8 Steps To Achieving Any Goal… Results Not Typical
How many times have you heard this disclaimer before: “Results not typical.” Every time you watch an ad for a weight loss commercial, or a make money from home product, you will hear this all too familiar statement. So, what does it mean to be typical? The dictionary defines “typical” as: “Exhibiting the qualities, traits, or characteristics that identify a kind, class, group, or category.” So, being TYPICAL, is falling in line with what the majority does, and is not something that successful people aspire to be. If you want to be successful, you want your results to be NOT typical.
So, how do you accomplish this? If you want to be anything but typical, you have to learn how to set and achieve goals. You need to make sure you pick attainable goals and you must have a game plan to achieve those goals. 98% of the “typical” world are amazing goal setters. They sit down and write all their dreams and aspirations down and come up with wild visions of grandeur about what it will be like when they accomplish all they set out to do. But, when it comes down to the nitty gritty of the hard work necessary to actually achieve their goals, they fall flat and end up giving up before the goal is reached.
Achieving goals takes hard work, persistence and TIME. You must believe in your dream and believe in yourself. Believe in your goal, no matter how many people try to tell you how crazy you are. Now, don’t set yourself up for failure. Make sure your goals are physically possible. If you are a 50 year old with dreams and aspirations of becoming an Olympian, you might be setting yourself up for disappointment. However, at 50 years old, if you have a goal of getting your body in the best shape of your life, and becoming healthier than you’ve ever been, this is a completely attainable goal. When your fat and out of shape, it might seem impossible, but don’t let that cloud your thinking. It might take a year or two…or more to accomplish what you set out to do, but as long as you are making progress, you are not failing.
Here is the step-by-step process on how you can achieve any kind of goal:
Step 1: Dream Big and Visualize Your Outcome
You have to understand that what separates the successful people from the “typical” ones is not that they don’t dream. Both populations dream. Successful people, however, dream at a different level. They dream big. They don’t dream based on just what they see or count. They dream to the farthest corners of their vast imaginations. That’s exactly what differentiated Steve Jobs from a small computer shop owner tinkering with custom computers. He literally had a dream of changing the world, and he did it. Dream as big as you can dream within your own realm of possibilities.
You have to understand that what separates the successful people from the “typical” ones is not that they don’t dream. Both populations dream. Successful people, however, dream at a different level. They dream big. They don’t dream based on just what they see or count. They dream to the farthest corners of their vast imaginations. That’s exactly what differentiated Steve Jobs from a small computer shop owner tinkering with custom computers. He literally had a dream of changing the world, and he did it. Dream as big as you can dream within your own realm of possibilities. You need to allow your mind to step into the future and see what it feels like, tastes like, looks like to accomplish the goal you are seeking. Visualize yourself as though it has already happened. Then, you will
Step 2: Break your dream into smaller, more manageable objectives.
When your dream seems so big it feels impossible, you need to break it up into smaller parts. Don’t try to eat the whole elephant in one bite, so to speak. This is the key secret in effective goal-setting. The reality is that if you have big dream and you try to tackle it without chopping it down, chances are you will get intimidated. You will get scared. You will be tempted to think that fulfilling it is impossible because of its enormity. Going back to the example of weight loss. If you want to lose 100 pounds in a year…that may sound extremely intimidating and maybe even impossible. But, if you break that down into smaller pieces, it becomes much easier for your brain to comprehend. Losing 2-3 pounds a week doesn’t sound nearly as intimidating as losing 100 pounds.
The smaller the goals are, the easier it is for your subconscious self to believe in them. You need to remember that your subconscious self is always trying to fight you. You subconscious is always trying to lose. The default human psychology is to be a loser or to fail. By breaking down your goals into smaller parts, you you are letting your conscious (meaning, the conscious part of your brain) take over be in control. Everything will remain possible when the sub sections are broken down into smaller more manageable parts.
Step 5: Tie Subgoals Into To-do Lists This is where the rubber meets the road. Every employee in America has a to-do list. In many cases, these to-do lists are tackled every single day. After you have broken down your goals down into smaller subgoals, next is to create to-do lists based on those subgoals in such a way that these to-do lists can be divided into daily or weekly partitions. This brings us closer to the actual everyday practice. Be very clear as to the tasks you need to do. There should be no guess work, there has to be no ambiguity, and there should be no gray or shaded areas. The simpler your descriptions are of what you needs to be done, the better.
Step 6: Set A Master Time line And schedule At this point you will need to set a master time line for the entire project. There must be an absolute deadline for you to take note of to have everything achieved. Working from that, you have to come up with a schedule for each of the smaller parts—a schedule for the objectives, for the goals, the time line, the subgoals, as well as to come up with the delivery for the to-do lists. Everything is broken down into details and fitted in to a time line.
Step 7: Make Sure Your timeliness Is Realistic As mentioned earlier, there is no such thing as an impossible goal. Seriously, even sending a man to the moon may have seemed impossible in 1958. But they were able to do it in the late 60s. Why? Because they were able to set a big dream and that they followed a realistic time line. You must make sure that the time line you create is sensible enough wherein you can have time to experiment and consider totally different options or courses of actions, should the opposite result come out. So, time should be allocated for you to carefully weigh the alternatives or solutions. Having a solution that is too restrictive or inflexible might emotionally set you up for discouragement or burnout. So put some fudge or padding into your time line to make it more realistic.
Step 8: Act, Measure, Fine Tune This the most important step. Most people who fail try something only once. When it doesn’t turn out well, they tend to give up. What’s wrong with that picture? You have to remember that we are surrounded with failures. Most of the time when you take action, it’s not doesn’t work out immediately. It’s not just like stepping on the plate and then hitting a home run the first time you take a swing on the ball; that’s not how it works. It’s absolutely not the case. Always understand that while you’re trying to achieve your to-do lists, you will be taking actions at the same time You need to measure the success of your actions. Measure them accurately, and then fine tune. So that when you take another action, it will produce the desired result. As long as you keep acting ,measuring, fine tuning; and then repeat the cycle again, you develop momentum and develop a system that will eventually define success. Make no mistake, the big difference between people who are successful and losers is not because the latter are less intelligent or less talented; no. In most cases, success comes to those people who have a system and a method.