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Creating Your Goals: Stop Making Excuses!

Given the importance to your life of establishing goals, you would think that libraries and schoolrooms would be full of goal-setting rule books. They are not, and unfortunately that is one of the biggest handicaps in our educational system.

The concept of goals when it comes to achieving success is also one that is often either overlooked or overworked in personal and business success programs. Yet even among those who write about or teach goal-setting techniques, few understand the necessary strategies and systematic approach required for maximum effectiveness.

There is little question that goal setting works, at least among successful or soon-to-be-successful people. And once you learn how to power up your goals with the necessary strategies, you can create a level of accomplishment and control over your life that at this point may be beyond your imagination. In fact, you can become so good at generating goals that it will be necessary for you to be careful what you plan or ask for because you will most assuredly experience it.

Goal setting is as important to the successful operation of your life as eating or sleeping. The only difference is that your life won't end if you don't set goals. However, without goals directing your life, you will miss out on much of your potential for experiencing the positive emotions of excitement, aliveness, enthusiasm, joy, and even happiness. Without goals, you can end up living from problem to problem instead of from opportunity to opportunity. Setting goals will steer you toward opportunities while enabling you to overcome the obstacles and break through the barriers necessary for their accomplishment. Running your life without goals is about as effective as attempting to drive your car from the passenger's seat. To be effective in the goal-setting process, you must go far beyond the usual ideas of how to set goals.

Forget Excuses And Start Making Choices!

“I don't have time to set goals. I'm too busy.”
“I don't set goals so I won't be disappointed.”
“I'm really not sure what I'm after.”
“I set goals but they just don't seem to happen.”

You have the right to make excuses, but excuses won't produce results. In reality you have one of two choices: you can design and direct your future by setting goals and working to achieve them, or by default you lose the opportunity to create and control your own life. In the latter case, you allow not only your future but also your present to be controlled by other people, events, and daily pressures, all of which produce plenty of stress and frustration but not a feeling of accomplishment.

But when you set goals, they become your navigational tools, guiding you toward a predictable future or destination despite the sometimes not-so-predictable events that may occur along the way. And as you begin to define your life in terms of goals, you automatically increase your level of excitement, aliveness, enthusiasm, self-confidence, and self- motivation.