Fine tune your goals for maximum success in 2025
FINE TUNE YOUR GOALS AND ACHIEVE MORE IN 2025 THAN YOU THOUGHT POSSIBLE
Welcome to 2025! Hopefully you have surged into the new year with a strong sense of renewed purpose.
I want to offer some suggestions about how you might 'tweak' your goal setting approach, so that you can get more done.
Yes, life is not all about achieving GOALS, the journey is important, enjoying life along the way. But the journey towards clear purposes is much more enjoyable than a journey of purposeless meandering. And deep down, you know that you want to reach a level of personal fulfillment by getting certain things DONE. Right? So here are 7 tips for moving towards achieving your goals in 2025.
ALIGN YOUR GOALS PURPOSES VALUES AND IDEALS
Your Goals are a product of you at your best. Your overall Vision for your life. Your Vision consists of your Values and Ideals, your Purposes, and then your Goals. Being fully aware of these elements of your drives and motivations, and getting them into alignment, are vital aspects of your success.
We all have Values. But for many of us, those Values are not fully conscious. It is only when we sit down and work on this area that they come fully into view. And this is an important thing to do, because Values are our highest motivations.
As for Goals, we have a general idea of what they are. But the reasons behind our Goals, where our Goals are really leading us, are in need of clarification.
Clarifying your Values and your Purposes can take some time. And is one of the most valuable exercises you can ever do. You may need help with it. Most coaches are able to do this sort of work. I will write an article on this specifically in the near future. In the meantime, talk to me (free session 1-2 hours) about this, if you want more clarity.
2. DON'T JUST VISUALIZE YOUR GOALS. FULLY SENSE THEM
We all know about ‘visualizing’ our goals. Some of us have had the experience of visualizing something, and then within days or weeks, that something appears magically in our life.
To increase the likelihood of attracting what we want, we should fully ‘sense’ the achievement of the goal. Think of yourself being there, experiencing what you have achieved, and in addition to what you can see, imagine what you can feel, and what you can hear. Imagine that you are surrounded by people who are celebrating your success. Hear their applause, and hear their congratulations as they are being shouted out to you. See the stage, auditorium, press conference, or whatever the setting is when you arrive at the achievement of your Goal. Read the emails and messages that are coming in, to congratulate you. Feel the feelings of achievement, empowerment, happiness, or whatever you will feel at this time.
You may even be able to add a sense of taste or smell to this experience. If you can add these other senses, and if you can hold your sensed reality for 2 minutes or more, you have greatly increased your chances of this wanted experience becoming a reality.
3. ASSESS AND CLARIFY YOUR GOALS UNTIL YOU FEEL THE MAGNETIC PULL OF THEM.
When you go for the right goals, not only will you feel that you want to push towards them, but it will seem that the goal is also pulling you towards it. This is an unmistakable sense.
Years ago I was working with a business man, looking at his purposes and goals, but we weren’t getting far looking at his long term business plans. But when we looked at a simple travel goal that he had, to go to Tokyo for a couple of weeks towards the end of the year, as a reward for working hard during the year, he felt a powerful surge from deep within his chest, some kind of dynamic movement towards this goal. He said he felt it was like something deep within him connected to this simple goal. He had always loved Japanese culture, and it had been a dream of his for years to go there. When we oriented his plans to this simple travel goal, his sense of motivation really returned to him.
This sense of kinaesthetic connection is unmistakable, and if you feel it in relation to any of your goals, you will know you are on the right track, and you will access motivational energy that has otherwise been not available to you.
4. PLAN WAY AHEAD AND BE SURE TO GO FOR YOUR BIGGEST GOALS
Don’t just plan for one year. This won’t engage the biggest goals that you have within you. I see this happening a lot around me, amongst clients and friends. I see people crashing when they review their goals at the end of the year. But one year is really not a long amount of time. Big achievers, including the big corporations, and success stories such as Richard Branson, Bill Gates, Tiger Woods…they all work on 5 year plans.
Perhaps 5 years is too long for you, some people begin to lose sight of their goals if they seem too far away. It might be enough for you to work on a 3 year plan. Long range targets are important. Want to own your own house? Want to build a business or a company? Want to really master a subject, a musical instrument, or a martial art? You need to know that you are really going for it and that you are building something that is going to last. Try a 3 year plan. Then your 1 year plan should be looking at how you can progress towards your long term goals.
5. PROGRAM YOUR GOALS
The visualizing and 'sensing' of goals can cause things to manifest, without us even lifting a finger. Many of us have experienced this. But this is not always the case, it is not always so easy. It seems that the Universe is very watchful of your own efforts. In order to achieve goals, mostly we have to take deliberate steps towards them. This means that a plan is needed. But where people run into trouble after that is the tremendous amount of varied actions that are needed in order to make something into a reality.
If you are starting a business, you have to think about all kinds of things. What kind of businesses are currently needed? What kind of products can make money? These questions require a Marketing Program. The first couple of steps on this program may involved consulting with a marketing specialist, and getting some surveys done, or accessing some marketing information. As more becomes known about what is needed, the marketing program can be expanded.
As the person makes progress, they are going to need a Finance Program. How to borrow money, from whom, how to put a business pan together, and so on. Step by step. They will need a Legal Program. What are the legal requirements of running such a business? Where can they operate their business, and at what hours?
In order to achieve their goals, an individual might have a Career Development Program, Study Program, Exercise Program, Wealth Program, Relationships Program, and so on. By sitting and thinking through the steps of each program, an area that otherwise seemed confusing, slowly but surely begins to make sense. Programs create maps that show how to proceed towards goals.
6. BE AWARE OF THE ‘AWAY’ FROM ASPECT OF YOUR GOALS.
Goals are generally something that we move towards. However, there will always be an aspect of our goals that is in the negative, something we are wanting to move AWAY from. Coming to terms with this aspect of goals is very important. The ‘away from’ aspect of our goals is something that is often in our unconscious mind. It may be connected to some trauma we have experienced, or it may be something to do with a fear that we have.
For example the goal “I want to find my soul mate, my life partner, this year” may be partly the goal “I don’t want to be alone any longer”. If the away from goal is the stronger of the two, then according to the laws of the unconscious mind, focusing on this goal will bring about the negative result. In other words, focusing on what you are trying to escape, can actually catch you in even more of a trap. This is why many lonely people continue to be lonely. They think they are focusing on their positive goal, but in actual fact they are focusing on something that is painful. And it is the painful aspect of their imagined reality that continues to come into existence.
The same is true for money. People think they are focusing on increasing their wealth. But in actual fact, they are dreading being poor, or being in a situation even worse than the one they are in right now. People who are trying to escape the struggle of life, accidentally continue to perpetuate their struggle.
It is part of the harsh reality of this world. We get what we focus on.
The thing to do is to
(1) examine your goals, become very clear on what is motivating you. Look at the towards and away from aspects of your goals. Ask yourself, what percentage of your focus is on the positive, towards aspect of the goal, and what percentage is on the negative, away aspect of your goal.
(2) If you find that the negative aspect is much higher, you need to do some work to release the negative mental and emotional charge that has built up in the area.
You will often have formed goals to ‘escape’ something. The way our minds work, and the way the universe works, is that we become free from things not by running away from them, but by making peace with them. There are many therapies and approaches that can assist you to fully come to terms with your mental and emotional pains and conflicts. These will be discussed in forthcoming articles and in more detail on this website.
7. TRAIN YOUR BRAIN TO BE ON YOUR SIDE, NOT HOLDING YOU BACK.
Your brain is a 'servo-mechanism'. Not only does it manage the primary systems in your body that are keeping you alive, it is also trying to keep you safe. Safe and comfortable, something called ‘homeostasis’. This can set up some unnecessary conflicts within you.
You are your mind, you are the conscious being living your life and trying to accomplish things. Therefore you are constantly trying to stretch yourself out, to get into new areas of learning and experience. But your brain doesn’t want this. Anything unfamiliar, anything that seems to be too demanding, and your brain will begin to 'rein you in'. This really came home to me when I read the books “You Are Not Your Brain” and “The Chimp Paradox”.
Drs Jeffrey Schwartz and Rebecca Gladding, and Professor Steve Peters, point out in considerable detail that many of our problems in life are the result of our brain being conditioned towards something other than what we want. Sure we want to be comfortable, but we also want to achieve things. This sets up a conflict within us. It sounds strange, but it is something that everybody needs to handle.
This is why good habits and routines are so important. The brain can be changed by repetition and routine. This is why regular visualizing, along with affirmations and other brain training techniques, pave the way to success. “You are your own worst enemy”, is something we often hear in life. Well, here is the physiological reality of that statement. Your consciousness, your will, needs to train your brain to get in line with the accomplishment of your goals.
A VERY good video was recently released by behaviour and mind specialist Chase Hughes covering many of the ideas I have discussed here.
As always, get in touch with me if you want to talk about these ideas, or if you want to experience Mind Shifting, Time Line Therapy, do some work to align your Goals and Purposes and Values, or anything else.
