No matter if you’re a business owner, work for a large company, a stay at home mom, etc. everyone needs to have goals and asportations they are chasing. After all, if you never have anything to look forward to, life can become pretty mundane pretty quickly…and I believe that God created each and every one of us to fulfill a specific purpose. Only God knows the desires of your heart, that is, until you share them with the world.
If you’re anything like me, I can quickly come up with a to-do list of things that I know I need to accomplish. But, sometimes, the hard part is actually knowing where to start.
Here are my top 5 recommendations for how to start setting BIG goals for yourself and more importantly, how to keep those goals in front of you:
- Everything good starts with a LIST
- Pick the goals that stretch you the most
- Start to envision what your life will be like when you achieve the goals before you
- Keep the vision in front of you
- Get your words into alignment
Everything good starts with a LIST
When it comes to goal-settings and actually coming up with the things that you want to achieve, I think it’s best to start with a list. Almost like a brain dump of all the ideas, projects, or plans you may have. Let your mind run a little wild and capture everything that you come up with.
When making your list, you may even realize things that you desire that you haven’t yet given much thought to. This can be a great exercise to get in touch with yourself.
Now, I would say to try to keep the list somewhat prioritized as it can be easy to go down a rabbit hole of thoughts that bring up tasks you need to complete rather than goals that you want to strive for and achieve. Stay focused!
Pick goals that stretch you the most
When you complete your list of newfound goals and ideas, the fun has just begun. This is where it gets important to begin to prioritize the goals you have and determine which you want to focus on.
One of the most daunting tasks will be to choose the goals you’re immediately going to put into works. I encourage you, choose the goals that scare you the most. That’s right! Believe it or not, the best things worth having are usually the things that scare the crap out of us. It goes back to the saying “nothing worth having comes easy”, and from experience, I can totally agree.
Start to envision what your life will be like when you accomplish the goals before you
One of the most practical things that I like to do when I’ve settled on a few goals is to picture the impact that it would have on our life when we get the job done. Now, that being said, not every goal that you set is going to be life changing…BUT, usually your desire to want to achieve something is rooted on the basis that some area of your life will likely improve after having completed said goal.
When you can start to imagine the reward after having completed your goals, it is often very motivating and can inspire you to want to push yourself past your previous limits of expectation. This is where the magic happens.
Keep the Vision in front of you
Once your goals are set, and you’re starting to get excited about the idea of completing them…it’s going to be absolutely vital to keep the goals you’ve set in front of you. What exactly does that mean? Well, as the great Napoleon Hill once said, “What the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve”.
You’ve got to keep your desires in the forefront of your daily activity or else it’s possible to start to slip on the progression of attaining the goal, or to actually begin to lose interest in the goal simply because your expectation has gotten low. Keeping expectation high is one of the key ingredients to developing the discipline and fortitude needed to accomplish big goals.
A few ways that we like to approach this are by putting up photos of our goals on our refrigerator, taping up words or sayings around our house where we will see them throughout the day, creating a vision board of the things you’d like to accomplish, changing our backgrounds on our phone lock screens to relate to our goals, etc. These may seem like silly ideas, but we can tell you firsthand that it works. Its the “out of sight, out of mind” principle. You don’t want that to work negatively against you…so find a few ways to allow it to work FOR you.
Get your words into Alignment
A great friend and mentor of mine once told me “I’ll stand behind you and your goals in complete agreement, so long as you do not speak a single word of negativity or disbelief when it comes to that goal”. That was a HUGE statement for me to process at the time. I never grew up thinking about the implication of the words that I let slip out of my mouth, but words are extremely powerful and they play a huge role into the fruition (or lack there of) our goals. The Bible goes as far to say that “life and death are in the power of the tongue”, and I don’t know about you, but I sure want my words to bring forth life!
So…we’ve really got to watch what we say. Usually what we say is a direct result of what we are dwelling on. What are you thinking about? Is your mind in the creative stage of “How can I get the job done?”, “What can I do with the resources that I have?”, “Who can I be a blessing to?”? Or, is it in a negative spiral of “I can’t do this”, “Who do I think I am setting a goal like this?”, “I’m not worthy of this”, etc.? If it’s the latter, I would surely start taking a harsh look in the mirror and decide if it’s worth it. A saying that we often keep before us is “I’d rather prosper”. When we get a little down or discouraged and it’s tempting to be negative, we just say “I’d rather prosper” and it helps us put things into better perspective.
So, you’ve now made a list, narrowed down your goals, picked what stretches you most, pictured the result of your accomplishments, put your goals before you and made sure your words are aligned with them. Now what? Now, you get to work! Faith is an ACTION word, and without you doing the things that you can control (the natural), God cannot meet you halfway and do the SUPER. So, get going. Tackle each day as new and stay the course. The rewards will be great, but even better, the self-satisfaction that you’ll find in completing the goals you set for yourself will be so sweet.
The Abundant life 