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?

Comments

  1. FireStarters

    Jodi this is my favorite article of the many great one’s from you I have read! Dr Covey is one of my all-time favorites. I read his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People when it was first published years ago. I’m one of the masses who have been impacted by it in such a positive way as you stated in your article. I subscribe to each of these habits including what you wrote about. Thanks for making my day even better with your inspiring guidance and reminder of Dr Covey.

  2. Daniel Vasquez

    Wow! I’ve been using SMART goals but I’m looking forward to using this new method for the larger goals. Thanks Jodi.

  3. WOW – you’ve hit on so many amazing points and highlights here, Jodi; from habits to envisioning to focus, and all wrapped up with a powerful question about changing your perspective.

    I definitely experienced this when I was working in Corporate: I’d been waiting for a promotion for 3.5 YEARS – very patiently. I was ‘given’ the promotion, and then, it was taken away. I was crushed at the time – bitter, remorseful, sad… Today, it’s probably a situation that I can say has changed my life. That single event pushed me over the edge, and ultimately was what empowered me to leave my job and try to start my own business. I didn’t look at it that way then, but I definitely look back on it as a defining moment for me.

    Thanks for this post!

  4. Maritza Parra

    Jodi, such a great article! I love doing things by “beginning with the end in mind” which you outline perfectly and ADD to it, using the SMART technique… love the audio visualization you’re offering! And, I actually have had so many times that a perpective change has made all the difference… one is after I got divorced and looked back, realizing that it was the single reason I discovered how to market my horse business effectively online… it shifted me from sorrow to WOW – I’m so grateful that it all happened now…

  5. John Ramstead

    Jodi, thank you for posting this! I am going to forward this on to my clients. Mindset is one of these things that will bring us the same results as the past or catapult us to new heights. Tying emotions (our values) to accomplishing a goal is the true key to actually accomplishing what we have set out to do.

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