You can conduct this exercise as a brainstorming session with the members of your staff, or with your key people. In your business, you can write down everything you would like to accomplish over the next five years, including sales, growth, profitability, people, products, services, processes and market share.
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You can conduct this exercise with your spouse at home. You can sit down together and write out everything that you would like to be, have or do in your lives together over the next five years, or even longer.
In the Bible it says, “Let there be light.” The more time you take to write out every possible goal that you would like to achieve sometime in the future, the greater light you will have in your life. You will be far more knowledgeable and aware of what it is you really want to accomplish in the months and years ahead.
As you write down your goals, think about the things you have always wanted to do in the past, but which you may have given up on because of constraints of time, money, marriage or other factors. When you write, let your imagination run freely. Concentrate on writing out the largest quantity of goals possible, without worrying about whether they are achievable, logical or reasonable. Just get them down on paper.
Organize Your Goals by Priority
Once you have written out your list of goals for the foreseeable future, go back over the list and organize it by priority. Write an A, B or C in front of each of the goals. An “A” goal is something that is really important to you. It is a goal that you would really like to achieve and which would make you tremendously happy if you were to attain it.
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A “B” goal is something that you would like to achieve, and that you would enjoy acquiring if you were successful. It is important to you, but it is not quite as important as an “A” goal.
A “C” goal is something that would be nice to accomplish, or nice to have or do, but it is not as important as an “A” or “B”.
It is only when you write your goals down and compare them against each other that you develop absolute clarity about their relative importance to you.
Select Your Most Important Goals
Transfer all of your “A” goals onto a separate sheet of paper. Review these
“A” goals and organize them by writing “A-1”, “A-2,” “A-3,” and so on next to them.
Select from your “A” list the most important of all goals, the one goal that could have the greatest positive impact on your life if you were to achieve it.
Ask yourself, “If I could achieve any goal on this list, which one goal would give me more happiness, satisfaction and rewards than any other?” This becomes your “A-1” goal.
Work through the “A” list by asking yourself this question. “If I could only accomplish one more goal on this list, which one goal would it be?” This 49
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becomes your “A-2” goal. Then ask this question again and again, until you have organized all of your “A” goals by priority.
Finally, take your “A-1” goal, the most important goal of all, and write it down at the top of a new page. This goal becomes your major definite purpose for the foreseeable future.
Make Detailed Plans of Action
The next step is for you to make a list of every single action that you can think of that you can take to achieve your most important goal. You should come up with at least ten or twenty different things you could do to accomplish this goal. When you have written down everything that you can think of, you then organize this list of activities by writing an “A”, a “B” or a “C” in front of each of the items. You ask, “If I could only do one thing on this list, which one action would help me to achieve this goal more than any other?” Finally, you go back and you write “A-1,” “A-2,” “A-3” until your list of activities is organized into a plan of action, from beginning to end.
You can repeat this exercise with each of your “A” goals. Write the goal in the present tense at the top of a sheet of paper and then discipline yourself to generate ten to twenty specific, concrete actions that you could take to achieve that goal. Organize each of these lists by priority, using the A-B-C
method. This entire exercise will only take you between one and two hours, perhaps on a Sunday afternoon. But once you have accomplished it, you will have a list of clear goals, organized in order of priority, combined with a series of action steps also organized by priority.
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With this set of goals and plans, you will have moved yourself into the top 3% of people in our society. You will have taken control of your future. You will have grasped the steering wheel of your own life and turned it in a different direction. What will happen to you as the result of this exercise will absolutely amaze you. Try it and see.
Turbocharge Your Goal Achieving Ability
There are five techniques that you can practice to accelerate the speed at which you achieve your goals. These methods will “turbocharge” your energies and abilities and enable you to accomplish more in a shorter period of time than you ever thought possible.
1. Visualize Your Goal as a Reality
Create a clear mental picture of your goal as if it has already been realized.
Imagine your goal as though you were already enjoying the finished result.
Close your eyes and think of what your goal would look like. Think about how you would be as a person if you had achieved the goal. Think about how much you would enjoy the achievement of that goal or objective. Your subconscious mind is only activated by pictures that are presented to it in the present tense, as though it were already a current reality.
When you repeatedly present a picture to your subconscious mind of your goal as already realized, your subconscious mind then works to make your external world and experience consistent with your inner picture. This ability 51
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to visualize is one of the great powers of the human mind. Your subconscious makes your outer world consistent with your inner world. To activate this power, you only need to create a “mental equivalent” of what you want to see in your outer life. Your subconscious will do the rest.
Activate the Law of Attraction
Like running a movie projector, you should play and replay this picture continuously, over and over again, on the screen of your mind. This picture will then activate your subconscious mind and trigger the “Law of Attraction.” This law says that you are a “living magnet” and that you inevitably attract into your life the ideas, people and resources that you need to achieve your most intensely desired goals.
When you play the picture of your goals on the screen of your mind, this action magnetizes your mind and draws into your life everything you need to achieve the goal.
Change Your Beliefs
The Law of Belief says that, “Whatever you believe, with conviction, becomes your reality.” You do not believe what you see, but you see what you already believe. There is a one to one relationship between how intensely you believe that your goals are achievable and how rapidly they appear in your life. As William James of Harvard says, “Belief creates the actual fact.”
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The Law of Mind says that, “Thoughts objectify themselves.” When you replay the picture of your goal repeatedly in your conscious mind, you will begin to believe with ever-increasing intensity that the goal is achievable for you. As your belief grows, your goal will begin to take physical form in your external world, and sometimes, far faster than you can imagine.
2. Positively Affirm Your Goal as Accomplished
Create a clear statement or affirmation of your goal as already achieved.
Enthusiastically repeat this statement to yourself over and over again. Imbue your statement with emotion, conviction and emphasis. As you repeat this positive affirmation, you imprint this command to achieve the goal deeper and deeper into your subconscious mind. Use personal language such as “I earn $50,000 per year!” Or, “I weight 175 pounds,” or “I am an outstanding salesperson.” By using affirmations, you can totally reprogram your thinking about yourself and your goals. With affirmations, your potential becomes unlimited.
When you reprogram your subconscious mind, you create a force field of energy that inevitably draws into your life the people and circumstances in harmony with your dominant pictures and thoughts. You automatically accelerate the process of goal attainment.
3. Accept Complete Responsibility for Results