Month 1:  Goals

Welcome to our Success in a Year Program.  This is month 1, where we're going to be talking all about goals.  One of the most important things anybody can do is define their goals, define the vision for their life.

I want to start by asking you, if you imagine yourself a year from now, what do you actually and truly see? 

Is everything about the same it is today, or do you really have a bigger goal or dream or vision for yourself?

Most people do have a bigger version of themselves somewhere buried inside of their minds, but very few people actually believe that it's possible or believe at a gut level that they can truly change over the course of a year, or longer and beyond.

What I want you to start doing this month is start thinking about yourself as a goal setter, but as somebody who doesn't just set goals; somebody who actually achieves their goals, who brings their vision into reality.

It starts with your belief in yourself.  If you believe that whatever you can visualize for yourself, whatever you can image in your mind, that you can in fact bring that into reality, and through the process of effective goal setting and obviously following through on those goals with effective planning and action taking, then you can begin to make this vision become a reality.

Again, it all starts with what we're doing here in month 1.

Having an overall goal or vision is really vital to your success.  Look around  at any great achiever, anybody that you really admire, whether it's authors, speakers, writers, great politicians, entertainers, we all see these people for the achievements they've already been able to accomplish in their lifetime.

What we often forget is they started from very humble beginnings, most of them.  Their humble beginnings usually began with the thought, the idea, the seed that was planted, which was really just a goal of somewhere they wanted to get to.

You have somewhere that you want to get to, and by setting goals effectively you can begin planting those seeds to start drawing you towards the future that you ultimately envision for yourself. 

The one you really believe you can have, if you're the kind of person that can persist on the action that's required behind these goals.

Visualize Your Ideal Life

Let's start by saying this.  If you haven't done it before, I'm going to ask you to start visualizing your ideal life.  We're going to take it way down the road.  We're going to go 10 years into the future.

Where do you really want to be in 10 years?  It seems at the moment like a long time away, but if you think of 10 years back from now, go back 10 years in your mind and you can see how quickly that time has evolved.

Did you do everything in the past 10 years that you think you wanted to achieve?  Or do you think you left a lot of stuff out because you didn't plan it effectively, you didn't make it a priority or you didn't set it as a goal.

You'll quickly see, especially as you get older in your life, that 10 years can just fly by and you can miss the boat on a whole bunch of opportunity if you don't correctly plan it.

So we want to start thinking about where we want to be 10 years from now, and then moving forward, how can we start to plot and write down goals that will lead us to where we ultimately want to by, our best ideal life?

We're going to start doing that this month.

Action Steps

Let's talk about some specific action steps that we're going to be doing throughout the course of this month in the Success in a Year Program. 

It starts by writing out a detailed vision of your unique life, at its most successful.  This is where you can really have a lot of fun.  You can sit down and really take the time to think about your ideal life.

The problem is, most of us never even take a minute to really think about our ideal life, what we actually, truly want if we could have anything.

Most of us, let's face it, we're too busy with the day-to-day ongoing of what's happening in our lives.  We go to work, maybe we're commuters and stuck in traffic for two or three hours a day and we've got to get the kids to school and to sports and we have to get the house prepared and we have to go visit our neighbors and go to family functions.

Before we know it, there's no time left to actually do the things that we want to do that are most important to us.

We often lose touch with this ultimate vision or the things we truly want at a gut level.

So now we're going to take the time this month to sit down and actually think about what we truly want, what are ultimate vision would be if we could really have anything.

From there, we're going to start thinking about some specific goals.  Specifically, we're going to recommend that you identify five major goals that will help you propel towards this ultimate vision.

Because when you start creating goals, you start realizing that there are steps you could be taking, actions you can put into place that will begin making this vision become more of a reality.

When you first begin setting this vision in step one, it's going to feel almost detached from reality, because it's so far beyond what you're doing right now.  It's so far beyond what you've allowed yourself to think about having for your life.

But when you actually start assigning goals to these things, to these visions, you start seeing, "Maybe this is possible, because if I were to at least start working on these goals and if I could take these goals from step A to B to C and further, then really my ultimate vision will start unfolding naturally, as long as I persist."

We want to make sure you set at least five major goals that will propel you forward.

Obviously, it's not just about setting the goal and getting all exciting, visualizing what might come to pass if you were to hit these goals, you want to break these things down.

You want to break them down into smaller, manageable steps that you can start working on right away.  That might mean giving yourself a list of things to do, starting today and this week.

Even though you have this long-term vision, and it may take you years to get there, you have something that you can start putting into play right now and you can build momentum and grow that momentum and start seeing, "Hey, this vision really is becoming a reality."

Finally, I want to recommend that you organize what we call a goals blueprint.  This is really just a place where you can put all of your manageable goals into a single spot.

If you're a pen and paper type of person, it could be a binder or a folder and you just stick that in your filing cabinet.  Or it could be some kind of virtual file that you put on your desktop of your computer or into a mind map, or even using some of the newer technology these days, there's programs like Evernote and DropBox that you can sync up to your mobile devices and you can have it with you on your computer, on your phone or you can print it out on paper if you need to see it in physical reality as well.

But you can have all these goals in front of you and you can manage them and trace them as you go forward.

That is your assignment.  That is the overall concept for the first month.  These are your action steps. 

Now all you need to do is proceed into the exercises, and for the next four weeks simply follow through each and every exercise and you'll begin to work on your vision and crystallize those goals.