Are You Ready to Navigate to One Year from Today?

“Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.”

-Napoleon Hill

Ahh….A New Year. It’s exciting, isn’t it, to think about all the possibilities that await you? It’s like beginning a race at the starting line…you’re eager, excited, ready to go!

But then something starts gnawing at you…an uncertainty starts to cloud your excitement as you reflect upon the past year…about goals that weren’t attained…dreams that fell apart.

If you’ve been following my previous posts, you probably know by now what did – and didn’t – work for you in 2014.

Can you achieve your goals this year? Absolutely!

Living your best life starts with changing your perceptions – and using visualization to identify exactly how you want your life to be – and what goals it will take to get there.

Change Your Habits, Change Your Life

25 years after it was first published, Steven Covey’s top-selling book, “7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” continues to help people in all walks of life tackle personal and professional issues. In fact, Amazon’s review calls Covey’s work a “manual for performing better” in personal and professional effectiveness.

He shares some of the problems he’s heard – perhaps we can all relate to this person’s feelings:

“There’s so much to do. And there’s never enough time. I feel pressured and hassled all day, every day, seven days a week. I’ve attended time management seminars and I’ve tried half a dozen different planning systems. They’ve helped some, but I still don’t feel I’m living the happy, productive, peaceful life I want to live.”

Maybe you can relate to this person’s inner feelings: “I’ve set and met my career goals and I’m having tremendous professional success. But it’s cost me my personal and family life. I don’t know my wife and children anymore. I’m not even sure I know myself and what’s really important to me. I’ve had to ask myself – is it worth it?”

Through his research, Covey discovered that our perceptions greatly affect our world. Change your perception, change your world.

Let Your Mind Envision the Outcome

We’ve all heard of SMART goals: Specific, Measureable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely. The SMART method can be very effective in helping you to outline – and ultimately achieve – many goals. But for bigger goals, different techniques need to be used.

Mark Murphy, CEO of Leadership IQ, says a person needs to feel a genuine emotional connection with a goal. His research came up with eight essential ingredients in goal setting that can lead to great success. Among them is to visualize your goal distinctly – see in your mind how tremendous it will be when accomplished.

Stephen Covey writes that you must use your imagination to envision the accomplishment of your goal. “There is a mental (first) creation, and a physical (second) creation. The physical creation follows the mental, just as a building follows a blueprint. If you don’t make a conscious effort to visualize who you are and what you want in life, then you empower other people and circumstances to shape you and your life by default.”

Covey saw firsthand how perception changes an outcome. In dealing with his son’s social and academic shortcomings, Covey and his wife examined themselves – and saw that their behaviors and attitudes shaped their son’s life. “We began to realize that if we wanted to change the situation, we first had to change ourselves. And to change ourselves effectively, we first had to change our perceptions.”

Through dedicated efforts, they began to see their son for his unique self – not what they ‘perceived” him to be. And he began to blossom.

Focus On You

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Covey suggests developing a Personal Mission Statement. Put yourself in the limelight- assert what it is that you want to do and who you want to be. Making your own mission statement will help you become the leader of your own life.

In upcoming posts, I’m going to share a simple process you can use once you’ve identified what your goals are. You’ll find out how to create an action plan that really works and what to do to avoid the stumbling blocks that get in the way of you meeting your goals.

Until then, use the audio visualization exercise and accompanying worksheet to help you clearly outline your goals for this year.

Tell us: Was there a time in your life when you changed your perspective on a situation – and saw that situation “change” as a result?