Promises, not goals

Bill Bartmann is the ultimate underdog, survivor AND achiever. He was homeless at age 14, a member of a street gang and a high school dropout. He then took control of his life by taking the GED exam and putting himself through college and law school.

1. Make Sure Your Goal is Your Own. Spend a solid amount of time figuring out what YOU really want. Think of all the people who are pursuing goals for other people. It’s not worth it. It’s the saddest realization to wake up at 50 or 60 and realize you’ve been chasing something you don’t really want for most of your life.
2. Make it a Promise. Use the word ‘promise’ instead of ‘goal’. Most people don’t reach their goals. Thinking about goals actually sets your mind up to fail, because not reaching goals is quite normal. When you make a promise, you don’t think about something you’re going to ‘attempt’ or ‘try’ or ‘strive to do’. You expect to keep promises. When you make a promise you really want to keep it, so your mind starts working for you to reach your goal.
3. Clearly Identify Your Promise. Most people are vague when they come to goals. They say “I want to get rich” or “I want to be famous.” But you need to know the specifics of what you want. How rich? How famous? If you can’t clearly identify your promise, you’re going to have a difficult time achieving it. When you can clearly see your promise in your mind’s eye, it becomes so much easier to achieve.
4. Identify You Personal Motivator. In order to achieve a significant goal or promise you’re going to need a lot of motivation. You need a good motivator, something to keep you fired up when the times get difficult. This can be anything that keeps you passionate and focused. Maybe someone once told you you couldn’t do something, so it’s the idea of proving this person wrong that keeps you motivated to carry on. Or maybe it’s your children that help you keep your eye on the prize.
5. Create a Promise Plan. It isn’t enough to have a clear promise and a personal motivator. You need a plan. You need to map out and write down the who, what, where, when, why and how of your promise. Your promise should include all the components of a proper business plan.
6. Review Your Plan Regularly. Take 20 minutes each day to review your promise plan. Focusing on your goals makes them all that much more attainable. Analyzing and refining your plan gets your brain working for you, showing you things that you hadn’t thought of before. Your promise plan becomes better and more efficient.
7. Tell Yourself You Will Achieve It. Repeat to yourself over and over again that you will reach your promise. This concretizes your promise in your mind and builds confidence in your ability to reach it.
8. Tell Others About Your Promise. When you tell someone else about your promise, it gives you additional motivation to make it happen. The more people you tell the better. This may be scary, but it gives you an additional incentive to realize your promise. In addition, many of the people you tell will come forward to offer support or resources to help you reach it.
9. Visualize the Final Result. A powerful tool to help you realize your promise is visualizing the final result. What does it feel like? What does it look like? You need to be able to see yourself in the moment of success.

Marcia Wieder is the dream coach of Americas #1 Success Coach — Jack Canfield. She believes that every person on the planet is a mere 10 steps away from achieving even their wildest dreams.

10-Step Formula to achieve your dreams from Marcia Wieder.

1. Set An Intention – Objective: To understand the power and importance of intention and for you to set an intention such as find a new job or career, or get a promotion.
2. Maintain Integrity – Objective: To learn how to live with integrity by removing incomplete actions and keeping agreements with yourself and others. It is essential that you remove or clear up anything from your past that might be in the way of you having what you want.
3. Live On Purpose – Objective: To understand the meaning and importance of purpose in order to live more aligned with your purpose. Dreams without purpose, even a job without aligning to your purpose, can be unfulfilling. We can take steps to avoid this.
4. Access Your Dreamer – Objective: To create a dynamic relationship with the Dreamer inside of you, and a dream you are passionate about. No matter how realistic you may be, there is a part of you that knows what will make you happy and what you want.
5. Learn From Your Doubter – Objective: To create a powerful and dynamic relationship with the Doubter inside of you, and to learn from the lessons this part of you offers. Left unattended, this is part of us that often sabotages our dreams. This does not need to happen.
6. Believe In Your Dreams – Objective: To create a belief as a solid foundation for making your dreams come true. If you don’t believe in yourself or your dream, no one else will either. This is a life-changing step.
7. Create Personal Practices – Objective: To learn to use all of life’s lessons as powerful tools, and to create daily practices to deepen what you learn. In this work, we look at what happened and what you learned and design practices for strengthening your Achilles heel.
8. Take Serious Steps Forward – Objective: To plan the essential action steps to insure that your dreams come true. In the end, it all comes down to taking action and the practical steps for making your dream real.
9. Building Your Dream Team – Objective: To be able to ask for help, making your dream more easily attainable. There are resources that you know and do not know who can open doors and make your life easier. Learn essential skills for asking and getting help
10. Live As A Dreamer – Objective: The objective is simple, to create a dream come true life. Once you are clear about your purpose, dreams and resources, you can look at all areas of your life and decide what you want. This process works on any dream.

We are all two people

This is some improvement - the second post for 2010.  

This year is meant to be action oriented and it will be predominantly driven through goals & related actions. So, obviously I am pretty caught up deep into stuff like Goals, Goals to action, motivation and related topics.

I really liked this article which talks of two of each of us that we deal with on daily basis. One is the real one that happily flows with the stream and the other one that I like to call as the aspirational version of our self. Thanks to Motivation 123 for this simple yet hard hitting article on making both the versions meet. What a wonderful realization that could be!

I am planning to modify the Homework part a bit to suit my life but here goes the actual version from Jason Garcia

We are all two people.

The man or woman who gets up in the morning, drinks a cup of coffee, drives to work in a daze and snaps out of it a few hours later before repeating the cycle the next day.

And then there is the New You, the man or woman who is confident and cool, in control and able to make things happen. The rock star, the adventurer, the renowned expert. The best-selling author, the CEO, the tri-athlete, the supermom or the superdad.

The New You is the ideal you, the dream you.

Nearly everyone I know will live their whole lives without ever stepping into those shoes.

They'll dream about, sure, but they'll never be it. It will always be a fantasy.

But it doesn't have to be. You can become that person. You can become the man or woman you've created in your head. It all starts with a definition.

A Homework

You can't hit a target you can't see, so the first and most important step is defining the New You.

At some point in the next thirty minutes, get a pen and sheet of paper and describe, in detail, your dream life.

What are you like? What is your personality? Are you calm, patient, lively, nuts?

Where do you live? What kind of house do you own? What do you do for work? How do you feel about it?

What do you have for breakfast? Lunch? Dinner? Who do you have it with?

What do you do after work? What do you think about on the drive home? What do you talk about with your kids and spouse? What do you do on Saturdays? Sundays?

Most people won't take the time to do this, and they're the same people who will never step into the shoes of their rock-star selves.

But if you do, if you put your heart and mind into the exercise, I promise it will pay off. You'll finally have a picture of the life you're going to build.

It's the only place to start. Get started.

And remember, if you want to start 2010 off on the right foot, check out our Motivated Mind special.
http://www.motivation123.com/prd-tmm.html

Have a great weekend and don't just think about doing something. Instead...

Make something happen,
Jason

2010 - A Start

As 2009 folded up, Life is a treat as a blog was one of my personal things that were reviewed among other things. And not surprisingly, it ended up in the bottom pile in terms of my performance. Of course, it has to be there, rightfully.


No, I am not talking of performance in the usual sense of a blog here. Not about traffic, followers or comments. Anyway these were hardly anything to write about, almost nil. I am talking about MY performance...performance as in number of blogs posted in 2009.  


With just 10 posts in the whole year, 2008 was slightly better with 22 posts but 2007 was even better at 41 posts in just six months. I had started blogging in May that year. I can't believe how much I wrote those days. 

In 2009, at the rate of not even one post a month, and considering that even I didn't visit this blog for months at a stretch, I shouldn't have bothered to analyse the reasons at all. Reasons..believe me, there are  so many of them when I think of them but they are at best excuses.


So, at the end of yearly analysis, this blog turned out to be a showcase for my laziness and more alarmingly a decreasing level of communication with my self. One of the symptoms of doing too much of work at the cost of my personal space all around. Officially it was a great year...yes..really great. A lot of things done...lot of new areas touched and developed...but all of them were at professional level. Personal matters were generally the last thing on my mind last year.


Well, not any more. I have started a number of activities to take my personal aspects up a few notches this year. May be, I will write about them here sometime later.


Goals for this space:
1.One post a month: That's one of the easiest goals I have set for 2010...atleast it looks like that now. Let's see. At 12 posts per month, by the time this year closes, I would have performed better than the 10 posts for 2009. Let's leave it at this and we will evaluate this goal's validity in Dec 2010 :) 


2.Write for myself: This may sound clichéd but that's how I feel about it. I should be capturing a lot of conversations with myself here that should be available for me any time I wish to.

Dumbledore: "I use the Pensieve. One simply siphons the excess thoughts from one's mind, pours them into the basin, and examines them at one's leisure. It becomes easier to spot patterns and links, you understand, when they are in this form."

Harry: "You mean... that stuff's your thoughts?"

Dumbledore: "Certainly."

    -Albus Dumbledore to Harry Potter

At first I thought I should use a digital diary...even downloaded a few and tried them...then I thout this blog is as good as my personal diary...anyway no body visits here..so I have the assured privacy! Also in a blog, unlike a password protected digital diary in my password protected laptop, I have to honour what I commit here.

Even if anyone reads my posts by mistake, here goes the the mandatory piece..

Statutory Warning: You are at your own risk of exposure to my monologues (read boring stuff) and whatever you may feel after reading my posts is not intentional but do leave your thoughts...Welcome, my friend!

3. Write about new topics: This is to widen my horizon which is part of another bigger goal. I should be writing new topics that weren't touched here earlier.


4.Energizers: This blog should act as an energiser for me at low tides. This was done earlier but so erratically. Now, I will make this space my personal library for energisers.


5. Books: Last year I set a goal of reading 40 books but didn't even complete 10. I even had an excel sheet with identified list of books but could hardly complete 10 books throughout the year. Unbelievable performance...I should be flogged for this, seriously.

This must be the lowest number in the last decade. Symptom of ignoring self. Must change this year. I am committing the goal of reading 30 books here. Conservative but decided on a play-it-safe strategy here. 30 is definitely better than 10, right? Also, I want to set it lower than last year's target to make it look achievable. I will also be writing about the books with a tracker count of the progress in the year. It would be fun to track this count of books one reads for life, isn't it?  Found a good site - goodreads.com, have to explore there further.


Well, that should be enough for starters. 
Due for review next month!