Are You Ready To Set Your New Year’s Goals?
How is one supposed to get ready to set their New Year’s goals? Why must one get ready? First of all, we all know from experience that achieving our New Year’s goals and resolutions can be very challenging. Read here to learn more about why New Year’s goals and resolutions are difficult to achieve.
But, before you begin setting your goals and intentions for the New Year, you might really benefit by first taking stock of what you have achieved this year. What accomplishments are you proud of? What needs recognition? Have you acknowledged all the smaller efforts and steps forward that you have taken? If you haven’t taken this step you will benefit from completing a personal improvement review.
Completing a personal improvement review is a rewarding way to gain closure on 2011 and it is an excellent way to help increase your confidence for the New Year. It is also a symbolic way of acknowledging that your accomplishments are important because you are actively investing in yourself and taking the time to grow and develop.
Before you start your New Year’s Resolutions for 2012, be sure to follow my goal setting program which includes seven steps that will drastically increase your chances of not only setting New Year’s goals but also ensuring that you actually follow through with your goals.
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Complete the online goal setting program for 2012!
Step 1: Explore what goals and intentions are the most meaningful to you at this point in time. What you wanted to achieve or create last year might not be as important to you this year. Don’t skip this step of brainstroming your goals.
If you haven’t already started an evolving achievement binder and learned how to manage your evolving acheivements binder you’ll want to read further on this because it’s an excellent way to organize your goals for any time of the year.
Step 2: Once you’ve brainstormed your goals take the necessary time to prioritize which goals are the most important and aligned with your current values.
Step 3: Writing your goals down formally and placing them somewhere you can be reminded of them every is important. This will help to keep you focused.
Step 4: Get clear on the benefits that you will reap as a result of achieving these goals. How will your life be better off as a result of moving closer to this accomplishment?
Step 5: Increase your negative motivation and gain clarity on the negative consequencs that you will experience if you don’t work towards achieving your goals.
Step 6: Identify what your limiting beliefs are so that you change them into more constructive ways of thinking.
Step 7: Gain clarity on what behaviours and habits are holding you back so that you can find alternative behaviours that will help propel you into further action with your goals.
Health Motivation
Are you looking to increase your overall health motivation? A big part of health motivation involves having a good variety of foods in your diet that you really enjoy. If you’re looking for how to be creative with your diet and the foods you eat, you’ll really enjoy Julie’s website – Peanut Butter Fingers
You’ll be inspired by her frequent blog posts that include many great pictures of everything that she eats as well. She is a walking example of how a women stays on top of all her life goals! You’ll see! Visit Peanut Butter Fingers
Cheers! I’d love to hear about your favourite health motivation websites as well!
Allison
Managing your Evolving Achievements Binder
Have you captured all your goals, dreams and ideas for your future on paper? Are they organized in a meaningful way to you? If you haven’t heard of this idea, you’ll want to read my blog post on the Evolving Achievements Binder. Hopefully your many goals have been captured on paper, and you’ve been inspired to take further action.
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After you’ve put together your Evolving Achievements Binder, you’ll still need to manage it. There are a few good reasons why you should regularly review, dust off, clean, and re-organize your evolving achievements binder (aside from the fact that it’s fun to do!).
When I was reviewing my binder just the other day, I came across my health and fitness section, and noticed that it had literally exploded in size. I had inserted so many different resources, and pictures of all the new weight lifting exercises that I had been doing at the gym. I actually ended up taking out the majority of that section, and I started a whole new resource binder for my health and fitness. Now, my binder is much more organized again. I can easily go through and read what my future goals are with respect to my health and wellness, without getting distracted. I also realized, that I’ve probably accumulated more than enough information to write a small e-book on this topic! Perhaps I’ll have to start another blog just on that topic alone.
When I was reviewing all my goals, it was interesting because I noticed myself saying out aloud, “Oh I’ve already done that”, and “I just started doing that!”. Unless I reviewed my goals, I wouldn’t have realized all that I had accomplished. Also, I had never made those goals my key priority, and had never consciously set aside time to work on those goals. I think that demonstrates the power of simply writing goals down. Somehow, the act of writing down our goals must communicate with our subconscious mind, and as a result we automatically begin taking action, and attracting those people and resources into our lives to make things happen.
I also realized the importance of translating all our goals into habits. Daily, twice a week, weekly or even biweekly habits. If you can’t make something a habit, then rarely would those goals ever turn into reality. The areas where I felt I was having the most progress, e.g., career and fitness goals, were the areas where I had done significant planning around how to turn some of my action steps into habits. For instance, I set the goal of spending two times per week writing in my book, and in doing so, I almost doubled the length of it.
Each time you read about your dreams, you’ll notice that you will read with a new sense of clarity, because your ideas have had more time to crystallize. Or, you might have had more time to think about developing actual plans to take further actions steps.
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I’ve also discovered a few little ‘goals’ and ideas that aren’t even important to me at all. At first, when I jotted them down, they seemed like good ideas, but in retrospect I’ve learned that they are meaningless. So you’ll also benefit as you discover your authentic self, and more of your values. Likewise, I also read over a few goal categories that made me feel really scattered and overwhelmed. Clearly, those goals need further development. So, I’ve planned a time to go back and prioritize or rank all of those goals. Over time our big ideas evolve into something more serious. What we value will come into the forefront of our mind, and that which isn’t so important to us, will fade out a bit.
Finally, regularly reviewing your Evolving Achievements Binder will constantly remind you of what is most important, and it will help you stay on track. Just think about the people that don’t write their goals down at all. If you seriously review your goals each month, you are going to speed up the entire learning process around who you are, what you want to achieve, and how you’re going to do it. More importantly, you’re going to be unstoppable because you’ll constantly find yourself in action!
Cheers,
Allison
Invest in Yourself!
“Invest in myself? Are you kidding me? I have no time!” I know I’ve said this many times over and over to myself. Everyone is busy taking care of multiple responsibilities, all at once. Sometimes it feels like we are running on a wheel or treadmill of life, constantly going, with no time to invest in ourselves.
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And now, here I am telling you that you should invest in yourself. I had an interesting, little epiphany the other day, when I was feeling frustrated about the lack of time that I had, and how I had used that as an excuse to continue writing my new book, Evolving Achievements.
Then, what popped into my head, was the 10% rule on investments. The golden rule is to always pay yourself first. Pay yourself first, pay yourself first….the message never grows old. And the rule works. Almost everyone is able to save some amount of their pay cheque, even if only a few bucks. So, I thought, could we not apply this rule to our personal goals, even if we are really busy women?
I don’t think we really have a choice. I once read in one of Bob Proctor’s books, that time is never the real barrier behind achieving our goals. The real issue is our failure to prioritize our time effectively.
So, how can we all use our time more effectively? A mentor recently reminded me that the most successful people became that way because they learned to break down their large goals into small tasks that could be done on a daily or weekly basis, in such a way that those tasks never interfered with the rest of their life.
I can remember several years ago, I was in Edmonton at one of Dan Poynter’s book publishing seminars. There was a lady in her early 40′s who was so determined to complete her book that she woke up at 4am every morning before work, and wrote until 5:30am. Then, she went to the gym to exercise before heading off to work. I remember asking her why she didn’t pursue her workouts in the evening (assuming 4am was too early), and she said that early in the morning was the only ‘quiet’ time where she could fully concentrate. How’s that for self-discipline, and more importantly, finding a habit
So, how will you find time in your schedule to work on the things that are most important to you? Will it be early in the morning? Do you have time between running errands, or while waiting to meet a friend or colleague? What could you do on your lunch break? One thing that has worked wonders for me, is simply making to-do lists all the time, and thinking or planning ahead about what I will do in my next block of time, whenever that might be. A lot of time gets wasted simply thinking about what to do next.
Another realization that I continually experience over and over again, is how it is a necessity to invest in yourself first. I can remember one weekend, having a major work assignment to prepare for, having two social obligations to attend, an entire house to clean, and a few appointments that I couldn’t miss. I was feeling a bit stressed out, and then I reminded myself about the importance of taking care of myself. So, each morning, I was up an hour earlier to workout, and then, I came home and gave myself time to write – something that gives me absolute joy, and fills up my ‘buckets’. That joy, that energy and vitality carried itself all the way through to all the other tasks that I needed to finish that weekend.
The point then, is to think of investing in yourself, as just that, – an investment. Don’t look at the achievement of your personal goals and habits as a chore, because those activities are what fill you up with expansive, positive energy, and drive you to maintain an excellent attitude and vigour in everything that you do.
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Here’s an excellent exercise that I’d suggest. Pull out a sheet of loose leaf paper. Make a list of all the small time blocks that could possibly be used to work on some of your important goals. Identify some times when you could truly get yourself into the habit of working on the pursuits that are most meaningful to you. This will ensure that your achievements continue to evolve as opposed to desolve.
Cheers to your success! that works.
Personal Improvement Review
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What is it?
What is a personal improvement review? A personal improvement review involves you reflecting back on your past and outlining in detail every single achievement, improvement, or positive effort that you’ve put forth in your life. I personally recommend doing this every three months, or possibly every six months. The more often you do this, the greater your chances for accelerating your life success and satisfaction.
I’ve focused on the word “improvement” instead of “achievement” because achievements consist of many improvements and efforts that build upon each other over time. If I asked you to only outline your achievements, you might feel a bit disheartened because you didn’t accomplish everything that you’d hope for.
The truth however, is that you’ve probably taken many deliberate efforts and steps to turn your dreams into reality. Although you might not see the final tangible outcome (if there is one), you must train yourself to all of the small or large amounts of time, energy, resources and efforts that you’ve invested into your goals. Those investments deserve to be noticed, celebrated or at least acknowledged in a positive manner.
Don’t simply wait for the grand finale when your entire goal is realized. This could take many days, weeks, months, years, or even a lifetime. It’s best to congratulate yourself on the mini-steps you’ve taken, and all the learning lessons that occurred along the way. After all, with each learning lesson, you’ve moved yourself closer toward your goals.
Who is it for?
Who is the personal improvement review for? Anybody who is completely serious about enhancing their personal growth, continuously improving their life satisfaction, along with achieving their life goals should be reflecting back on their personal improvements and achievements.
Benefits
What are the benefits to doing to a personal improvement review?
- Enhanced self-esteem. When you see how far you’ve come and how much you have invested in yourself, you can’t help but feel good about who you are. You’re essentially telling yourself that you’re worth it!
- Realization of how intelligent you are. When you reflect back and understand just how much you’ve learned, you feel a sense of relief that you haven’t been remaining stagnant, and that you are actually moving forward, and closer to your goals.
- Increased locus of control – you begin to see the correlation between your personal actions and the outcomes in your life, even if those outcomes are simply learning lessons
- Gives you a reason to ‘celebrate’ or to do something positive for yourself
- Increased motivation to stay persistent in working toward your goals. Therefore, you are less likely to feel discouraged, and give up because you don’t see the final outcome that you are looking for
- Learn from your successes what is actually working, so that you can continue doing more of it. Learn from your mistakes so that you can identify what areas of your life require sharpening.
If you never reflect back on your life performance, how will you know what areas of your life are improving, and, if you are improving, how will you get a better sense of how you’ve improved? You might even find patterns of strengths or weaknesses developing. For example, I knew a woman who made such great strides in her career when she opened up her own business, but as a result her health suffered drastically. Within a year, she had gained over 25 pounds as a result of stress eating. She also had high blood pressure, and was diagnosed with diabetes. Even though her bank account had grown in dollars, her weight had grown, and her health suffered. Imagine if she had sat down, and done a review of her performance in each area of her life? Perhaps she could have nabbed this weakness as soon as she gained five or ten pounds, compared to the 25 pounds.
Likewise, I once had a client who was achieving many of his travel and leisure goals, but it happened all at the expense of his savings, and he wasn’t ok with this. He was able to nip this one quickly, when he sat down and took the time to actually reflect on the negative consequences to his net worth.
Often times, we know what is working and what isn’t. We know what is going well, and what isn’t. However, unless we sit down to strategically think about all the different areas of our lives, and how our actions or lack of actions are affecting us, nothing truly sinks into our brains, and we don’t do anything about it. If you haven’t already, you’ll want to get into the habit of consistently evaluating how far you’ve come with your goals in each area of your life. Overtime, you can’t help but get better. Wherever attention goes, energy flows, and then the results will start showing up.
How?
I recommend pulling out your evolving achievements binder, and starting a new section just for your personal improvement reviews. Start one page to list all your improvements and achievements, and start another page where you’ll list what didn’t go so well. It is beneficial to examine all areas of your life, including health/wellness, finances, career, leisure, personal growth, relationships and spirituality.
Some people prefer to evaluate their success by the area of their life, or some simply brainstorm all their achievements on the same page. If you choose this latter approach, you may even wish to go back and the organize your achievements by life area. You could even formalize the process further, by typing it up on your computer and printing if off. Organize yourself however you’d like. As long as you do the exercise.
Where?
Complete your personal improvement review preferrably in an inspiring, uplifting, or comfortable environment, one that also gives you enough privacy so that you can fully concentrate on reflecting back. One of my friends James, checked himself into a nice hotel in his home city, so that he could celebrate the entire process of not only documenting his improvements and accomplishments, but also so that he could celebrate the fact that he was even doing the actual exercise! To this day, James is one of the most successful people that I know, – both financially and in terms of pursuing what he is most passionate about. I’ve seen him make dramatic improvements and changes in his life, all for the better.
Good luck getting started!
Cheers!
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Evolving Achievements Binder
How to Organize Your Brainstormed Ideas and Goals
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Do you need a place to capture all your big dreams, ideas and lofty goals? I’m going to share with you my secret on how I organize my many goals and dreams.
I’ve decided to keep track of every whimsical goal that I’ve pondered.
For years, I wasted so much time and money on buying pretty journals and notebooks for writing down my goals. I’d end up not only writing down my goals, but I’d use those notebooks as a journal as well. So, my goals and other thoughts all became mixed up with no real functional order. Also, it became difficult to add in new goals, and delete my old irrelevant goals. It was also challenging to put all my various goals in different categories.
Of course, when those notebooks became full, I ended up throwing many of them out. After all, I had no need to keep all my journal entries, and I figured that I would just re-write out all my goals in the next notebook that I would buy.
You can avoid all these problems by putting together an ‘Evolving Achievements’ Binder . This is an easy to use, practical filing system that allows you to easily maintain, update and delete goals as you see fit. You will devote this entire binder to your goals. Think of it as a landing place for your ideas, desires and wants. The key is to capture those ideas so that you can evaluate them at a later time. I’ve decided to keep track of every whimsical goal that I’ve pondered.
Here’s what you’ll need:
1) A nice 3-ring binder
2) Lined paper to go inside your binder
3) Tabs or dividers
It’s so simple and easy to maintain, and since I’ve converted to this Evolving Achievement binder, I’ve never gone back to using journals for the purposes of organizing my goals.
Also, having the dividers or tabs will allow you to organize your goals by various categories that make sense to you. Whenever you think of a new idea, you simply find the tab/divider that corresponds to that type of goal, and add it in.
From time to time, because we are busy woman, there will be phases in our lives when we get side-tracked and abandon some of our goals. When you have your goals all organized in one spot, it prevents you from misplacing and forgetting or about your goals. It might sound a bit ludicrous to suggest that someone would forget about their goals, but it happens all time.
For instance, think of your to-do lists that you have. Imagine that you’ve written some of your errands on a few sheets of loose paper around the house, while some are in your journal, and others are in your calendar. When the list of errands is scattered all over the place you are bound to misplace, and thus forget about what you need to get done. You easily lose your focus.
It’s really no different with our goals. We need to keep them all organized in one place, – a place where we can be sure to find them! This way, when a period of time goes by and you haven’t attended to your goals, you’ll be able to pick up right where you last left off, without any delays.
The ‘Evolving Achievement’ binder will also allow you to insert your plans for how you’ll achieve your goals. Whenever you come across new resources, services, or other ideas about how you can achieve your goals, you’ll insert them in the same section along with those goals. As we’ll discuss later, once you have brainstormed and set your goals, you’ll need to devise a general plan or at least outline some steps that will allow you start taking actions toward your goals.
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Just as people forget about their goals or get sidetracked, the same thing happens even after people have committed to their goals. They start taking action, and then they run into a few barriers. Once they get stuck, confused, or frustrated, they lose their focus, and forget about their plan and abandon it. When your plan is written down, you’ll never forget what your next steps are.
If you have multiple plans written down, you will always have something to return to, along with many other ideas for what you might try next to achieve your goals. Having a binder dedicated to achieving your goals will increase your confidence that you can indeed achieve those goals.
For me, the binder is like a concentrated source of energy that fuels my goals and propels me to take more and more actions toward those goals. This happens because it provides a person with a clarified focus. Everything you ever wanted to be, do or achieve, will be contained within this binder. The ideas have already been turned into something concrete and tangible. This helps you perceive and think about your goals more seriously just because you can see them! Then, the mere act of reading your goals over and over again, imprints them deeper and deeper into your subconscious mind.
So, what are you waiting for? Start your own ‘Evolving Achievements’ Binder today! Don’t loose sight of what is important to you.
Definition Goal Setting
The word “goal” is only one piece of language that describes goal oriented behaviour. The definition goal setting, is not clear cut in my books. That is, there are many different ways to think about what goals are. I’m afraid though, that for a lot of people, the term has negative connotations. People think of deadlines, time committments, and last but not least – the idea that failure is possible. So, to help move away from this typical way of thinking about goals, I want to provide several pieces of language, or other ways of thinking about goal setting. There is obviously more than one definition. Goals can also be thought of as:
Do any of these words or ways of thinking speak to you? If so, then I want you to think about one of these particular words as your definition. Goal setting is most effective when you have a way of understanding what works for you!
These goal setting software programs have become popular because they are helping people to organize their personal goals. I myself, was contemplating on buying some goal-setting software until I encountered many great free goal setting software programs. However, I’ve realized there are pros and cons to using these tools as opposed to writing your goals down on paper. 
