Posted 9 months, 3 weeks ago at 1:00 am. 0 comments
How many times have you set a goal that you thought was absolutely amazing, only to stall out half way towards completion? For example, you may have decided to increase the amount of RSS subscribers to your website by 1,000 in two months, but it’s been a month and a half and you’ve only got 700 subscribers. What do you do? You don’t want to abandon your goal, but you aren’t necessarily satisfied with your current results. You know in your heart you can do better!
Situations like these are what I like to call “sticky goals“. You literally become stuck somewhere on your path towards goal completion - it’s almost like your goal needs an energy drink! In a situation where you have a sticky goal that is in desperate need of some CPR, I use a technique that’s fairly simple: I brainstorm ideas that I know could completely exceed my goal.
Brainstorm more ideas for above and beyond goal completion
Notice my choice of words - “completely exceed my goal”, “above and beyond goal completion”. The solutions you come up to complete your goals are directly proportional to the questions you ask yourself on how to complete said goals. For example, suppose you ask yourself “How can I squeeze two extra minutes in my day?” You’d tell yourself how easy of a question it is - you could leave two minutes later to work, wake up two minutes earlier, take two minutes off of your daily shower, and so on. Now suppose you ask yourself “How can I add fifteen minutes in my day?” It’s a tricker question, but I’m sure you could think of some great solutions. Finally, imagine asking yourself “How could I add an hour in my day?” Whoops! Now you’re pushing your mental capacity. An hour is a lot of time - it just doesn’t come from nowhere. You’ll have to do some out-of-the-box thinking. What activities could you cut corners and free up some extra time with? What can you completely cut out of your daily schedule?
Goal brainstorming falls into the same category. Too often a person will have a goal where they need to do out-of-the-box thinking, but they ask themselves simple questions. They want to add an hour to their day, but they instead ask themselves “How can I squeeze two extra minutes in my mornings?” These people will get solutions, of course, but the answers won’t lead to the desired outcome they were hoping for. You see small thinking all of the time with bloggers. They want to know “How can I get 1,000 visitors to my website?” but they’ll ask themselves “How can I get 10 new visitors to see my product?” Ask small questions, get small answers. Ask big questions, get big answers.
You can use this type of thinking in a variety of settings:
- You want to increase something by X amount (subscribers, sales)
- You want to make a product go above and beyond expectations (designing a website)
- You want to present something that people will be floored with (a presentation)
Don’t ask yourself how to merely complete the goal - ask yourself what you could do to make the goal an absolute, outright success if you had to complete your goal at all costs. Sometimes the best answers are created by flamboyant thinking. Part of the reason your goal is stalling out might very well be because you aren’t thinking big enough!
Posted 9 months, 3 weeks ago at 9:30 am. 2 comments
“Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often.” - Mark Twain
Action, action, action! Personal development skills all revolve around that one word - action. Whether it be installing a new habit, starting up a new lifestyle, or even taking the guts to quit your unsatisfactory job, if you don’t take action towards your goals, those goals are worthless. Hopes and dreams take you only so far; you have to add in the last few steps to make them a reality.
Speaking your mind and actions are something that go hand and hand with one another. Often times, people are able to dish out their opinions and advice on a multitude of subjects… sometimes when the person doesn’t even know anything about the subject. Of course, this leads to major incongruence. Apparently we speak our mind, but rarely take our own advice.
In late December / early January, lots of person development bloggers wrote on the subject of “New Years resolutions”. Everything from why your resolutions will not fail to keeping up with your resolutions was covered. Consequently, I wonder how many people’s resolutions failed because they didn’t take action on what they truly desire; I also wonder how many of those same personal development blogger’s New Years resolutions failed themselves because they didn’t take their own advice.
Advice is great. This website has a multitude of advice for you, from motivational pieces to pieces that I hope can change your life in some great way. But this website - and all other websites similiar to it - can only do so much. It can’t push you to take action on your plans. This website can motivate, can inform, can change, and can mold you into a brand new personal, capable of amazing things. But motivation, being informed, and changing and molding yourself is only part of the equation. Action is the missing piece.
You can have the most perfect, detailed plans on how to get exactly what you want, but without action, those plans are better used as birdcage lining. You can be the most motivational speaker out there, but if you refuse to take action to share your talent with the world, what good is your gift? Action is the key to unlocking your destiny.
And it doesn’t even have to be the right action to begin with! Lots of people start out on one path, turn around, then start on a brand new path when it didn’t work out the way they expected. That’s fine! Too often we get in this phase of action paralysis, when we decide we can’t move on because we have to “explore all of our options and decide what to do”. That’s not proactive. That’s not living. That’s excusing yourself from making real progress towards your dreams. I’ll be the first one to say planning is essential in any endeavor. You need to know exactly what you want and a fuzzy idea of how to get there. But to use planning as an excuse to stay stagnant is for losers. (You’re not a loser, are you? I hope not!) Just pick a path and go down it. It doesn’t matter if it’s exactly what you want or not. Your life is going to go by anyway - you better make the most out of every day. Find out later that’s the wrong path for you? Ditch it and start a new one. You have nothing to lose!
Nothing to lose at all. What’s the absolute worst that can happen? You go down the wrong path and end up back where you started? You go down another wrong path and end up worse off than you started? So what! Just pick a different route and go down that! The worst thing of all is no action, because if you don’t take action, you’re no better off than where you are now.
I know a lot of you who read this article are personal development fans too. But be honest with yourself. A year from now - when you’ve all but forgotten your New Years resolutions for 2008 - are you going to be staring at a bunch of empty goals and plans from the past year, neatly typed up and printed out? I hope not.
Take some action today. Decide on a goal, get a basic plan written up on how to achieve it, and move towards it! And whatever you do, don’t give up. Don’t ever stop taking that action to get what you want.