It’s almost 2019, and we live more cluttered lives than ever. What do we do when we wake up? We respond to emails. What do we do when we’re waiting in line? We scroll through Facebook. This time zapped by our devices means that the white space—the time that we’d otherwise reflect on who we are and why we’re here—is disappearing.
But this new year, I give you permission to make the reason you’re on this planet a priority.
In order to do that, you must set goals. No, not those New Year’s resolutions that you write on a slip of paper and keep in your junk drawer. To live life at performance level, you must prepare your dreams behind the scenes before opening night. After all, the only difference between a dream and a goal is a deadline. I’ve refined my goal-setting process to be uniquely effective, and here, I give you my five ways to ensure your dreams take center stage.
Reflect. I believe that unless you reflect on your past, you’ll be destined to repeat it. But I don’t want you to reflect on just the negative things that happened this past year in order to set new goals. I also want you to reflect on the positives—the surprise successes that tell you how to win going forward. To do so, follow the steps in my Goal Setting Workbook.
Dream. Now it’s time to have some fun. There’s a difference between goal setting and dreaming. We’re not looking into the hows and the whens yet; we’re just dreaming about the endless possibilities before you. After all, you can’t set goals until you’ve spent time dreaming. If you have no idea where you want to go, planning how to get there is useless. For prompts to write down your dreams, click here.
Set Goals. The difference between a dream and a goal is a deadline. When we set goals, we find the actionable, doable steps that we need to take in order to turn our dreams into reality. To help break this down, we’re going to do a case study together on a fictitious big dream of yours. Read the case study to learn the secret to making your dreams come true!
Take action. It’s easy to spend a lot of time planning out our goals, but if we never take action, they will never become a reality. One thing that may prevent you from taking action is time.
Life is like a hall crowded with round banquet tables, and each week you have a certain amount of time allocated to sit at each table. Each table represents different things you spend time on, and because We all have full lives, we spend them at each of these tables every week. If we want to introduce a new goal or action, we can’t just add another table because the hall is full. Instead, we must look at how much time we’re spending at each table, and decide to make room at one of them for our new goal.
Find how you can make room by using my custom workbook!
Measure your progress. If you’re preparing to sail to a distant land, it’d be nice to have a GPS on board. If you have no reference for how far you’ve gone, how far you have left to go, and whether you’re on schedule to arrive on time, you will have no motivation or direction for how you should proceed.
What do you want to have accomplished by the end of the month?
Six months?
By the end of this year?
Plan to regularly measure your progress.
You’re not going to move forward in your career, in your relationships, or in your personal development by accident. Without sails and a rutter, a boat wanders the seas, and without goals, we ourselves may never reach the shores of our dreams. Join me in setting sail and setting goals for 2018!
Want to to live your dreams in 2018? Get your FREE download of my Goal Setting Workbook here.
As a speaker and author, Curtis Zimmerman has impacted over one million people with his life-changing messages and award-winning programs. Curtis is an expert at transforming organizations by inspiring individuals to live their lives at performance level.
Want to be inspired? Check out his podcast The Next 24 Hours.