Although planning does not sound as attractive as "living day by day getting carried away by the present moment", the truth is that it works much better. And just as you would not think of going abroad on vacation without preparing anything or buying a plane ticket without knowing the destination, you should not face this new year either without being clear about what you want.
Planning is important, and planning your goals correctly can make the difference between success and failure.
The following 8 keys to define your objectives.
1. Statement in Positive
Our brain tends to focus on what we think.
For example, when we want to buy a new car, we tend to look at the cars we like on the street. Or a pre-mom who seems to be more pregnant on the street.
It has a biological explanation (The Reticular Activation System is the part of your brain that regulates attention among other things, it is like a radar that alerts you to what is external that matches your thoughts).
You can also see it as a personal development issue. As Harv Eker says, "That which you focus on expands."
The point is that we are attracted to what occupies our thoughts. Therefore, instead of thinking about what we don't want, it is more useful to think about what we want and set our goals for this year as a result:
I want to stop being lazy → I want to get fit
I want to stop being fat → I want to be at my ideal weight
I want to stop being poor → I want to increase my income
I want to stop doing lazy in my spare time → I want to start a blog that gives results
2. Goal Under Your Control
Our goal has to depend on ourselves, and not on others.
When we define goals and plans for this year that depend on others, we are putting out of our control whether they are met or not met.
For example if I say "I'm going to take a girlfriend" (or boyfriend). In part it may depend on me, but if the candidate or the candidate that I have in mind is not for the work of going out with me, no matter how hard I insist, it will not happen.
However, what can be in our hands is to meet people, because that will increase our chances of finding a partner.
In the same way people do not have to read your blog, or buy your product. The number of visits to your blog or the number of sales made are results. It's okay to measure and control them, and try to improve them, but they aren't your goals. Your goals would be your publications and your marketing and sales campaigns.
"I'm going to partner" → "I'm going out to meet people"
“I will lift 90 kilos in bench press” → “I will go to the gym regularly”
“I will reach 1,000 subscribers on the blog” → “I will write regularly on the blog”
3. Adjusted Specification
An ambiguous objective will give us ambiguous results. If our goal is as generic as "going more to the gym" or "eating less junk food", we will not be sure if we are getting it or not.
If we work on concrete goals, we will obtain concrete results.
I'm going to the gym more → I'm going to the gym 3 days a week
I will write more on the blog → I will write at least once a week on the blog
I will learn to play the guitar → I will play the guitar half an hour every afternoon
An external observer should be able to verify without a doubt if we have achieved our goal or if it is not yet complete.
It is diffuse to know if you have gone “more” to the gym or if you have written “more” in the blog. It is easier to check if you have really gone 3 times in a given week, or if this week you have skipped posting on the blog.
Allow yourself flexibility: even if you adjust your goal, don't be too hard on yourself, because if you don't, the moment you fail you may feel like throwing in the towel.
It is very useful to define it with the word "almost". For example: "I go to the gym 3 days almost every week." If some week I can't go 3 days and I go only 1 or 2, I don't get too upset. Of course, it is not worth using it as an excuse: that the "almost" does not become "almost never"
4. Appropriate Size
If you have never set foot in a gym and the first week you want to go 3 hours every day to get a complete training table and some strenuous collective class, possibly when you arrive on Saturday you will have stitches even in the facebook profile. And possibly the next week you will have many ballots so that you do not feel like anything at all to return to such Chinese torture.
Overly ambitious projects are easy to abandon: we have to cover things that we see that are within our reach. Likewise, projects that are too easy do not involve us leaving our Comfort Zone, they do not give us tangible progress.
Our goal has to be challenging but achievable.
5. Motivating Objective
If you set your goal, say, learn to play the pink ukulele, and it is not a thing that calls you especially, as soon as you have something more urgent or important to do, the ukulele practice is over.
Set a lot of goals just to have many things to do, if you really are not focused on achieving something that we are really passionate about, it will only serve to have a long string of abandoned goals along the way.
The question we ask ourselves here is:
Why do I want this goal?
We have to ask ourselves what we are going to achieve with this objective, and if what we are going to achieve really excites us.
If you really love the ukulele, or any other instrument, and playing it you enjoy like a cat next to a radiator, then, this goal is for you!
Beware of challenging yourself to prove yourself: many people sometimes set goals simply to show ourselves that we can achieve them. Not because we like the result but to show us that we are worth it.
In my experience this is a mistake, since the effort invested is enormous simply to be able to demonstrate something to ourselves and to raise our self-esteem. This happens because some people have a self-esteem conditioned to results (if things go well we get happy, but if they go wrong we get very frustrated with ourselves).
I have been working on self-esteem issues for many years and in my experience it is much more useful to love yourself unconditionally (love you the same if things go well than if they go wrong) and set goals that will bring you closer to the results you really want, because you Passionate about the subject or because they will improve your life qualitatively.
6. Resources Needed
Resources are what we need to achieve our goal.
We distinguish two types of resources:
External resources are those that are outside of us. Basically we can summarize them in: time, money and energy. If you want to go to the gym you will have to look for the hole in your agenda, and also pay the gym fee. These resources are (to some extent) interchangeable: you can, for example, do all the tasks of your blog yourself, with a cost of time and energy, or outsource certain tasks, with an economic cost.
Internal resources are the ones that interest us most from the point of view of personal development. They are the internal states that you will have to strengthen to achieve your goals. For example, if I want to write in my blog every week, I will have to strengthen my discipline to find a place to write. If I want to find a partner, I will have to increase my sociability (in addition to the ability to socialize, I mean the desire to meet people and connect with other people).
7. Positive Intention
Your current situation brings you a benefit.
In what you have now, there is something that you think is good for you. If not, if it were 100% harmful, you would not.
For example, you smoke to relax. Or you eat unhealthy food because it is very tasty.
Even in the largest of the self-sabotages there is a positive intention behind. For example, do not believe that you deserve success.
To change your situation you have to find a way to maintain that positive intention.
If we set ourselves an objective that takes away something that is positive for us, we will surely abandon that objective, or some secondary damage will appear.
For example, if we smoke to relax, and stop smoking, we can get anxious. With which we will smoke again, or we will eat compulsively to calm that anxiety, and we will gain weight.
If I want to undertake, and right now I am working for someone else, there are things that I don't like, but at the end of the month I charge. This is a positive effect for me of the current situation.
If I start to undertake and in the first months I see that I do not enter anything, I can either quickly leave the enterprise and go back to look for work for someone else, or become too obsessed with income, for example trying to make aggressive sales that may bother my clients .
Take a moment to think what is good about the current situation and how you can keep it once you launch for your goal.
For example, to calm the anxiety of quitting tobacco you can resort to nicotine gum, or even better mental techniques such as meditation or smoking hypnosis.
Before embarking on entrepreneurship you can either create a comfortable economic mattress, or start with a project parallel to your current situation, so that not entering money at the beginning does not take away your sleep.
8. Ecological Check
Our life is not a set of isolated elements, but a complete system in which the different elements interact with each other.
It is important to take into account how the objective (both pursuing it and achieving the final results) will affect the whole of our life.
A friend of mine who went up at work told me that many days they put meetings at 7 pm, it is what you have to be boss!
In the same way if I go to the gym for two hours several days a week, I will surely notice that lack of time: those days I will have much less time to devote to other things.
And if I start a diet and the people I live with do not, I will surely have to cook for myself something different from what the rest eat, this may involve additional work!
I sometimes think that when I'm hyper-famous with my blog, I'll have to go incognito in the street in case fans harass me.
Joking aside, the question we would ask ourselves would be: to pursue this objective and obtain the final results, how will it affect my life? How will it affect my environment, my family or the people around me?
Once we have clear all the previous points, we will have a well-defined and planned objective, and we can get to work.
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