A goal is dream with a deadline!
I read that on a recent chinese cookie and it was so appropriate I’m going to use it to start this post.
You worked hard getting your list of goals together and for some reason it just appears to be overwhelming. Well, stop selling yourself short!
For now suspend your mental judgment. Trust me on this.
Look over your list and start by sorting the items into what you think are in line with who you are as a person and make sure that you take into account your physical ability, health, and so on.
What you are looking for is congruence – as Tony Robbins says. When you have congruence you have a greater success rate than if you don’t and it is easy to verify this.
For instance, if one of your goals is to scale Mt Everest and your health is plagued with asthma, you may have to change that to visiting Mt Everest as opposed to scaling to the peak. What this will do is create a sense of possibility rather of futility.
Don’t cross out many of your goals because you don’t have resources, either. What this means is that you shouldn’t cross out a goal that may require a lot of money when you are broke and don’t see any prospects of an income in the near future. All this means is that you haven’t earning the right to the money, just yet.
Once you have worked on your goals, and there is a lot more to it than what I’ve just covered, it is time to start on your journey.
First, determine the priority of the goals you’ve written down. Make sure you have a good list of goals for the following periods of time, one year, five years, ten years, twenty, twenty five and so on.
Look at the one year goal and now start working away on that.
First, take a clean sheet of paper and write down the goal, in big block letters.
Below it write down the months it will take to complete the goal. Start with a month a year from now down to today.
What day do you want to accomplish the goal? Write it down.
Working back write down what you will need to do each month to reach your goal.
For instance, one of my favorite moments was completing a marathon. The day of the marathon, all I had in mind was being able to get to the start line in time and then being able to complete just one mile at a time.
Six months before that though, I started learning about what it took to complete a marathon. I met with coaches; I run a few miles; I made sure to watch my diet; and I found like-minded runners. A month later I was running more consistently, sometimes two or three miles a day and a lot more over the weekend. I eventually run to the point where I was doing a thirteen miles on the weekend and easily fifteen to twenty miles during the week. My physical strength was raising and my endurance with it. It did require sacrifice as I wasn’t able to be watch TV when I needed to be running. The point though is that it took time to get to my goal of finishing a marathon.
Chunking is somewhat like that. It is a way to look at the end result from where you are right now and finding the simple unique steps that you can take daily to reach that goal. One step each day will definitely help you get to the goal you have in mind.
For many of us here in the US it will be difficult to set this up used as we are to the fast food society that we are. But, if you are serious about reaching your goal, that is what you must do. One step at a time and you will reach that goal.
By the way, chunking also works as far as time commitment. When you decide on a goal and start working towards attaining that goal, break down the amount of time you have during your day and decide what chunk of time will be best used for the activity. You should allow for distractions and interruptions and the best way to counter them is to have your end in mind irrespective of what happens around you. The distractions and interruptions will always be there but having your goal to redirect you back to the chunk of “stuff” you need to accomplish before the day is over will help you get closer to your goal like nothing else.
Wishing you the best.
Tags: goals, managing goals