'm still writing 2010 on my checks!

This past week I talked an awful lot about SMART Goal Setting (maybe too much). Having said that, I'd like to share with you a method that works really great for getting the "things" we want in our lives. It's called a Vision Board and it has been highly effective for us in attracting to us the things we want in our life and it isn't half as difficult as SMART Goal Setting is.

A Vision Board is a device to help you keep some of your more tangible goals in the forefront of your imagination. It's simply a space to visually remind yourself with images of the things you want to manifest in your life. We simply cut out little pictures of the things we want and stick them on a board that we can look at throughout our day.

Creating a vision board is very simple. You can use a bulletin board, a white board (I like the magnetic white boards the best), or even the kitchen fridge to get started. Place the board in a location that you will see it multiple times during the day. If you don't want strangers to see your vision board, you may want to place it in your private bathroom or in the kitchen instead of your work place office. My wife and I have these all over our humble abode. There's one in the master bathroom, we still use the fridge in the kitchen and then we have a huge one in our home office (wait... I think we have two in there now).

Now comes the fun part. This is a little bit like scrap booking. You can cut out little pictures of the things you want from newspapers, magazines, books or whatever. I spend 75% of my life on the computer, so I simply print my images directly from web pages. Besides, Google makes it a lot easier to find images of what it is I want. For example, if you want to attain six-pack abs or a washboard stomach for yourself this year, clip out a photo of a model who is sporting the body you want to see for your own. If your dream is to travel more, you might find photos of airliners and cruise ships to add to your vision board. The more you can personalize these images, the better. For instance if you have cruise photos of yourself on the cruise ship, you might want to use those to conjure up memories of those feelings. The more emotional you make the images, the more powerful they become in the creative process.

We've used this method with great results in our own lives for things like cars, motorcycles, guitars and myriad other "material" objects. It seems to me that the physical fitness images are a little more challenging (at least for me they are). My wife still has photos of me and her stretched out on the beach when we were in our twenties. Maybe the key will be for me to actually put some "skinny" images there myself. You can use this method for anything. The pictures or images should be as close to exactly what you're dreaming of as possible. I've heard stories of people putting their dream home on a vision board, packing the board away for several years, and then realizing that they were actually living in their dream home when they unpacked the box and saw the photo of the home they have just moved into. OK... for those of you who know, that was from The Secret, by Rhonda Byrne.

You may be skeptical, and I don't blame you, because I too was thinking to myself that this was just a gimmick, but I have to tell you, it really does work. The more we think about and "see" what it is that we wish to attract into our lives, the more real a thing becomes. Have we acquired everything on our vision boards? No, but there have been so many countless items that have come to pass that it is scary. The washboard tummy is one of those more elusive goals. I also have some pictures of million dollar bills on my boards. I will tell you this. I am a heck of a lot closer to acquiring these things than I would be if I did not have a daily reminder poking my psyche and urging me to continue working out or creating new opportunities. OK, I've rambled long enough. You all get the idea. I'm going to start cutting and pasting some new stuff for this new year. If you don't have a vision board of your own, I urge you to try it. Use your bathroom mirror as a starting place. It works!

SMART Goals Are Timely

When we go about setting our goals, it's always advisable to make sure we give ourselves a deadline in order to provide some urgency. Like using metrics to keep our goals measurable, giving our goals definite time tables is a way to let us know whether or not we're on target. If we leave our goals open ended, the goals may never get accomplished.

SMART Goals are:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Realistic
• Timely

By giving a goal a due date, we are more inclined to place a little more pressure on ourselves to achieve the goal. Without this, it is very easy to let the matter slide indefinitely. By stating that I want to lose 10 pounds by the end of the month, we set an alarm clock for our goal that will be constantly "ticking" in the back of our minds telling us to get off the stick.

Another reason we want to place time constraints on our goals is for scheduling. Organized folks should have their work planned out such that they have calendars with milestones. These timelines provide us with the structure to keep everything rolling along smoothly. If we tend to do things "whenever", how do we ever know exactly what we should be doing at any given time? Setting timely goals will keep busy people more organized and therefore more efficient in the long run.

If we want our goals to get done, we need to make sure we're SMART about it. If our goals are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely, then we have a markedly improved chance of achieving them. If we let everything kind of randomly fall into place, our results may not be optimal. A reminder that people who fail to plan are planning to fail is something that I constantly come back to any time I find myself spinning my wheels. If I have my goals in front of me, it's never really a mystery what I should be doing at any given point in time.

SMART Goals Are Realistic

When setting your goals for the future, another very important thing to keep in mind is that each goal is realistic. This simply means that the goals have to be possible. They must be based in reality in order to come to fruition. Having said that, we now need to take a much closer look into what reality is.

SMART Goals are:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Realistic
• Timely

When I sat down to write the post this morning, I had a Deja Vu moment. Didn't I just talk about this yesterday? Well yes, and no. While contemplating this, I thought that maybe the creators of this SMART acronym were simply being slightly redundant in order to make the word SMART. But after a deeper considersation of how I can elaborate on 'Realistic' in a way that I didn't touch on when discussing 'Attainable', I decided to talk more about the reality outside of ourselves. So 'Attainable' was introspective and 'Realistic' becomes extrospection (which I'm not sure is even a word). So without any further ado, let's look a little closer at reality.

I believe that reality is constantly shifting; that there really is no hard, fast, rigid physical reality that exists outside of ourselves. I get this absurd belief from the study of quantum mechanics, but I'm not going to delve into that here. Let's just say for the sake of discussion that reality is somewhat illusional based on the beliefs (or perceptions) of the society as a whole. Your individual beliefs shape your individual reality just as powerfully as the concensus of cummulative beliefs. Therefore, it is actually possible to change our personal reality and the outside world's current reality.

OK, before I lose you all, the reasoning behind the madness of my last statement is this: Once upon a time, the world was flat. It was truly a reality that the world was flat because everyone believed it. Once it was imperically "proven" that the world was indeed a sphere, there was a paradigm shift in reality. Some may argue that this was simply because we didn't know the true reality at the time. But I can turn the nay sayers' argument right back on them and ask the question, then how do we know that what we know is the ultimate 'end-of-the-road' reality on any given subject? Man continues to explore the unknown and is constantly coming up with discoveries that shake the very foundation of our current understanding of things. This says to me that reality is indeed somewhat pliable.

Now does this mean that we can set goals for ourselves like, "I will learn how to fly without the aid of any sort of mechanical or external aerodynamic means". I still advise against it. While it may be realistic on some cosmic level over the next millenium of many men contemplating man's unaided ability to defy gravity. It isn't a goal that we as a society would consider realistic. Try to keep your own personal goals firmly planted in reality.

My final thought on reality would be that while it may not be ultimately as concrete as people think it is. The ability to shift reality requires a massive amount of faith. Perception is reality, or so they say. So in order to make a nebulous thing real, you must be able to "see it" in your minds eye. You have to "believe it" with every ounce of your being and then finally, you may have to convince others that what you believe is in fact true. Keep your goals realistic for you, love and believe in the outcomes and do not give up on them.

SMART Goals Are Attainable

The goals that we set for ourselves need to be attainable. Otherwise, we're simply fooling ourselves, OR we're setting ourselves up for failure. The last thing you want to do is set out on a journey than can never be completed. The key to knowing whether or not a goal is attainable is as the ancient Greek aphorism goes, "Know thyself".

SMART Goals are:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Realistic
• Timely

It seems obvious to most of us, but truth be told, many people go out and attempt to accomplish things that they really have no business attempting. If you're in Real Estate, for example, you just might want to set your sights a little shy of becoming the next Donald Trump. Unless of course you honestly possess the kind of drive and determination that Mr. Trump has demonstrated over and over again in his life. The operative word in the previous sentence is honestly. You want to be as honest with yourself as possible, so that you know that your goals are attainable.

The best way to determine which goals are right for you is some good old fashioned introspect and careful consideration of what your abilities are. Set goals according to your current state of being, but please don't be afraid to stretch yourself. The best way to challenge yourself is to set a goal you know you can accomplish and then maybe drizzle a tiny bit of enthusiasm onto that so that it won't be a slam dunk. Challenge yourself, but don't bite off more than you could possibly ever choke down. You know what you're capable of, go out there and set some attainable goals so that you can reach your dreams.

SMART Goals Are Measurable

When you go about the business of setting your goals, you'll want to make sure that they're measurable. This means that you quantify the results you're looking for. For instance, your goal could be to increase sales. This goal is admirable, but it has no metrics associated with it. Therefore if you increase sales even by as little as one unit, you've succeeded! But I don't think you'd want to stop there (I could be wrong). Yesterday we discussed the process of specifying your goals more clearly. Adding meatrics is just another layer of specificity that should be applied to your goals.

Just a brief review from yesterday...

SMART Goals are:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Realistic
• Timely

Using yesterday's example of buying groceries, we can add metrcis by stating how much we need to purchase. I need to pick up a gallon of skim milk, one pound of ribeye and 2 large baking potatoes (yes, russets). If you want to increase sales, indicate by how much. Let's say we want to increase sales by 33% over the next year. This is a measaurable figure and therefore lends itself nicely to your action plan. It gives you the ability to calculate how many sales will be required for the year (to reach your desired 33% increase), which in turn can be broken down to more meaningful monthly and weekly sales goals. This gives you the yardstick with which you can measure your degree of success for any given week. If you haven't met your specific sales requirements for the week, you know that you'll need to increase your efforts the following week in order to make up the difference. Without making the goal measurable, you lose this important tracking system for your success.

Having metrics also let's you know if you're pushing yourself hard enough in your goal setting. Let's say your goal was to increase your sales by 10% and you hit your target before the end of the month every month. This simply means that you haven't set the bar high enough and you should really consider increasing the target in order to achieve even more for yourself this year. Yes, goals can be adjusted. In fact it's an important part of the achievement process.

If you're piloting an airplane and you set your goal to fly from Los Angeles to Honolulu, let's say you take off and set your bearings for the aloha state. Now you just kick back until you get there? I don't think so. You need to constantly monitor your progress, making sure that you're on track, and if you deviate from your desired course, you need to make the necessary adjustments to get the plane back on course in order to reach your destination. This evaluation is necessary for all goals and without metrics to give your goals the specificity of being measurable, your don't have the information you need to keep yourself on target. Keep your goals measurable and we'll talk about the rest of SMART goal setting as the week progresses.

SMART Goals Are Specific

Welcome to the first work day of the first week of the first month of the first year of the new decade. 2011 is shaping up to be the best year for us and the reason I can say that is that we've set some goals that are really exctiting. With the new year comes the time to plan out the upcoming weeks, months, and years. Goal setting is something that needs to be done for the short term, medium term and long term. Time frames are important when you start planning massive action. Some of your goals are more immediate or short term goals while others are a little broader and far reaching long term goals. We encourage you to write them all down; big and small alike. There's a saying and I don't even know the source, because I've heard it put hundreds of ways by hundreds of people; "People who fail to plan are simply planning to fail."

We at Dream Outfitters like to set SMART goals - Goals that are:

1. Specific
2. Measurable
3. Attainable
4. Realistic
5. Timely

This week, I'll be tackling each one of these items and elaborating just a little bit so that it makes a lot more sense than just a snappy little acronym for goal setting; which means that today I'm going to get down and dirty with specificity and talk about making our goals very specific.

Everybody has goals whether they realize it or not. Every time we get a thought in our mind such as, "I need to buy some groceries", the thought is merely a desire, however, all of our desires are, in reality, goals. Whether we write them down or spend a lot of time dwelling on them or not, they are still considered goals. If you truly want to start designing a new life for yourself, or improve upon the great life that you're already living, you need to have goals. This is how we measure success. Success is measured, in most part, by the achievement of our goals.

The goal that we've set for ourselves in the previous paragraph is great. We know that we need to go and buy groceries, but that goal is a little vague. In order to get the absolute best results for the goal, we need to make it more specific. So how do we go about making it more specific? Easy... We start to ask ourselves questions about it. Questions that more clearly define what it is we really want to get out of the goal. For our example, we might ask the following questions:

• What store do we want to go to in order to buy our groceries?
• What specific items are we looking for? (this is an iterative process)

If we now begin narrow down our specific grocery items we'll see that each iteration gets us closer and closer to our true desires. Let's say we have a pretty short list:

• Milk
• Meat
• Potatoes

I'm from Minnesota originally, so this is primarily my diet (which I'll be improving this year by the way). We still have some narrowing down that needs to be done. We continue looping through this process of narrowing down until we've left nothing to chance. What kind of milk? There's buttermilk, whole milk, 2%, 1%, skim. And meat, well, we have pork, beef, fish, chicken and so on. Now we pretty much nailed milk down (except for possibly the size - Gallon, half-gallon, quart, pint), but the meat is still wide open. There are many different cuts of beef, many different species of fish, etc.. Potatoes too can be further narrowed down unless you're the type of person who only eats russet potatoes. So we go further and further, narrowing our originally vague concept of purchasing groceries until we have a very detailed list of items that we plan to pick up at the store we decided to shop at.

I realize that this was a fairly laborious way of getting at being specific about our goals, but I think that some of us have a tendency to leave our goals just a level or two too vague and this leads us to moments of decision making that could have been avoided had our goals been set up properly in the beginning. Sure we need to make decisions, but the best time to make those decisions is in the earliest possible planning stages, not when we're in action mode. Massive action requires clarity if its to be done efficiently. Keep your goals specific and we'll talk about the other areas of SMART goal setting later on this week.

Happy New Year! It's 2011...

Yes! We made it to the new year and it's looking very good for us, so we hope to be able to inspire you to have the best year ever too. Since today is a holiday, my post will be brief. I want to wish each and every one of you a very happy new year and a healthy and prosperous 2011 no matter where you are on your journey. I want to especially give a shout out to our men and women defending this great country of ours in the armed forces as well as all who have been called away from home and loved ones to serve. Thank you for the sacrifices that you and your family are making on behalf of the United States of America.

New years is a time to reflect on the past year, but more importantly, a time to lay the foundation for the year ahead. This upcoming week we'll be discussing goal setting and how to go about designing your life based on five specific goal setting strategies and techniques to help you to visualize your future. I'll lay it all out for you starting tomorrow. But for now, let's enjoy New Years Day with family and friends and remember to stay safe and arive alive...

Happy New Year!