A Quest For Freedom Step 2: How To Start Setting Your Goals freedomiseverything.com /2016/05/03/a-quest-for-freedom-step-2-how-to-start-setting-your-goals/
How To Start Setting Your Goals In my previous post, I talked about the first step in creating a life of greater freedom – designing a vision for your life. Designing a vision should always be the first step because it allows you to set your life compass – ie the overall direction that you want your life to go in. The life vision should be bold and completely out of reach at the current time; it is something you will work towards over time, giving you a sense of purpose. So, what is the next step? Designing a vision is a can be a wonderful experience and it is a great starting point for setting a course for your life which inspires you. Even the action of creating a vision can be liberating and energising. However if your vision is suitably grand then it probably feels completely unrealistic and out of reach at the current time. If, in your vision, you have a passive income of £100,000 per year, and currently you earn £30,000 per year in a job where you work 8am-7pm, then it is difficult to stay inspired for long. You need some clear steps, which will start you moving in the direction of your vision. This is where setting your goals comes in to play. Long-term studies have shown that people who set goals are overall far more successful and have a higher income than those who do not set goals. As the legendary productivity guru Brian Tracey noted after studying successful people: “success is goals”. I look at setting your goals as creating a roadmap, or series of steps, which can lead you to your vision if designed properly. That said, goal-setting can be tricky for some people. Like with our visions, we have a lot of internal blockers and limiting beliefs which hold us back from even setting big goals, let alone achieving them!
So, how to start setting your goals… Depending which book you read or which expert you listen to, there are a variety of ways to define your goals. In his excellent book ‘The One Thing’, Gary Keller advocates a strategy called ‘goal setting to the now’, which I really like. ‘Goal setting to the now’ involves working from your biggest long-term goal (a ‘someday’ goal) and working backwards through time to finally create a one month, one-week or even one-day goal. So, for example let us say the ‘someday’ goal is to be earning £100,000 per year in completely passive income (ie income which is divorced from any time spent) and let us say the person currently earns £4000 per month working a regular job: Someday goal = earn £100,000 p/a in passive income 5 year goal = earn £50,000 p/a in passive income 3 year goal = earn £30,000 p/a in passive income 1 year goal = earn a salary of £100,000 p/a and begin to earn passive income each month 3 month goal = increase my overall income from £4,000 p/m to 5,000 p/m
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1 month goal = find a new job which provides a 25% salary increase As you can see the scope of the goals change as we move closer in time. Initially, with the someday goal, the figure is completely out of reach and the income is completely passive (ie not tied to a job). In fact, the someday goal may be what you wrote down for your life vision; therefore it is currently unrealistic. However as the timeframe becomes shorter the goals become more reachable and realistic. The above example is an indication of how powerful the vision-building and goal setting processes can be when used properly together. Effectively what you are doing is creating the life you want in the future (vision), and then creating the targets, which have to be achieved along the way to reach that vision. What is also notable is the fact that the goals have an element of compounding, or acceleration. What this means is that the goals start out relatively small (similar to when you start saving money, you start small) because the timeframes are short and the person is still quite limited in their capacity and thinking. But as time goes on and goals are achieved, the figures become higher. This can happen because reaching smaller short-term goals gives huge confidence that bigger goals can also be reached.
How do you decide upon, and set, your goals? Most goal-setting experts believe that goals should be SMART: Specific Measureable Achievable Realistic Time-focused This template is a great place to start and I agree with most of the points, but not all. For example, I believe that goals should be exciting and stimulating, even scary, and sometimes that does not go together with realism. Often the idea of setting goals is to help your life go in a new direction, and this can feel unrealistic at first. It is only once you start on the road to achieving the goal that the ‘how’ becomes clear. What I have found is that specificity is very important; in fact you should continue to refine your goals until they are very specific and aligned with exactly what you want. From personal experience, I know that when you set goals at first they tend to be quite unspecific and even a bit ‘woolly’. The reason is that many people don’t know what they truly want, or how to get it – therefore they set broad, general goals. These are often not achieved because they are not precise enough, or the desire to achieve them not strong enough. This is why the vision process and knowing EXACTLY what you want is so important. Goal setting is a massive topic and is a process which, if used correctly, can be life-changing. Learning to set goals is a skill like any other, and it does take practice to do well. It is a skill worth learning because once you start setting and achieving goals, you are unstoppable! For further reading around goal setting there are many resources online and many excellent books. I recommend ‘GOALS!’ By Brian Tracy, or ‘The One Thing’ by Gary Keller. Take time to really create an inspiring vision and then work backwards to set the goals which will set and keep you on the path towards that vision. You now have a basic understanding of how to set your goals. Good luck with the process! And of course: never, ever GIVE UP!
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