Developing Your Power to Set and Achieve Goals

 

Developing Your Power to Set and Achieve Goals

 

Only about 10% of people ever really set goals and less than half of them actually use a process that will maximize the probability of success.  Of course, not setting a goal is in itself setting a goal for a fragmentary existence.  Nearly thirty years ago Paul J. Meyer? formulated a five step process designed to achieve the full impact of the creativity of belief and the combination of intellect and emotion--thought and feeling.

Step 1--Focus Your Thinking.  In order to gain the full intellectual impact, write down your goals, i.e., your motives, as specifically as you can.  Define what you want to achieve as clearly as possible.  While you can set goals for any area of your life using this process, you need now to focus only on the career goals that will motivate you to move toward that place in which you can make the greatest contribution, derive the greatest satisfaction on a daily basis, and from these two achieve a proper reward.

Step 2--Develop a Plan with a Deadline.  Achieving any worthwhile objective requires planning.  Setting a goal without developing a plan for its attainment is foolhardy.  Of equal importance is setting a deadline providing a timeframe within which the action will be executed.  You need to identify the obstacles for achievement and formulate strategies to overcome each.  Setting a reasonable deadline may be very difficult for you since you may not have a good basis for knowing what to expect.  Don't set too short a deadline, lest you miss it and become discouraged.  And don't set too long a deadline, lest you tend to procrastinate.  One way is to use a benchmark such as for every increment of $10,000 you seek, you should allow one month.  However, that's just a benchmark and with commitment to your goal, maintaining a high consciousness, and working the methods effectively you can expect to beat it.  It's not unusual for people to set a goal that's so far out of their experience and one for which they state too short a deadline that there is no logic to their plan.  People who do such things are playing games.  They don't expect the system to work--and of course for them it won't.  While perhaps not completely linear, there is a trade-off between the qualitative factors in the goal, position, title, location, reward, etc. and the time that will be required to achieve it.  Depending on your circumstances, if you set a career goal with many high quality variables, it may take longer to achieve it, but it will be worth the wait.

Step 3--Create a Burning Desire.  If you are like most people you may find that part of your difficulty is that you don't really have a burning desire to do anything unless you are already strongly oriented to achieve a specific goal.  If you do have a burning desire to do something, even, if it's outside the realm of your basic experience and training, don't deny the possibility.  True desire comes from within--indeed, the term means (de)from the (sire) father.  Perhaps you're an engineer who has always really wanted to teach high school math and science.  Maybe your parents pushed you into engineering despite your wishes.  If you are dissatisfied with engineering or you're on the street because the market for engineers is shrinking and you lacked zeal in your work, it's time for you to go within and listen.  Ask for guidance and you'll get it.  If you don't have a desire it can be created by using the power tools of affirmation and visualization that will provide the emotional reinforcement (feeling) dimension that will be needed to create true belief.  We'll discuss the power tools shortly.

In order to identify those areas of career activity that will create true desire requires honest self-examination.  You may want to spend extended time in thought and meditation to determine the best direction for your talents.  However, since you are at a crossroads in your life, don't deny any area of true interest that you may have otherwise been suppressing up to now.  Of course, there are tests of aptitude and interest that may help you get a handle on the situation.

We live in a society that places emphasis on three E's--Education, Experience, and Environment.  However, these are sterile conditions and they have little to do with our true potential unless we have carefully followed a career path that blends our intellectual and emotional talents.  We should place our emphasis on three I's--Imagination, Intuition, and Inspiration.  The development of our creative powers will have far more to do to bring us peace and true success than the three E's, i.e., intellect alone.

Step 4--Develop Supreme Confidence.  You may have heard it said that with enough confidence you can accomplish any task.  And this is true for all intents and purposes.  People fail most often because their negative unconscious programming so often causes them to doubt their own ability to succeed at a given task.  Therefore, if you are experiencing such a circumstance in your own life, the first thing you must to is to change the programming.  Otherwise you will not likely be able to attain the goals you seek no matter how strongly you may desire them.  Don't berate yourself for failures that stem from unconscious conditioning.  Understand the nature of the conditioning, that you can observe from successive failures and frustrations, accept the responsibility for changing your consciousness, them embark upon a plan to do so.

Two powerful tools that you can employ to change your consciousness and to reprogram your unconscious tapes are affirmation and visualization.  Affirmations are statements of truth about yourself or your circumstances as you wish them to be.  They are best stated as having already occurred since, according to Maltz, "The unconscious cannot tell the difference between a fact and a repeated statement of expected outcomes."  They are most powerful when stated in the form of the verb to be, e.g., "I am," "I have," etc. in active voice.  When a statement like "I am in my true place doing work I enjoy for a proper reward" is internalized with conviction, the unconscious mind has no choice but to move you in the direction of your goal.  Remember, you are affirming all the time.  Anything you say or think to yourself, about yourself with strong feeling or strong expectation, is an affirmation--either negative or positive.  The results will follow proportionately.

A word of caution about affirmations.  Don't expect to use affirmations to help yourself create belief in a goal that is totally unreasonable.  If you are a fifty year old unemployed engineer with a B.S. degree, there is little logic for you to set a goal to become a brain surgeon.  While not impossible, the achievement of such a goal is highly inconsistent with your unconscious mind's ability to accept such an idea and create the necessary belief required to propel you in the stated direction.  The result will be unconscious rejection and conscious confusion which will result in great frustration and your tendency to reject the process as ineffective.  But there is nothing ineffective about the process, only the way in which you are using it.  Set goals, and formulate their corresponding affirmations, that are within the realm of your capabilities so that true belief can be internalized and the necessary power generated.

Visualization is the creation of the inner picture of the successful outcomes we desire.  We can visualize either with our eyes open or closed.  Essentially, we are visualizing all the time, either the disaster we expect or the triumph we expect.  Our true expectation is the goal that we must achieve.  To be most effective, visualization is a technique that you should employ daily, maybe several times daily to focus on the picture, in mind, that you want to bring into manifestation.  It is best accomplished at the same time or times each day and in a period of quiet that may be called meditation, contemplation, or prayer.  During this period your goal is to create the "mental equivalent" of the desired outcome and to attempt to think and feel about it as you would if it had already come to pass.  A part of this process is to achieve a consciousness of joy and thankfulness--exactly as you will when the condition is achieved.

If you are willing to commit to a rigorous routine of using the tools of affirmation and visualization you will fulfill your requirement to maintain the positive attitude or high consciousness that you must develop and maintain in order to attain your goal.  All you are doing is controlling your thoughts and feelings to create belief in the desired outcome and you are building your self-confidence in the process.  By doing so you will become committed to  the final, action step.

Step 5--Work with Total Commitment.  No matter how well you plan and no matter how hard you work to develop your inner power, nothing can replace the persistence to execute the strategies in your plan.  Most people go through life using excuses for their failures such as, I'm not smart enough, I'm not good enough, I'm not well educated enough.  But those are all cop-outs that we give power to.  If you don't succeed it is because you haven't developed a success consciousness and committed yourself to your goal.  If you don't have a degree, but you've worked in a position where most peers possess a degree, the lack of a degree is only a factor in a job search if you allow it to become one.  If you are middle-aged and you are competing with younger people, your age is a factor only if you allow it to become one.  After all, nothing is as valuable as your ability to do whatever you do.  Your job is to use the process of motives, attitudes, and methods to sell yourself as a product successfully.

The willingness to do what has to be done will do more to determine the success of your campaign than any other factor.  Commitment is not an abstract concept, it is the very essence of achieving any worthwhile objective.  There is no substitute for commitment. no matter how intrinsically worthy your goal may be.

 

 

 

Madeleine York

York Career Development, Inc.

Houston-Austin

866-502-8258 office

512-565-8506 mobile

www.yorkinc.com

myork@yorkinc.com