Goal setting with no limitations

I take holidays as a good opportunity to read, digest and think about life and work in general and this week I am in Spain thinking about goals and goal setting. It´s occurred to me that I don´t talk about goals and goal setting enough. I don´t really know why.

Certainly, it´s one of the most powerful personal and career development exercises I have ever done. I remember the first time I ever came across goal setting, years and years ago.  It was through a book by Anthony Robbins called Unlimited Power. A friend of mine recommended it and said that reading it would increase my sales results.

Yeah, righto!

But I like reading and I like books so I picked it up anyway. Wow! Did I enjoy it or what! The book is a great read and a must read if you´ve never read anything like that before.

Anyway, I duly followed the instructions and set myself goals for numerous areas of my life, many of them "plainly absurd" based on where I was at that point in my life and career. I shared them with a few of my friends at the time and they were, to put it mildly, unsupportive. I don´t think they meant to be that way but hey, that´s where they were in their lives. I guess that they were just trying to protect me from heartache and disappointment!

I got a lot from Anthony Robbins at that point in my life but I guess that, like many things, I got sidetracked by life and stopped working on my goals. Probably because life was so busy and my career was going from strength to strength. With the work I was doing studying sales and communications I just forgot to review my goals. A move of house later and my goals were buried somewhere under a whole host of paperwork and books.

About 3 years later I was sorting through some papers and I came across my goals. I read through them laughing at some of the preposterous things that I had written. Had I been ambitious or what! But as I read them, I started to laugh on the other side of my face.

Many of the goals I had set had already been achieved or even surpassed!

Stop! What?

I had already achieved many of them.

Checking through my goals I looked more closely. All of the "achievable" ones had been achieved, all of the "stretch" ones had been achieved and over half of the "unachievable" ones had been achieved. And that´s when I have "forgotten" about them!

What could I have achieved if I had been really focused on them?

From that point on I was a convert to goals and goal setting. Goal setting works and I was up for it and motivated to achieve everything I wanted in my life. I promptly set goals for my life, career and work and then set off to achieve them.

In my travels as a sales author, motivational speaker and seminar leader I often ask about goals and goal setting. It constantly amazes me how many people just do not set goals or set such wishy washy ones that they stand no chance of even knowing if they have been achieved let alone of achieving them. Perhaps this is fear of failure. Maybe it is cynicism. Perhaps it is because they associate goals with "school" and other people, thus thinking goals are about going for things that we don´t really want. In the UK I even think some of it is avoidance of being too greedy or capitalistic!

Get over it already!

Goal setting does not have to be about others. It does not have to be about money. It does not have to be about business. And it does not have to be about "things".

Goal setting is about you and what you want. It can be as monetary as cold hard cash and as holistic as peace. The key is that you set goals that mean something to you, that you set them well and that you go for them.
Failure to set goals will ultimately mean failure to achieve what you want out of life and failure to achieve what you want means unhappiness.

Do you have kids? Then you should be setting goals. Not goals that they need to be a doctor or a banker or play for some football team or another. That´s about you and that´s your stuff. Maybe that´s why you avoid goals :-). No, goal setting for your kids should be about quality time together, love and support.

So here I was, sitting by the beach with the sun coming down and I was thinking about goal setting. I had just finished Jack Canfield´s Success Priniciples and I had decided to review my goals.

And then it hit me.

It wasn´t anything I had read. The Success Principles is good, it´s well written and I would certainly recommend it but there was nothing I had not read of, implemented previously or taught myself in there.

No, it was one of those moments when you realise that you´ve accepted something as a truth which really, really isn´t.

I believe that when you want to achieve something you should find someone else who has already done incredibly well in this area and model it. Use Other People´s Experience (OPE) to get you where you want. This has always been my approach and it´s one which works very well.

But when you accept someone else´s model you also accept it´s limitations too and as I sat on the beach I realised that what had been the "right" goal for me, now held limitations. Because I had achieved most of the goal, one specific fundamental that had been empowering was now serving as a limitation. When taking a model of someone incredibly successful you sometimes don´t pull out the limitations and I´d missed the fact that this might become one in the future.

Now I know this and I teach it so this wasn´t anything new either but it just shows the importance of constantly reviewing your goals and ensuring that there are no limitation creeping in.

I´m not going to tell you what it was because it doesn´t really matter (unless you´re a speaker!) but it´s something that is carped around in coaching, training and speaking circles as a truism. And it´s not. Not even slightly.
So I am very excited. Excited about what this means for me and for the business and of course for you. Because this frees me up to really focus on an area of the business that I had been "avoiding" because of "common" wisdom.

So what´s my message?

Well obviously to set goals. To make them mean something to you and to review them regularly. Find someone you can model and model them well but be careful to pull out any limitations in their model because although they may not hold you back to start with they may become limitations in the future.

Whatever barriers or limitations they are; whether on time, possible billings, size of sale, what clients will pay, how much you can earn, how you can do it, how much time you can have off; you don´t have to buy it.

Why not share with me and our community the most exciting goal that you ever set and achieved. Click on comments now.