Have your own plan or fit into someone else’s…

FACT NO 1 - Nearly all outcomes, outside of nature (which of course includes human beings anyway) transpire because of the actions or behaviours of human beings. Economic circumstances, political events, social change, industrial, commercial and scientific advancements and even much illness and disease come about because of the actions (positive or negative) of people.

Whether you are setting personal or professional goals the outcomes that you will experience will be influenced directly either by yours or someone else’s actions or lack of them.

FACT NO 2 - Setting effective goals means thinking and planning. Most people simply cannot get themselves to spend even a modest amount of time thinking about what they want, what they have to do to get it, how they will have to feel, and what they will have to learn. In other words the old adage is still as true today as it has ever been:

People don’t plan to fail, they fail to plan

FACT NO 3 - Even the best planners fail to take action on their plans. The only thing that makes anything happen is action. Talk is easy, as is daydreaming, wishing and hoping. Ultimately we only get from life what we have earned the right to experience. In other words, we all get everything that we deserve most of the time when it comes to getting what we want because getting what we want comes from:

• Deciding and defining what we want

• Planning how to achieve it

• Feeling how we need to feel to get there

• Taking the right consistent action

• Reviewing our actions against the outcomes that we experience

• Regrouping and changing the action where necessary, and

• Maintaining the right outcomes by sustaining our efforts

‘Motivate your mind and you multiply your success’

• David Green –

Over the last twenty years or so much has been written about goal setting. From a business perspective goals tend to be viewed as logical, tangible and practical objectives that are generally geared towards increasing turnover and/or profitability.

Goals are actually nothing more that a destination. They may be the final destination on a long journey of achievement or a series of stopping points along the road but either way they are destinations nonetheless.

The best way to achieve anything is to know what it is that we want to achieve. All else leaves us prey to the ebb and flow of the tide of life and the constant winds of change. I discovered this for myself many years ago when one of my university lecturers told us of an experiment that had been done at Yale University some 21 years earlier. You probably know the ‘story’.

One hundred students were asked if they had specific, written goals with a clear plan for achieving them; 97% had none but 3% did have tangible, written and planned goals. In 1973 researchers revisited the surviving members of that class of 1953 and they discovered something very interesting. The 3% of students who had, clear, written goals had amounted more financial wealth that the other 97% put together.

Regardless of the financial aspect of story, the research did seem to affirm the value and importance of goal setting. You can imagine my disappointment when, some years later, I tried to track down the original research from that Yale university study and found that none existed. It would seem that the whole story is some urban myth and no one quite knows where it started. Regardless, the principle says something important about goal setting and we do know independently that some 95% of the population do not set goals whilst approximately 5% do.

What is poignant about this statistic is that the 95% work for the 5%! Clearly there is something very telling about the statistic or the 5% who do set goals. What is it? Both the urban myth and the statistics reveal something very important about cause and effect and how that natural law impacts our lives:

If you don’t have your own plan for your life (your business or career) then you will almost certainly end up fitting into someone else’s plan for their life!

Many people have difficulty in setting goals and some never even think about them. For many people their goals are unclear and unspecific, which makes them more like wishes.

AND as I always say…

The only difference between dreams and goals is that one stays in the mind while the other one comes about as a direct result of taking action.

• David Green -

Of course, not everyone is ambitious and there is nothing wrong with that but we all have some hopes and dreams about the future. Without them there would be no point in getting up in the morning. What many people do not realise is that human beings are natural goal achievers. Within each one of us lays a natural mechanism for achieving. Our brain is genetically programmed to take action based upon our survival and it constantly achieves its goal by regulating our blood pressure, heart rate, breathing and repairing damage to the body.

These actions are pre-programmed into the brain genetically. However if you take a look around you what do you see? Across the world billions of people are achieving goals like getting married, having children, owning homes, going on holiday and keeping their job. Too much has been written about commercial achievement and entrepreneurial success, and yet little is published about the success of the masses and the amazing strength of will and determination that it takes to maintain security and provide for a family in this ever changing and increasingly insecure world.

Achievement takes many forms and success can mean many different things. The world now sees achievement in financial, business, career or material terms and yet happiness, fulfilment and personal satisfaction often come from somewhere else; from family, health, hobbies, sport, and education and learning goals. Indeed many people today have the desire to get out of the ‘rat race’ and create a more natural and less stressed life style.

Whatever you want from life there is a way to get it. No matter how modest or challenging your goal there is a natural, logical, doable and achievable process by which it can be achieved. NLP provides some valuable psychological and practical tools for doing this in the form of its Well-Formed Outcomes Model. This skill set provides you with the what, the why, the how, the where and the when of achieving goals. It is a step-by-step guide to creating any outcome that you desire and achieving it.

NLP is the science of excellence that provides an amazing range of sensory-based tools that can help almost anyone to transform their thinking and their way of perceiving themselves and the world around them. You can find out more and develop some of those skills at http://NLP4dummies.com. You will find a range of opportunities including FREE mini-courses and NLP resources that work in the real world.

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