Goal-Setting: Are Your Goals BIG Enough?

"Why everything you've ever heard about goal-setting is backwards ..."

Are written goals even important? You better believe it.

Most of you have heard about the study which demonstrated that graduating college seniors who kept a written set of goals were exponentially more financially successful 10 years down the road than their peers without a list.

Writing down your goals is important.

Extremely important.

But there’s a lot more that goes into effective goal-setting than scribbling a few half-cocked ideas down on paper and forgetting about them.

Conventional wisdom suggests that you should set “reasonable” goals for yourself. Goals that you think you can successfully accomplish, and can accomplish in a “reasonable” amount of time.

Remember the Bill Murray movie “What About Bob?”, where Bill’s character Bob is wracked with anxiety and depression, and has a new psychiatrist who gives him a book entitled “Baby Steps”?

This book advises the reader to set small, extremely easy-to-achieve goals. Goals like “walking out the door”, or “taking the elevator downstairs”, or “taking out the trash”.

So Bill Murray’s character goes through his day talking to himself, mumbling to himself things like “baby steps down the hall”, or “baby steps across the street”, a process which he finds magically cures him of his condition.

If you haven’t seen the movie, go rent it ASAP. It’s hilarious!

It’s an extreme example of this kind of short-term, “reasonable” goal-setting, I know. But you get the picture.

If you ask the usual “authorities” about goal-setting, they will give you similar advice. Well, guess what … it's backwards.

If you follow this advice, you are setting yourself up to under-achieve for the rest of your life!

So many people fall short of their potential in life, because they set goals for themselves which are “reasonable”.

A goal, a true goal, should be something aggressive. Something ambitious. Something grandiose. Something that you’re not certain whether you can accomplish or not.

It’s the steps you take towards achieving that goal, the series of tasks that you set yourself, that should be reasonable to achieve within a reasonable amount of time. But not the goal itself ...

The goal itself needs to be BIG.

For example: If you’re a salesperson, don’t set a goal of doing $10,000 more business next year. Set a goal of being the #1 salesperson within your company (better yet, your industry!) and then chart out the steps you need to take to achieve that goal.

Another example: If you’re overweight, don’t set a goal of losing 10 pounds this month. Ask yourself what you really want. What you would look like if there were no limits to what you could achieve.

Free your mind!

Once you have the answer, chart out a rational series of steps towards how you would achieve the kind of weight loss and muscle gain that you would need to achieve that goal.

There’s something magical about BIG goals. They have the power to excite, invigorate, and motivate us in a way that smaller, hum-drum, reasonable goals can’t.

It’s that energy, that momentum that they provide which will help carry you through the more mundane, reasonable steps that you need to take in order to get what you truly want.

Don’t sell yourself short.

Aim high.

And while you're at it, check out my HARDCORE Stress Management™ course ... it will make achieving your goals easier than ever before!