How to Make a Plan to Achieve Your Goals
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The car is packed and you're ready to go, your first ever cross-country trip. From the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco to the Statue of Liberty in New York City, you're going to see it all. Your first planned stop is Reno, Nevada for a little gambling and National Automobile Museum. A little while into the trip on U.S. 101 you realize you need to check the map because you've forgotten what highway takes you to Nevada but panic realizing the map never made it off the kitchen table at home. You are on a 3000 mile journey across the country without your map and notes on how to get there. Itching for a little adventure you say "Oh well" because you figure as long as you are heading East you are good. You take a right, put in a cd for some traveling music and keep on going. Unfortunately, you never reach your destination but Fresno was nice, but not so much in Los Angeles. Too many of us treat goal setting the same way. We dream about where we want to go, but we don't have a map to get there. What is a map? In essence, the written word. What is the difference between a dream and a goal? Once again, the written word. Goal setting however is more than simply scribbling down some ideas on a piece of paper. Our goals need to be complete and focused, much like a road map, and that is the purpose behind the rest of this article. If you follow the 7 goal setting steps I've outlined in this article you will be well on your way to becoming an expert in building the road maps to your goals and the guide for your life.
I remember when I started taking baseball umpiring more seriously. I began to set my sites on the NCAA Division 1 level. Why? I knew there was no way I could get onto the road to the major leagues, so the next best thing was the highest college level. Pretty cool, right. Wrong. Sure, when I was talking to people about my umpiring goals it sounded pretty good, and many people were quite impressed. Fortunately I began to see through my own charade. I have been involved in youth sports for a long time. I've coached, I've been the President of leagues, I've been a treasurer and I'm currently an Assistant State Commissioner for Cal Ripken Baseball. Youth sports is where I belong, it is where my heart belongs, not on some college diamond where the only thing at stake is a high draft spot. When setting goals it is very important to remember that your goals must be consistent with your values.
For example, you can't buy a $750,000 house if your income goal is only $50,000 per year. This is called non-integrated thinking and will sabotage all of the hard work you put into your goals. Non-integrated thinking can also hamper your everyday thoughts as well. We should continually strive to eliminate contradictory ideas from our thinking. |
See More of Goal Girl Annie 3. Develop goals in the 6 areas of life:
Family and Home Financial and Career
Spiritual and Ethical Physical and Health
Social and Cultural Mental and Educational
Setting goals in each area of life will ensure a more balanced life as you begin to examine and change the fundamentals of everyday living. Setting goals in each area of life also helps in eliminating the non-integrated thinking we talked about in the 2nd step.
See More of Goal Girl Lindsey 4. Write your goal in the positive instead of the negative.
Work for what you want, not for what you want to leave behind. Part of the reason why we write down and examine our goals is to create a set of instructions for our subconscious mind to carry out. Your subconscious mind is a very efficient tool, it can not determine right from wrong and it does not judge. It's only function is to carry out its instructions. The more positive instructions you give it, the more positive results you will get.
Thinking positively in everyday life will also help in your growth as a human being. Don't limit it to goal setting.
See More of Goal Girl Maranda 5. Write your goal out in complete detail.
Instead of writing "A new home," write "A 4,000 square foot contemporary with 4 bedrooms and 3 baths and a view of the mountain on 20 acres of land.
Once again we are giving the subconscious mind a detailed set of instructions to work on. The more information you give it, the more clear the final outcome becomes. The more precise the outcome, the more efficient the subconscious mind can become.
Can you close your eyes and visualize the home I described above? Walk around the house. Stand on the porch off the master bedroom and see the fog lifting off the mountain. Look down at the garden full of tomatoes, green beans and cucumbers. And off to the right is the other garden full of a mums, carnations and roses. Can you see it? So can your subconscious mind.
See More of Goal Girl Molly 6. By all means, make sure your goal is high enough.
Shoot for the moon, if you miss you'll still be in the stars. Earlier I talked about my umpiring goals and how making it to the top level of college umpiring did not mix with my values. Some of you might be saying that I'm not setting my goals high enough. Not so. I still have very high goals for my umpiring career at the youth level. My ultimate goal is to be chosen to umpire a Babe Ruth World Series and to do so as a crew chief. If I never make it, everything I do to reach that goal will make me a better umpire and a better person. If I make it, but don't go as a crew chief, then I am still among the top youth umpires in the nation. Shoot for the moon!
See More of Goal Girl Taylor 7. This is the most important, write down your goals.
Writing down your goals creates the roadmap to your success. Although just the act of writing them down can set the process in motion, it is also extremely important to review your goals frequently. Remember, the more focused you are on your goals the more likely you are to accomplish them.
Sometimes we realize we have to revise a goal as circumstances and other goals change, much like I did with my umpiring. If you need to change a goal do not consider it a failure, consider it a victory as you had the insight to realize something was different.
So your goals are written down.
Now what?
First of all, unless someone is critical to helping you achieve your goal(s), do not freely share your goals with others. The negative attitude from friends, family and neighbors can drag you down quickly. It's very important that your self-talk (the thoughts in your head) are positive.
Reviewing your goals daily is a crucial part of your success and must become part of your routine. Each morning when you wake up read your list of goals that are written in the positive. Visualize the completed goal, see the new home, smell the leather seats in your new car, feel the cold hard cash in your hands. Then each night, right before you go to bed, repeat the process. This process will start both your subconscious and conscious mind on working towards the goal. This will also begin to replace any of the negative self-talk you may have and replace it with positive self-talk.
Every time you make a decision during the day, ask yourself this question, "Does it take me closer to, or further from my goal." If the answer is "closer to," then you've made the right decision. If the answer is "further from," well, you know what to do.
So take this as todays dating tip or relationship advice from the Men's Guide to Women, if you follow this process everyday you will be on your way to achieving unlimited success in every aspect of your life.
One Guy
in Mens Guide to Being a Better Man, Mens Guide How To Guides
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Reader Comments (1)
"They are saying “That’s not the man I want. I want a strong confident man. I want a man that is going to run the sex and romance in our lives. I want a man that is going to make me feel safe, take care of me even if I have a career, even if I am smart, I want a good strong man.”
Men feel like there is something wrong with them for being men because the messages we have gotten for so many years from parents, teachers, magazine articles, and the idiocy on television make us feel like there is something wrong with us for being men."
ok deep breath: first of all, how can you say men are sooo simple, wanting only food sex and sleep and in the same proverbial breath say men need others to be dependent on them in order to feel any sense of self worth?? whaaaooooooo. that so does not fall into the category of food, sex and sleep. and all the sports metaphors about fulfillings goals and being succesful and confident really don't either. does it really seem like the zenith of confidence to need to reduce a woman into a state of incompleteness, essentially, in order to make yourself indespensible? don't ya'll want to be chosen? wanted? for all the talk about wanting confident, intelligent women who aren't clingy or crazy, that sounds like exactly what you want. someone who NEEDS you to care for her. pretty pathetic.
perhaps i can shed some light onto this phenomenon: with disdain, wayne here has written, "in the last few years men have become 'feminized.'" the very fact that "emasculated" is essentially equated here to slave mentality, rife with ressentiment, betrays the conflation of these identifying properties. "feminine," as it is being used here in an antiquated fashion, prescribing to an already debunked, ultra-freudian mode of thinking. "femininity" here is the absece of the phallus, or "emasculation," a term i don't think anyone could argue carries the connotation of dehumanization, humiliation, and shame. ok, so if the state of femininity is humiliating and shameful for men, what on earth makes you think that women would not feel doubly (trebly, quadruply, exponentially) more angry, resentful, shamed and dehumanized knowing that within the patriarchal system of meaning-making having a vagina automatically places you in a state of humiliation. in this paradigm, men must reduce women to a subhuman level by definition just so they can feel good about themselves.
this is no big fucking mystery. it's the law of the father, the oedipus story, the history of the subjugation of the female sex into the feminine gender.
as a feminist, i am naturally skeptical about all biological and evolutionary explanations of gendered behavior, as it is normally used to justify women's subaltern position (or brown people, or immigrants, or anything different from the unmarked while heteronormative male). but since you guys seem to fancy yourselves animals in need of only the bare necessities, i'll phrase this in terms i hope you can understand:
we get it. you'll never really know that you've passed on your genes and succeeded at the game of life unless you are absolutely sure it's your baby. women don't have this problem. what's the easiest way for the (perhaps) physically larger male to ensure his reproductive success? why, keep "his woman" locked in a tower, of course. sound familiar? it happens all over the fucking world. try deserving it, for a change. try respecting your partner as an individual.