Succeed Using Goals

“If you don't set goals for yourself, you are doomed to work to achieve the goals of someone else." -Brian Tracy

t's the beginning of a new year and this often means...New Year's resolutions! Made any? Kept any? If you've stumbled along the way, it's not too late. Let's talk about that this month.

Before we get into the nitty-gritty, technical aspects of resolutions, I want to share with you the best piece of advice I've gotten regarding them. In fact, let's just start the new year of For Your Success articles off right with success tip number one: If you've fallen off the wagon, you're only one step away from getting back on. Simple, eh?

It really is just that simple. All you have to do to renew a missed resolution is start again. Too often we think that we must be perfect or the whole deal is off. Yet we are, by nature, problem-solvers. A mistake is just another word for a problem, so solve the problem! Success tip 1A: Resolve to start again.

Now let's take a closer look at the technical aspects of resolutions. What is a resolution? Put together properly, a resolution is nothing more than a goal. The best way a goal can be achieved is to make sure that it is a good goal. We'll call that success tip number two: Make sure you have set good goals. But what are good goals?

First (success tip three), a good goal is tangible and measurable. If you can't determine when you've achieved something, how will you know when you're done? So you have to know what you want to do (tangible) and when you've done it (measurable).

My favorite example of a goal that doesn't meet this criteria is a goal such as "To have more fun." What does that mean? What is fun? Obviously it's different for everyone. So quantify it! Suppose that fun for you is traveling. That's tangible. It's not measurable, however. So we can make it measurable by saying where we want to go, or how many times we want to travel. Let's make the goal, "To travel to Egypt." Tangible and measurable. But wait, there's more.

As our fourth success tip tells us, your goal needs to be time-lined. Why? Putting timelines on goals creates pressure. In this case, pressure is good. We humans need a bit of it to motivate us to achieve things we might not otherwise.

The nice thing about New Year's Resolutions is that the time-line is sort of built right in: I want to travel to Egypt in the upcoming year. Think about that statement. I'll bet it's already got you wondering when you'd go if this were your goal and what you need to take with you. That's a well stated goal.

We're not done yet, though. For a goal to really work for you, our fifth success tip tells us that an effective goal should be positive and inspiring. At first blush, these may sound like the same thing, but there's a difference. Let me explain.

Positive goals are stated in a way that appeals to us. It's been suggested that your mind is more amenable to positive statements than negative ones. We would naturally tend to shy away from negative things, events and people. So if you state a goal in a negative manner, it's likely that you will shy away from that goal.

The example I often use is a common New Year's resolution: To QUIT smoking this year. That word "quit" is pretty ugly and we tend to associate ugly things with ugly words. Quit smoking, quit having my cigarette breaks, quit enjoying my freedom to do what I want, etc. If it were restated positively, we might say, "I want to be smoke-free in 2006." Free – that's positive and we generally tend to associate good things with the word. Freedom from cigarette slavery, freer cash in my wallet now that I don't have to buy cigs, free breathing. That's the value of positive goals.

Inspiring is another matter. If a goal doesn't inspire you, you're going to have difficulty achieving it, no matter how it's stated. I set several goals last year which sounded good, but really didn't inspire me. One of them was to get back into business producing a product I had decided to stop producing several years ago. I thought it would be a good eBay style product, but I had built up some pretty powerful notions that left me cold and uninspired regarding it.

Now, I could have changed those notions. That's success tip six: you can always change your mental associations. For reasons that still make sense to me today, I chose not to do so. The point being, if your goal isn't inspiring, no amount of work to state it correctly is going to help unless you decide to significantly alter your outlook. (There's a whole new article in that point alone.)

I've saved the best for last. This is probably the most important success tip in the whole bunch – so do this if you do nothing else (although you may as well do everything else while you're at it.) Success tip number seven: Write your resolutions (or goals) down in long-hand on paper. There's some magic created by putting the thing on paper – I suspect it may be a link your mind creates between the goal and the action of writing. Goals not written down are like leaves on a windy day – they fly away, never to be seen again. So be sure to write them down!

This should give you a good start to a good year. Use these tips to make sure that you will achieve those  positive resolutions you set for yourself. It's a great way to start the year off well.

Have a great month!