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What are Your Goals in Life?

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What are Your Goals in LifeWhat are your Goals in life? It took me some trials and errors (and a few years!) before I reached a level of crisp clarity I was comfortable with to lead my life rather than letting life happen to me. To help you save time and efforts, I share how I define goals in life, relentlessly commit to goals and track progress towards those goals.

Don’t read further if you are not serious or have discipline to commit to something and enjoy the time back!

What are your Goals in Life?

 I needed a few things to help me achieve goals in my life:
  1. Make sure I was going to work towards the right things, which are “true” to me and my values,
  2. Make sure I had the necessary relentless focus on meeting those goals,
  3. With the focus on those goals, make sure I was completing them in the most efficient manner.

After some years of trial and errors, here is what helped me achieve this:

 

#1 Your Mission, Values and Goals

One of Stephen Covey‘s contribution with the 7 habits of Highly Effective People is a great place to start and explore defining your Mission (your purpose), your Values and Goals in each of your roles (at work, at home, as a parent, etc.). This is the most important step, ensuring your day-to-day actions are aligned to your life’s mission.
This is a popular book, quickly read by many but rarely actioned by most! If you have read it before, go back to it and do your homework now before proceeding with the next step to relentlessly pursue your goals.

 

#2 Your relentless pursuit of those Goals

10min Mental Toughness for High Performance to achieve your Career and Life Goals

With your Mission, Values and Goals defined, the next step is the relentless pursuit of those goals. I didn’t do this well until I worked using Coach Wooden & Jason Selk’s methods with his book 10 Minutes Mental Toughness. (He also has a Business Executive version but I didn’t find it as clear and usable).

This book gave me the method and practices to ensure I would deliver on those goals I had defined and it simply changed my life.This isn’t a book to read but to get you to turn its content to actions and getting started towards your goals.

If you are serious about leading your life to achieve what you want, I highly recommend this method, regardless of your industry. Buy a few copies for the people you care about.

 

#3 Getting Goals Done

 With the Product Goals and Process Goals defined with Jason’s methods described in his book, you are then ready to deliver on these (that means committing to do them, track progress and review daily). I found the Getting Things Done method (GTD) helps greatly to achieve this.
My “GTD system” is aligned to those 3 levels: Your Mission, Your Product Goals and your Process Goals:
  • My Mission (purpose), Values and Goals (Product Goals here) are tracked in ToDoMatrix for Blackberry so it is always with me, and I can use it for my 10min Mental Toughness workout (visualisation of success) each day and end of day reviews.
  • My Process Goals are tracked in details in my GTD system (mostly relying on Outlook with Netcentrics GTD add-in and while on the move on my Blackberry with ToDoMatrix). Find more details to implement your GTD system 

 

So are you part of those 20% of the population who has goals and 10% who take the time to write them down? How you define and track your Goals? What are you goals? Share them below in the comments!

Resources:
  • Jason Selk’s 10 Minute Mental Toughness website
Filed Under: Anticipate & Build for the Future Tagged With: , , , , . Posted on 02/03/2012
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