We make New Year's resolutions, set ambitious goals, create a career path, make plans for the future and then… time passes, and we are stuck. So is it worth wasting time making plans? My own life and the example of dozens of participants in my coaching projects who got rid of their debts and paid their mortgage loans to zero, do what they love and make their dreams come true would say a simple: "YES, it's worth it". However, to have a real chance of achieving your goals, you need more than good intentions and New Year's enthusiasm. This article will show a detailed description of the method I use in my client sessions and my personal life.
I decided to bring up this topic after a phone call from one of my clients. She was devastated and wanted to resign from pursuing her goals. In her voice, you could hear helplessness and disappointment. That is precisely the same feelings that accompanied me several years ago.
I think many of us look back at snapshots of our own lives and bad experiences at this point. I immediately remember myself from 2008, when my only son was born. We had debts over 100k on our backs. Life on credit and the raging financial crisis was a source of stress and worries about the job, which we lost overnight. It seemed that I did not influence anything. Everything was changing dynamically, the day was too short, and setting goals was pointless. That's when I started taking control of my own life and finances. I learned a lot over the years, and I will present some practical tips to you today.
Usually, I hear from my clients: "I don't plan - it's a waste of time - my plans don't work anyway." Rule number 1 - no planning means failure. I am not a fan of motivational gurus, but my life and work experiences have prompted me to adopt a proactive approach to life. Under the skullcap, we carry 1,300 grams of the most remarkable structure in the universe, which contains approximately 86 billion neurons, 2,500 terabytes of "hard disk", and a processor that performs 1016 calculations per second—having such a device obliges us to think professionally.
Wise planning effectively helps to improve the quality of life and use the potential that each of us carries within ourselves. It is no coincidence that the best athletes have precise training plans, beautiful buildings are built based on carefully prepared designs, and the landing on the moon was possible thanks to the accurate implementation of the planned procedure. Thoughtful planning just works.
On the other hand, the lack of planning and setting goals is tantamount to making a decision about mediocrity and drifting with the flow. If you do not set your goals - someone else will do it for you. Instead of doing what you want, you will do what other people ask you to do. Instead of pursuing your own dreams, you'll seek the goals of those who have them.
So let's not waste time pondering whether it is worth planning, and let's move forward and get to know how to do it in the right way.
The most common mistake is lack of planning. Each of us will create a long list of goals in minutes that would be fun to achieve. The day, however, is 24 hours long, and we have a limited amount of energy. So we have to face a painful truth: it is impossible to do everything. The trick is to CONSCIOUSLY choose ONLY A FEW GOALS that are really important to us - but how to do it when there are as many as 100 goals?
And here I will give you the first method. Narrowing down the list of all targets, I use this way to eliminate 80% of the listed goals in two rounds. And here, it all depends on the proportion. Even if the actual proportion is different, you cannot deny that only a few things in our life have a decisive influence on their quality. The rest are trivial. Expecting better results, and at the same time not wanting to work to death, we must identify what is most important in a given period of life.
Let's say you have 100 goals listed and eliminate 80% of the less essential targets in the first round. After the first elimination, twenty out of hundreds of crucial goals pass to the second round, which we have to reduce again by 80%. The results give us the four most important goals that we can achieve.
In practice, narrowing down the list of goals to a few of the most important is very difficult. You can quickly dismiss some of the obvious ones, so the first round goes quite smoothly. Remember, you cannot stop at this stage because the list will remain with too many goals, and we will not achieve them. Therefore, after completing the first round, it is worth taking at least a day off, and then with a fresh mind, conduct the second round, working only on the shorter list.
This approach assumes that even with a hundred different goals, we can ultimately limit them to four. Of course, it doesn't have to be four, but more than ten goals is a recipe for frustration, in my opinion. Unfortunately, cutting out less important targets is complex, and here you have to be ruthless.
I must admit that this stage was (and to some extent still is) the biggest challenge for my clients and me. I am interested in many things, many projects are exciting, and I am also quite easily "fired up" to different ideas, so I often had trouble telling them "no". As a result, most of them couldn't be done anyway (time is not made of rubber), the stress was enormous, the effects were average, and the frustration was high.
And it is in conscious elimination that, in my opinion, lies the key to success and satisfaction.
You are probably wondering why this method is so compelling? I'll tell you! After this elimination, you have the four most important goals - you will achieve them in the next few months. After realising you have extra free time, great relationships at home, no stress and frustration, a sense of fulfilment - with such achievements, you will take up new challenges with total energy with such accomplishments.
It is not the end of your planning... After completing the distillation and identifying your most important goals, it is time for the following significant step. Many people complete the planning process here. It is a mistake because the list itself is not enough. Achieving goals involves effort, breaking old habits and building new ones. For this, motivation and consistency are essential. So now we need to have the suitable mental "fuel" reserved to help us reach our destination.
Each of the targets on our shortlist is now taken to a workshop and adequately processed. At this point, we pass the targets through a sieve of six questions:
Do I know how to achieve this goal?
Why didn't I reach my goal last time?
What will I do when difficulties arise?
How will I know that I am making progress?
Why is this goal important to me?
How will I feel if I don't achieve this?
I don't want to exaggerate with examples here, but the more we detest the state we want to get out of, the more willing we will act to break out of it.
Finally, a crucial point. As you can see, appropriate goal setting takes much effort. It is a concrete job that requires our attention, focus and time. Therefore, you cannot do it by jumping over it. You should set a specific time (for me, it is every Sunday from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.) in which I work with my goals, check my progress, and gain additional knowledge about them. Planning and setting goals work great, but only if we take it seriously. But could there be a more serious matter than our own life?
And with this question, I will end this extensive article... I congratulate everyone who has reached the end of this reading, and I hope it will help you plan and set your goals. I am waiting for your questions, ideas, observations and advice resulting from your own experiences - the comments below are at your disposal as usual. I wish you fruitful goal setting, effective implementation and perseverance.
KJB International Aid
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