One you have settled upon your desired goal, it is essential that you create a clear plan, the provide you visibility of the steps that you need to take to help you achieve your goal. Planning how to reach your goal, is the immediate next step post your having established what your goals are.
Advice from the Masters – Goal Planning
Planning for your Goals
The importance of Planning & Preparation: Take a second look at what appears to be someone’s “good luck.” You’ll find that not luck but preparation, planning, and success-producing thinking preceded his good fortune. Just concentrate on developing those qualities in yourself that will make you a winner.
Goals give you direction: Nothing happens, no forward steps are taken, until a goal is established. Without goals individuals just wander through life. They stumble along, never knowing where they are going, so they never get anywhere.
Act like a corporation: The modern corporation does not leave its future to chance. Should you?
Goals give you energy: overwhelming majority of really successful people work much longer than forty hours a week. And you don’t hear them complain of overwork. Successful people have their eyes focused on a goal, and this provides energy.
David J Schwartz – The Magic of Thinking Big
Fail: By failing to prepare you are preparing to fail. —Benjamin Franklin
John C. Maxwell – Author – Failing Forward / How Successful People Think / Put Your Dream to the Test
The Importance of Vision in Goal Planning
Your vision is essentially how you see yourself many years down the road. Great achievements take time, and Clarity of your longer-term vision is essential to be able to put together the series of short-to-medium goals that can help you reach your final destination.
How can things be?: Look at things not as they are, but as they can be. Visualization adds value to everything. A big thinker always visualizes what can be done in the future. He isn’t stuck with the present. It isn’t what one has that’s important. Rather, it’s how much one is planning to get that counts.
David J Schwartz – The Magic of Thinking Big
The long-term play: Remember, this is a long-term game played over years and even decades, not something that is over in a few weeks or months.
Sunil Saxena – Author – Massive Action equals Massive Results
Review your goals periodically
Review your high-level goals daily. My high-level goals are on my phone, and I look at them within the first hour of waking up as part of my morning routine. I also review my why statement on a daily basis, which keeps me on track at a high level. This puts me in the right frame of mind for the day and reminds me why I am doing what I do.
Reviewing your high-level goals before you go to bed is also a powerful concept. This helps your subconscious mind even more as it works to provide solutions and direction while you’re sleeping.
Sunil Saxena – Author – Massive Action equals Massive Results
Recommended Books on Goal Planning
The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
Authors: Eliyahu M. Goldratt,Jeff Cox
Alex Rogo is an employee whose personal and work life are both falling apart, and has only 90 days to save his plant. Learn how he frees himself from conventional methods and changes the entire course of his life.
Fortune’s “Guru to industry” Eliyahu M. Goldratt gives you a thriller that will transform management styles across the world.
First Things First
Authors: Stephen R. Covey,A. Roger Merrill, Rebecca R. Merrill
Where you are going matters more than how fast you are going. Stephen Covey shows you how to sort out your priorities so you won’t be left questioning yourself at the end of your long day. His insight will give you a more fulfilling life, that efficiency alone cannot give, such as inner peace, confidence and better relationships.
Write It Down, Make It Happen: Knowing What You Want And Getting It
Authors: Henriette Anne Klauser,
Transferring your dreams from your mind to paper is the first step to making them come true. This is how most successful people began their journey. Klauser’s pen-to-paper strategy is humbling but highly effective and will change every aspect of your life, from your relationships to your career. It starts by writing down what you want.
Videos – Goal Planning
How to Design Your Life (My Process For Achieving Goals)
Designing your life is a 3 part process. Part 1 is the design – involving writing down your goals, and reviewing them periodically. Part 2 are your daily habits – forget the longer-term goal, and focus instead of the small thing you need to do today to reach your goal. Part 3 is the follow through – are you actually doing the things you set out to do?
Other concepts on Goals
Dominate – Don’t Compete
People who truly succeed big, never try to compete – they choose instead to dominate their particular niche and become known as the ‘go-to’ person or company for those specific requirements. Domination allows you to never have to compete on price, not get involved in feature wars and bring along free marketing.
Journals
The practice of Journaling (writing your thoughts into a diary on a daily basis) has been proven to be of tremendous value in helping you reach your goals, change behavior, clear your mind and deal with a range of negative issues. A simple daily habit, that can truly transform your life.
BHAG – Big Hairy Audacious Goals
BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goals) is a goal setting style that focuses on setting goals that in normal circumstances would be considered unrealistic. Setting BHAGs have tremendous benefits in terms of motivation, a drive for massive action and to galvanize and bring teams together to achieve the improbable.
The Right Road
We often get so caught up in doing, that we forget to check if what we are doing is really helping us proceed to our desired goals or destinations. While action is important, it is critical that the action is something that it taking you closer to (and not further away) from your desired goals. Are you on the right road?