Achievement and Self Affirmations

Sydney is in the grip of a self discovery journey, what with the visit of the Dalai Lama and the incredible success of books like The Secret. Every second person seems to be on some personal discovery journey of their own.

I haven't read The Secret yet, although NSSG is reading it at the moment along with half the people I know. I don't generally get a lot of time to read for pleasure these days, most of my time is taken up working, thinking about work or trying to forget that I work entirely and seeing friends!

The basic premise of the book is that you need to ask for what you want ( I am sorry if I am oversimplifying the concept). The idea of everything you want to achieve being out there is nothing new and in fact it makes perfect sense for a couple of reasons.

You have to have goals to achieve them

It seems really stupid when you think about it, but everyone that gets what they want, knows what they want and can identify this. I don't mean things like 'I want to be rich', I mean things like I want to own my own property by [insert age]. When you think about this sort of goal setting and look around a bit you can see this in everyday life.

I run a small business and like good small businesses I have a business plan which includes my 'business goals' and then the tactics I am going to use (and do use) to achieve the goals.

Most small businesses fail, why? Because the business has no goals to achieve!

Create small baby goals to get you on the way to your big goals.

Baby goals are short term easy to achieve things that when you add them all together get you on the way to your big goal. If you think about the objective of owning your own property, you need to do some pretty fundamental things:

Save money for a deposit;
Prove that you can regularly pay off a debt;
Get a job and keep a job (if you don't already have one).

So in terms of the small goals it's things like 'save XX dollars a week from my pay packet'. Every time you do this you can mentally tick off your baby step goal for that week.

Remind yourself of your goals and reward yourself

Big goals can take a long time to achieve and even the most self directed person gets bored with the small baby steps. You need to remind yourself on a regular basis what the big goals are and reward yourself for achieving the small goals.

I once read Scott Adams ideas on affirmations, for those of you not in the know Scott is the creator Dilbert one of my all time favorite cartoons. Scott believes that to achieve something you need to visualise what it is you want to achieve and then write it down 15 times every day while visualising it.

Affirmations are not new, nor are they witch doctory crap, they work just like good psychological techniques work in helping people achieve.

Why not try some of these things yourself? Sit down and actually write out what you want to achieve, make it something tangible and then work out the small baby steps you need to achieve to get to the big goal.

Then visualise your goal, make the achievement tangible in your mind, what do you feel when you have achieved it? What can you see, taste, touch etc.

I am a list maker, every day I write out my to do list and as I do the tasks I cross them off the list, for me this are my baby steps of the day that help me with my big list which in turn helps me get to the big goals!

Labels: contemplation, direction

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