GOAL SETTING UNLOCKS YOUR POWER

It’s a powerful tool.

No one wants to feel helpless. When you see things you want, you would like to feel like you could make decisions and take action that would cause you to actually get them. It’s not rewarding to get the things that you can get without making any real effort.

The excitement and thrill in life comes from doing new things and achieving bigger things than you’ve ever done before. To do this, you must get organized and focused.

You’ve got to set some goals and know how to make them happen. Once you have this skill you can move forward in any area of your life that you choose.  

• If you want to improve your finances
• If you want to get in better shape
• If you want a better job
• If you want to fix up your house
• If you want to help your kids get better grades
• If you want to improve your relationship with your spouse

Everyone, in every area that they want to improve, needs goals.
In fact, having goals is much like having a will. You have them whether you know it or not. Everyone has a will. It’s either the one you have through neglect, where you allow the state to decide how to distribute your assets or the one you go and write for yourself with your attorney. It’s not a question of “do you have a will?” You have a will whether you like it or not.

It’s the same with goals. You actually have goals in every area of your life. They are either definite goals you have chosen, that you have game plans in place and are moving toward achieving one step at a time, or they are goals of neglect. These are the areas of your life where you are drifting and usually creating feelings of unhappiness and dissatisfaction.  

Goal setting allows you unleash all of the powers and abilities you have inside to achieve the life you want.

Autism Taught Me How Goal Setting Really Works

Guest Post by Venessa Sylvester

I thought goals were obvious. After all, isn't it just stating what you really want DO WITH YOUR LIFE? 

Why make such a big deal out of it? It's obvious, isn't it? "My goal is to be debt free. My goal is to travel the world. My goal is to pay for my children to go to any college they want. My goal is to be a winner."

Actually, no. It's not that simple.

When I sat down with my son's IEP team (Individual Education Plan) to set his goals, I thought it was obvious. My son has autism, so I thought his IEP team would all assume the same goal—"to help him with his autism."

When they sat across the table and asked me, "What are your goals for Zane?" I stopped thinking about autism and blurted out, "For him to grow up happy and fulfilled and have people around him who love him."

His IEP team must have known then that I was new to this process. They took over from there, explaining that his goals needed to be measurable, have a timeframe and be reasonable for that timeframe.

They suggested, "Zane will form sentences of 3 words or more." "Zane will learn how to properly hold a crayon." "Zane will approach another child and initiate play." We spent almost two hours talking about ways to help Zane, his strengths and weaknesses, his potential. When I left I realized how much better off everyone would be if we approached our goals with such care and clarity.

This process taught what goals really are.

• Goals must be clear and exact
• Goals must be measurable
• Everyone on the team has to agree on the goal
• A goal without a deadline is just a daydream.

In business this means changing a goal from the assumption, "To turn a profit" into "To raise profits by X% by the X date." If everyone on your team does not absolutely know the goals, how can you hope to achieve them? How will you know when you get there?

Action Item: Clarify your goals. Make sure everyone on the team knows and agrees THESE ARE THE GOALS, and these are the deadlines. 

Sidenote: Zane reached those goals and surpassed them—and then we set new ones. I expect he'll be setting his own goals for himself soon. He is amazing.

GOAL SETTING - WHY IT’S EASY

We’re all great goal setters when we have to be.
Give us a crisis and a deadline and we become goal setting pros! The proof of this is how we respond when we have a deadline.  

We may have been goofing off, wondering around and wasting time, but once a deadline pops up we spring into action: 

• Automatically we calculate how much time is left, what needs to be done, what we can do ourselves, and what we’re going to have to get help on.
• At this point no one has to tell us to work hard because we automatically go into overdrive getting things done in rapid fire fashion.
• We race to the finish line… once again pulling out a miracle at the last minute! 

Yet most people think of themselves as very poor goal setters.
This idea comes from the fact that there comes a time where they say they’re.. 

• going to lose weight
• save a certain amount of money
• go for certain improvement
• learn how to speak a language
• learn how to play an instrument
• clean out the garage and closets
• reach a new record goal at work

…and then fail miserably.  As a result they say “I’m just lousy at goal setting.”

The truth is, you just need to understand a little bit more about how it works.
For one thing, there’s a difference between long term and short term goals.  There’s a difference between big picture and little picture goals. All that’s needed is a little bit more insight into how goal setting works because in reality you have already mastered it, you’re just not aware that you have.  

Here’s the trick: Once you understand how it works you can use it to stay in front of crisis.
Instead of being forced to spring into action in a panic mode because a critical deadline is racing at you, now you will be able to use your time and step by step keep moving towards places and directions you want to go in your life in a rational normal manner. Knowing how this works will allow you to achieve much more in every area of your life. This will give you a sense of control about your time, your finances, your money, that you’ve never had before.  

Tomorrow we’re going to look at a simple example of how one person learned how goal setting works. One example is all it will take for the light bulb to go on. You’ll see how simple it is.  You’ll see that you already know how to do it, but then you’ll be able to apply this skill more regularly in your life to move forward.

OUT THINK THEM

The 3rd Key to Beating Big Shots is Strategy

Strategy is all about beating a specific opponent on a specific day. Strategy shows up in your game plan. The goal is to maximize your strengths and to minimize your weaknesses. 

You want to identify and be able to exploit your opponent’s weaknesses, and everybody has weaknesses. As much as possible, you want to steer them away from their strengths, because that’s likely how they’ll beat you.

You don’t want surprises
You want to have studied your opponent so much that most of the time you know what they are going to do before they do it. You want to know their tendencies, how they usually react in specific situations.

If anything, you want to be able to surprise them. You should have some trick plays to run if you need them. You want plenty of special plays and have back up plans prepared for special situations. Who knows what you may need? You want to be prepared for everything.

That’s why you hear professionals talking about watching “film” on their opponents.
When you see NFL coaches waving their clipboards and laminated sheets around on the sidelines during games, that’s what you see. Game plans. These are the result of hours a hours of study and strategy. 

Coaches constantly refine and re-invent their favorite plays to keep their competition guessing. They like to add twists and surprises because if the other guy knows what you are going to do, he’ll stop you.

Vince Lombardi took this to high art
Famous TV announcer and Super Bowl winning coach with the Oakland Raiders John Madden tells the story of attending a Vince Lombardi coaching clinic when he was starting out as an assistant coach.

He said Lombardi spent 9 hours talking about 1 play. In painstaking detail, he explained what each player had to do, why he had to do it, and how they worked together to make it work. It turns out there were infinite variations inside this one play.

Opponents knew the Packers ran primarily that one running play over and over, to the left and the right, but no one could stop it. What they didn’t know were all the variations and twists Lombardi had incorporated into it. They thought they were seeing the same play but they weren’t.

In fact, if you go to Broadway and see the play, “Lombardi” with Dan Lauria and Judith Light, you’ll see Dan as Lombardi describing this very play.

Madden said after spending the day at that coaching clinic his mind was blown. He went on to say …

“I couldn’t spend more than 2 minutes describing any play that I knew. After Lombardi spent 9 hours on that one play I realized there was a lot more behind their success than I ever imagined.”

Strategy and Game Plans, this is where you get specific about HOW you’re going to win!

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Part 4 of 5 KEYS TO BEAT THE BIG SHOTS

Part 1:
You Can Beat The Big Shots

Part 2:
John Wooden and Shoelaces 

Part 3:
Get READY, Get SET

Part 4:
Face the Pain

Make Sure It's Worth It

You'll never get it off the ground unless you believe it's worth working for.Before you do anything, make sure its worth it.

Because if it's worth doing, it's worth doing right. When you do things right it takes extra effort. It’s effort you don’t mind making because you have decided it's worth it.

But if you aren’t sure, you’ll cut corners. You’ll do it in a half-hearted way. You’ll waste your time. And as a result you’ll surely fail.

Keep this in mind:

Everyone underestimates how hard it is to do something new. Everytime you price what a new project, house or business is going to cost, you underestimate. Everytime you estimate how long a project will take, you underestimate. So realize, in spite of your best efforts, anything you decide to do is going to take much more effort and money than you think.

In fact, when you start something you don’t how long or how much it will cost to wrap the thing up. One thing you don’t want to do is get half way through and stop.

So before you start…make sure it's worth it, or you’ll just waste money and time, and be left with a sour taste in your mouth.