8

SET GOALS

Nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose—a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.

—MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY

Good personal planning involves no more than determining how you will get from your present circumstances to the future you have created through your vision.

The trouble with many plans is that they are based on the way things are now. To be successful, your personal plan must focus on what you want, not what you have. If you focus on what you have, your future will be limited by your present circumstances. If you focus on what you want, your imagination will be set free to explore the possibilities.

ONE STEP AT A TIME

Suppose you live in rural Kansas and you have a burning desire to see the sights of a big city. But you look around you and all you see is farmland. If you focus on present circumstances, you’ll say, “Well, I guess I’ll just have to learn to like farms and ranches. That’s all we have around here.”

But in reality, you’re not a prisoner of circumstances. You don’t have to be tied to your farm in Kansas. Youare in the geographic center of the continental United States. You can travel north to Minneapolis–St. Paul, west to Los Angeles, or east to Washington, D.C. Your present circumstances don’t determine where you can go; they merely determine where you start.

Suppose you want to see Los Angeles. “That’s half a continent away,” you tell yourself, “and I live out in the country, miles from nowhere. How can I get there from here?” You don’t get there in a single leap. You break the trip down into steps. You get in your car (or pickup truck) and you drive into Topeka or to Kansas City. You buy an airline ticket. You board a plane. Before you can say “San Fernando Valley,” you’re descending to Los Angeles International Airport.

So you don’t have the money? Start a savings account. Don’t have a job? Find one. Don’t have the qualifications? Get them.

In moving toward your personal vision, you don’t do everything at once. It’s like moving a huge pile of stones. You don’t pick up the whole pile and carry it to the new location. You move it a rock at a time, just as you go from Kansas to California one step at a time. The task of fulfilling your personal vision involves figuring out what steps you need to take and when to take them.

Breaking Your Mission into Doable Tasks

Break your personal mission into doable tasks, and do them one at a time. In life, this is known as goal setting. You determine where you want to go and what you want to be. You identify the milestones you need to pass on the way. And you make those milestones your goals.

Notice that in setting the goals to take you from Kansas to California, you don’t start from Kansas. You start from California. You envision yourself landing at Los Angeles International Airport. That means you’ll have to buy a plane ticket. A plane ticket will require money. Money will require a job. A job will require qualifications. If you say “I need job qualifications,” before you say “I want to go to California,” your efforts will not be focused. You won’t know the end result you’re seeking, and so you won’t have firm guidance in deciding what qualifications to acquire and what job to accept. You will end up taking whatever job comes along and going wherever that job permits you to go—which may be downtown Topeka. You will become a prisoner of circumstances rather than a creator of circumstances.

Figure 8–1
Goals LeadYou Toward Your Vision

PLAN BACKWARD FROM THE VISION

Begin your planning with your personal vision in mind, as shown in Figure 8-1. Decide what you want to achieve. Decide when you want to achieve it. Then plan backward in time to the present.

Your vision represents your overall objective in life. You won’t achieve it in a day, probably not in a year, and perhaps not in a decade. But you want to make steady, measurable progress toward your vision.

You make that progress by setting and achieving definite goals. Effective planning involves four types of goals: long-range, medium-range, short-range, and immediate. Long-range goals are broad objectives that will require several years to achieve. They may have deadlines ten, fifteen, or even twenty years into the future. Medium-range goals are more specific. They specify the things you need to accomplish to achieve long-range goals. Usually, they involve time frames of one to five years. Short-term goals usually encompass time periods of less than a year. They tell you what you should be doing in the near future to accomplish the medium-range goals. Immediate goals are things you should be working toward right now to take you toward your short-term goals.

You can set daily, weekly, and monthly goals to carry you toward your broader goals. The shorter the time period involved, the more specific should be the goals. Put a date beside each one and make a determination to reach the goal by the specified date. Make the deadlines reasonable, but set goals that will stretch you.

Suppose your vision is to open your own business within ten years, but your bank account at present is running on empty. Don’t start your planning with the empty bank account. Start with the new business. What assets and qualifications will you need to open the business ten years hence? Where will you need to be nine years from now—the year before the opening? To reach the nine-year milestone, where will you need to be five years from now? Where should you be two years from now to reach your five-year goal? A year from now to reach your two-year goal? Six months from now to reach your twelve-month goal? What do you need to do immediately to meet your six-month goal?

Write these goals down and review them daily. They will help you keep your long-range commitment in mind and will keep you focused on the short-term steps you need to be taking to achieve your long-range goals.

The Benefits of Goal Setting

Goal setting is the key to effective planning. It illuminates the road to success just as runway lights illuminate the landing field for an incoming aircraft.

Through goal setting:

• you can direct your time, energy, talents, and skills into the areas where they will be most effective in taking you toward your vision
• you can make the most effective use of your congenial competencies, using them to establish a meaningful pattern of success
• you can identify the results you expect to achieve, measure your progress toward these results, and make midcourse corrections where necessary to assure the achievement of the results
• you can identify the obstacles in the pathway of success and deal with them more effectively

Specific, Measurable Goals

A goal won’t be effective if you don’t make it specific and measurable. If your goal is to “lose weight,” how will you know when you’ve fulfilled it? When you’ve lost a pound? When you’ve lost ten pounds? With such a goal, you’ll end up a year from now with the same figure or physique—and maybe a little more. Set a specific goal and a specific date: “By the first of July, I will have lost fifteen pounds.”

That gives you a specific target to shoot for by a specific date. And it’s measurable. You can set intermediate goals to take you toward that objective: ten pounds lost by June 1, five pounds by May I, and three pounds by April 15.

Be similarly specific in your career goals: “By the time I’m forty-five I will be earning $80,000 a year.” Then you can set your medium-range goals: $65,000 by age forty, $55,000 by age thirty-five, $40,000 by age thirty, $35,000 by age twenty-five.

Include EveryAspect of Life

Your vision should encompass every aspect of your life, because your future involves every aspect of your life. Therefore, you will need to set goals in different areas of life. Your vision should take into account your physical, mental, and emotional health. It should take into account your social, civic, and spiritual lives.

Do you need to lose weight to achieve maximum health? Do you need to lower your cholesterol level or your blood pressure? Set goals in these areas and work with your doctor in achieving them. Do you need to reduce stress levels to maintain proper mental and emotional balance? Do you need to become more active in service organizations? Are you devoting the proper amount of time to religious activities? Are you spending the proper amount of quality time with your family? You can set specific, measurable goals in each of these areas.

Organizational and Family Goals

If you are part of an organization, chances are it has its own organizational vision. If you plan to become successful within that organization, you need to be familiar with its mission and goals. Your personal vision should support the organizational vision. Your personal goals should be developed in harmony with the organization’s goals.

Family goals also need to be set in cooperation with other family members. You and your spouse should be clear on your visions and goals. If your vision calls for a larger home, do both of you share the vision? If so, you’ll need to set goals for accumulating the financial resources to buy the home. Do you envision a place in the country while your spouse longs for a home in the upscale suburbs? You’ll need to discuss the differences in your visions and work toward setting common goals.

Using Your Right Brain

Goal setting is a left-brain activity—a matter of judging and organizing. But your right brain can play a role in helping you meet your goals.

Goals can provide you with emotional tugs that draw you toward the achievement of your objectives. You can draw energy from your goals by absorbing them into your subconscious mind. The subconscious has a variety of ways of receiving information. It takes it in through the eyes, through the ears, and through the senses of touch, taste, and smell. It also takes it in through self-talk—when you consciously think in words, your subconscious absorbs the words from your conscious mind.

When you write down your goals, you are forced to think the words as you write, so your subconscious absorbs the goals as self-talk. When you read the words, you take in information through the eyes. When you speak them aloud, your auditory senses reinforce the message. Some people commit their goals to audiotapes, and listen to them each morning while getting ready for the day.

Turning Goals into Affirmations

Some people tum their goals into affirmations. Affirmations are positive statements that express your goals as if they were already attained. The use of the present tense adds more certainty to the fulfillment of the goal. The subconscious mind accepts the goal as accomplished fact, and guides your behavior accordingly. Thus “I feel more energetic because I have lost ten pounds” is more convincing to the subconscious than “I plan to gain more energy by losing ten pounds.”

Similarly, saying “I am the regional sales manager” is more likely to get you the job than saying “I will be promoted to regional sales manager.” If you state your goals in the affirmative and in the present tense, your subconscious will cause you to act in a way that is consistent with your goals.

Advertise Your Goals

Advertise your goals. Some people keep their goals to themselves. They reason that if they tell the world what they hope to achieve, the whole world will laugh when they fall on their faces. That’s not necessarily true. Your acquaintances fall into three basic categories:

• those who will be cheering for you whether you win or lose
• those who will be pulling for you to fail
• those who don’t care one way or the other

When you advertise your goals, your supporters will cheer you on and provide you with extra incentive to succeed. You’ll also work harder to keep from embarrassing yourself in front of those who are pulling for you to fail. And you’ll be motivated to sway the indifferent ones into your comer.

Just as you advertised your goals, advertise your success in reaching them. Advertise and celebrate. When you celebrate an achievement, you boost your morale and acquire the emotional energy to move on to the next goal. You also advertise your success and let the world know what you’re capable of. You thus gain market value for yourself. As the anonymous wit wrote:

The codfish lays ten thousand eggs,
The homely hen lays one.
The codfish never cackles
To tell you what she’s done.
And so we scorn the codfish
While the humble hen we prize,
Which only goes to show you
That it pays to advertise.

Each goal that you achieve takes you that much closer to your vision—that much closer to the future you desire. The achievement of that future means the achievement of success. So set your goals, work to achieve them, advertise your success, and celebrate.