www.Paul-Bradley.com

I used to rank goal setting among the more mundane aspects of self development, I still set and achieved goals, I just could never get very inspired about the whole process. Now I realise this was because I had not yet discovered a powerful enough purpose for myself, so I felt unmotivated to set goals.

I didn’t see it that way at the time though, since I had allowed myself to be satisfied with the excuse that goal setting was a boring, mundane task rather than an opportunity to consciously decide how to live “on purpose”.

Why set a goal at all if it’s something you can’t get really motivated to do?

If you’re setting goals that you’re not achieving, and you can see that this is because they don’t emotionally compel you to make them real, then spend some time soul searching and deciding what it is you really want to manifest in your life, not just in terms of the end products of your goals, but in terms of the purpose of your life. Goals are merely steps along this path. Goal setting is not an end in itself, it is a tool to be applied in the service of something that both transcends and incorporates individual goals – your purpose.

Once you have a sense of purpose in setting goals, it becomes surprisingly easy to get motivated to use the tools and techniques which can help you to set your goals in the way that serves you best. In my experience, learning and using the right goal-setting tools will require a moderate amount of willpower to learn and implement the techniques initially but will repay your investment of time and energy many times over

I’d like to share with you a kind of stream-of-consciousness narrative of some of the distinctions I’ve found helpful in setting goals. Often I will set a goal and keep refining it with a slight rephrasing for some weeks or even months, always working on the goal assuming the current definition is perfect, but also being sensitive to the feedback I’m getting to refine and further focus my goal to make it more closely express what I want.

Setting written goals is indispensable for me. There is a definite power in writing things down, and most people find a written set of goals much more compelling, memorable and motivating than unwritten goals. If you’ve never tried writing down your goals you are missing out on something big – the mysterious power of writing down and regularly reviewing your intent. Years ago, I used to have a kind of instinctive aversion to this kind of organization, it felt constricting to me – as though it would compromise my ability to be free and fluid in what I pursued.

Now I see that setting and refining written goals is another path to greater freedom and control of your life, it’s a way to become more free spirited and independently minded by consciously creating your own future. If you’ve never set written goals before I suggest trying it for a month or two, even if it feels a little weird at first, give it time and there’s a good chance you’ll love the results.

“He who has a big enough Why can bear almost any How” – Friedrich Nietzsche

When setting goals you’re far more effective if you know why you’re setting goals.

Not in terms of their specific outcomes, but in terms of the bigger picture. Why are you setting this particular goal now – where is it taking you?

For example, my goal in starting this site is to create another channel through which to share beliefs, techniques, values and thoughts which have been of massive value in my life with others, and to discuss these subjects with those who have similar interests and goals.

I want this to be a high traffic site because I want to share these life-enhancing understandings with as many people as possible. Through sharing these things with others I also hope to accelerate and intensify my own self development. I also want to make enough advertising revenue off the site to fund my ongoing personal development and to enable me to give back more value here, so a high traffic site is not only an end but a means to a bigger end to a bigger means and so on.

Why? What’s the bigger picture behind this goal? My bigger picture is my future vision of myself as more than I can possibly imagine. I’ve believed for a long time that people are capable of far more than they know, and if you really believe that you need to acknowledge that one of the consequences is never being able to permit yourself the dangerous sedative of inertia, of feeling you’re “doing great” – I am doing great, but I also know I can do and be much more and this site is one route to further growth.

My bigger picture includes me sharing what I know with many others, learning more from them, and succeeding through offering something of genuine value.

Now can you see how with my bigger picture, if I set a goal “To be a professional writer” it would be incongruent with my bigger picture – the very meanness and smallness of my thinking in what the sites goal was would rob me of the juice, energy and desire I can put behind my goal. I don’t write these articles to exchange time and knowledge for money – that is a scarcity based mindset whereby something precious and limited is being exchanged for something else precious and limited. I prefer to think in terms of abundance. I prefer to think that there is more than enough to go around.

When I more fully state my goal as “To share my knowledge, perspective and experiences, to learn from others with similar interests, to contribute to my own continual development, and the development of my ability to help others” it is motivating to me on so many more levels. When you set goals this way, not only are they congruent with your vision of your future, they are also congruent with each other, since they all derive from the same higher purpose – goals which complement each other give you tremendous momentum and energy that you are just squandering if your goals conflict with one another.

It’s important to state your goals in the positive. When I learned hypnosis I realised that every thought we think is interpreted by our subconscious mind as a command. You cannot think in the negative – if I say “don’t think about the colour of your front door” you can’t help but think about it to understand the sentence. Similarly, if you state your goals in such a way that they include what you don’t want your neurology will dutifully create lots of images and representations of the things you don’t want and you will start moving towards that. So “to eat healthily” is a far better goal statement than “to give up junk food”. Remember that you get what you focus on, so focus on what you want, not what you don’t want.

Goals should be stated as specifically as possible, when a goal is stated in measurable terms it enables you to easily appraise your progress and decide what next steps will take you closer to the goal in the most efficient way, it also allows you to know when you have achieved the goal – if you don’t know what you want how will you know when you’ve got it? Decide what specifically you will see, hear and feel when you have reached your goal. So be specific in terms of what, when, where, why, who. Make as rich a description you can, whilst remaining concise and to the point, of exactly what you intend to manifest. Setting a clear goal with a specific intent, timescale and reason is far more motivating than a vague wish or inclination.

Big goals produce big results – if you set your sights higher than you have good reason to aim you may not always achieve 100%, but 80% of an audacious goal is, in my book, always better than 100% of mediocrity. Make your goals big enough that people tell you you’re crazy – this is a sure indication that your level of sanity is becoming too high for the rest of the world to be comfortable with it. Set goals so ambitious they have the power to inspire you to action.

“Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right.” - Henry Ford

Belief is a word with many different meaning – sometimes people think that to believe something they have to rationalise it to themselves, to explain or understand it. Other times, belief is a matter of faith. In terms of your goals, you must learn how to believe in them without reservation if you want to get the most out of them.

The story of KFC restaurants is a classic story of the power which belief and the refusal to quit has to turn an idea into reality. Colonel Sanders didn’t come up with the idea which made him his fortune until he was 65 and he would never have succeeded if it hasn’t been for bad luck.

He originally sold his chicken from a restaurant in Corbin, Kentucky. All was going well until the early 60s when a new interstate was planned to bypass Corbin. His customer base removed, The Colonel sold off his restaurant. At an age when most would be settling down to retirement, he started all over again with nothing more than social security payments as income. He set off across America with a chicken fryer and stopped at every restaurant he could find – he would cook chicken for any restaurant owner who was interested and if they liked it he’d keep them well stocked with his special coating and they’d pay him a nickel for each piece of chicken they sold. KFC eventually grew beyond what Colonel Sanders could have ever imagined – in 1963 he sold the business for $2 million.

A living testament to one of his favourite sayings “A man will rust out before he’ll wear out”, he remained with the company as a spokesman and averaged 250,000 miles a year – that’s 1000 miles per working day, visiting KFC restaurants to ensure his high standards were met. A business that started with a 65 year old man travelling the country on his $105 per month social security cheque now has more than 11,000 outlets in more than 80 countries serving over a billion meals every year.

“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed” - Michael Jordan

Success often arrives only after we refuse to quit despite overwhelming odds - Make your success an article of faith – something you know like you know the sun will come up tomorrow.

Milestones are an important aspect of long term goals – if you’re going to set big goals over a long enough time period then it’s especially important to have feedback over time as you refine your goal and move towards it. Reaching milestones also gives you a sense of achieving the goal one step at a time and helps motivate you when the main goal seems a long way away. The criteria you use to decide whether or not you’re succeeding should be your own efforts and actions. Base your criteria for success only on your own performance, not on factors beyond your control like the responses of others. If you acted and observed for feedback, then you succeeded.

Perhaps, like Thomas Edison, you need to find a few thousand ways not to make a light-bulb before you can achieve your end goal, but you’re succeeding every day that you take action, observe for feedback and learn what you can from the outcome. Act, act and act again – failure is feedback, an opportunity to succeed in learning something new.

Anthony Robbins makes a point of emphasising in his books that he never leaves the scene of a decision or goal without taking some action towards it’s fulfilment. I’ve found this a useful behaviour pattern, it seems no matter how small the initial action it gives the process momentum and gets the process moving while your motivation is high and your resistance low.

Reaching a goal without having a new higher one to aim for can be a curse in disguise, the inertia, complacency, disillusionment and stagnation that can result from this are easily avoided by making it a habit to review your goals list regularly to make sure your goals are still consistent with your purpose and that you are still doing whatever it is most important to you that you do with your time – ask yourself on a regular basis “is what I’m doing with my time the most efficient way to move towards my vision of the future”.

To keep your actions to be “on purpose” you need to prioritise your goals. I keep a working goal list which contains my most important goal in each of 5 categories. I find it useful to keep this on a whiteboard in a prominent place where I will notice it often during my day. By reading this goal list daily and updating it from time to time to ensure it still represents my 5 top priority goals I have an easy way to stay focused on what is the most important thing I could be doing right now – I can easily go off and work on other goals if appropriate, but if I’m uncertain which of a group of projects to work on I always have a default behaviour, so I’m never adrift without an action to work on. If I can’t decide on a goal to work on within a few minutes, I know none of them can be that urgent or compelling so my energy is best invested by defaulting to my whiteboarded goals.

This kind of persistence comes from harmonising the emotional and rational aspects of goal setting – by spending the time to refine and focus my goal list, I have a logical step by step process to follow on those occasions when for some reason I can’t get emotionally juiced up about the goal – because I know on a logical level that I have invested the time and energy in my goal list to make it keenly focused on my top priorities, it is much more difficult for my logic to create excuses not to get moving. Instead of feeling drained and constrained by the structure in my goal setting process, I feel energised, inspired and motivated.

Reading and rehearsing your goals on a daily basis focuses your intent on where you want to go – creating and strengthening a detailed vision of your future which will pull you towards it. When you read your goals, mentally rehearse them as though you had already achieved them, see what you’ll see, hear what you’ll hear and feel what you’ll feel when you’re enjoying all the positive outcomes of achieving your goals. Put yourself in your own future shoes and enjoy all the feelings of success as you look back on how you achieved the goal.

5 minutes spent daily rehearsing your goals is 2.5 hours a month, imagine what clarity you could achieve in 2 and a half hours of focusing on and refining your goals.