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.

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.

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

Personal Improvement Review

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!

Evolving Achievements Binder

How to Organize Your Brainstormed Ideas and Goals

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.

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.

Visualization for “Non-Visual” Women

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Visualization need not be complicated, artsy and all creative. Many people including myself find it too tedious to do the traditional imaginative exercises in our heads. We lose concentration, we fall asleep, or for some other reason it just doesn’t appeal to us. So, here are some great ideas for the logical person who still wants the benefits of visual exercises, without having to imagine pictures in one’s head.

PRACTICAL VISUALIZATION TECHNIQUES

1. Print off a nicely organized list of your goals, or action steps for a particular goal, and then put your goals in a nice picture frame! Place this frame somewhere that you will see it every single day. How’s that for a nice visual? Rather than having your goals written on some piece of paper or notebook shoved in a drawer, now you have them up on display! You can get as obsessed as you want with this technique. You might have several different frames up, each entailing a list of action steps for your various goal projects. Or, you might have several frames up, each with the big picture objectives of your various goal categories.

2. Buy a really attractive or appealing greeting card from your local store. Inside that card, write out all your goals, or again, the actions steps for a particular goal. Keep this pretty card sitting on your night table, on your desk, or even posted on your fridge, wall or bulletin board. Whenever you have a spare minute, read through your goals and action steps.

By writing your goals and action steps in a beautiful card, it ensures that you don’t shove the card in a drawer where it will get lost. So since you write your goals down on something that you paid several dollars for, you are more likely to keep that card in an easily accessible, visible location.

3. Put your goals and actions onto your computer’s screen saver or regular desktop background. How’s that for a constant visualization reminder?

4. Program one of your big goals onto the face-top of your cell phone!

5. Forget showing off your driver’s license picture in your wallet. Instead, use that visual space to insert a printed version or a picture of what is most important for you to focus on completing right now! Maybe, you might even put a motivational quote or reminder in there.

6. Use Post-It sticky notes to write down all the action steps needed for one of your current life projects. Post it right beside your desk where you work most often. This way, whenever you encounter a lull in motivation or a barrier, you will constantly be reminded of the steps that you need to execute to continue on with your goal.

Often, when people run into barriers with their goals, they become foggy-minded, fooled, and disillusioned about their reality of what is happening. Soon, their fear and negative emotions paralyze them. Then, they forget what they need to do or try next to get started again. Don’t let the bumps in the road cause you to forget what to try next. Have this post-it of action steps on your wall so you are always have a visualization to remind you of what you need to do.

7. Use the power of email! Email yourself and in the subject title, simply write an action step or goal. Don’t ever delete this email until you have completed the action or achieved the goal. Every time you log in to your email, you will be reminded of your goals or action steps!

8. Create a vision board! Buy a bulletin board from Walmart, and hang it somewhere visible. Then, cut out pictures that symbolize what you want to do, be and have in your life. You can even post real pictures of you that show you achieving your goals. Keep on the look out of inspirational pictures in magazines, the newspapers, etc. Clip them out and post them on your board.

9. Use a whiteboard! using the dry erase markers that easily are wiped off, you can write your to-do list on here for the day, week, or month. Organize it however you want, but keep it somewhere you can see every single day.

10. Use a scrapbook! If you want a more private medium, then you can store all your visuals in a book. However, keep this book right by your bedside table. In the morning and/or evening, pull out your scrapbook, and flip through all the pictures as reminders.

11. Buy a hardcover, spiral bound journal of medium size – one that is really beautiful with nice designs on the pages. Buy a nice bookstand or picture stand, and place your journal on it. As your goals or to-do lists change, simply turn the page, update your list, and put back on your display stand! I love this one, and I keep mine sitting right on my desk by my monitor.

So, now you have a good handful of visualization techniques that do not involve lying down and listening to relaxational music. These are practical, and tangible strategies that are guaranteed to boost your productivity, keep you focused, and give you all the benefits of traditional visualization!

Here are some questions to leave you with:

1. What other visual symbols or tangible items could I put in my environment to remind me of my goals and required action steps?

2. What visual strategies have motivated me, or kept me focused on my goals in the past?

3. What do I have the most difficulty imagining or ’seeing’ in terms of my success? How can I find a real visible snapshot of this?

Goal Setting Activities

My goal setting activities will help you program your subconscious mind to make your newly chosen affirmations and beliefs, a reality! Some of these exercises will also help you gain clarity on which goals you should focus on.

I love these exercises because they are so easy, and they help to really increase confidence at the same time.

1. Try journalling. Journalling is one of the best goal setting activities I’ve experienced in terms of gaining clarity on my goals. Go out and buy a nice hard cover journal with lines. Get a spiral bound cover since it is easy to fold and adjustable to different sitting positions that you may prefer. Here’s a great experiment.

Give yourself up to an hour each day, and simply write whatever comes to mind. Don’t judge the process. You can write about random thoughts, concerns, inspirations, etc.

Just get into the habit of expressing yourself on paper, and soon, you’ll begin to clarify which goals you’d like to focus on now, or prepare yourself for focusing on in the future.

I will never forget the time I tried this doing this in my own life. I was in my early twenties, and had just finished reading the book The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. She talks a lot about the morning pages, and the benefits of doing this type of free-form journalling.

To make a long story short, within several weeks I realized that I had a major desire to design and deliver motivational speeches to the community. I immediately developed these workshops and then cold called elementary schools and social organizations. I also later spoke at a financial corporation. Out of all the different goal setting activities, this one has done so much for me in my life.

If I hadn’t journalled to discover and then express this desire through my writing, it never would have become a reality for me. So, go buy a nice journal, and then find a time when you do this regularly. Give it some time.

Just begin writing about whatever is important to you. See what happens!

2. Another one of many goal setting activities that will help you, is my free, online goal setting program which helps you prioritize your goals.

3. Post all of your goals on a bulletin board above your desk so that you can see them all the time. As you read your goals each day, you will get a real sense of which goals are truly in line with who you are right now. And when you read those important goals, you’ll be motivated to continue taking action steps to achieve those goals.

4. Put your goals on wallet-sized ‘business’ cards.. Carry these cards in your wallet wherever you go. Then when you have a few moments, you can pull out the card and read it. You might even want to keep that card in the window of your wallet where people typically keep their driver’s license. You also easily make your own wallet-card templates as well! Whatever will help you remember what your goals are, will help you take action toward your goals! Remembering and reminding is often half the battle!

5. Many goal setting activities are carried out online now. Try using some online goal setting software such as these programs here. These are very functional, easy to use programs that give you an interface for setting and monitoring the progress of your goals, as well as others! Why not join with a friend and keep each other accountable!

6. Be sure to use the power of other self-help resources that will help inspire you into action, and over road blocks. Cinematherapy involves watching movies for some therapeutic use.Review the categories of movies here, and see which topics might be relevant to the achievement of any of your goals.

Also, bibliotherapy is another great way to keep yourself motivated with your goals. By reading books on other real people or characters, you will relate and learn from other people’s experiences.

7. Some people will even record their own goals on a digital recorder and then play them back to themselves each day. Use an mp3 player, iPod, or your own computer program.

8. Try spending a few hours in a local coffee shop or bookstore that has comfy chairs available. Bring your journal, and re-write your goals down. By doing this, you are experiencing the importance of your life goals. Also, you are giving yourself total concentration by being outside of your home and your regular distractions. It can be a very uplifting experience.

I’ve had a few friends who even spent a full day and night in a hotel to focus solely on setting and revising their life goals. Again, by doing this, it demonstrated their committment to their goals. Also, being in such a novel, or even an extravagant environment (depending on where you go or what type of room you get) can be uplifting, and infuse you with hope for the future.

9. Try joining a mastermind group, or creating your own mastermind group. Get together with like-minded people who want to discuss their life goals, and their goal progress.

Try the website MeetUp.com if you don’t of anybody. Sometimes being surrounded with like-minded people can make a world of difference in achieving your goals. Like attracts like! Why not find people engaged in the same goal setting activities that you are?

Set Your Goals Now! Try My Goal Setting and Motivation Program

Set your goals NOW using the most comprehensive, FREE, ONLINE goal-setting and self motivation program on the net! It works!

Step 1: Brainstrom All Your Goals
Step 2: Prioritize Your Goals
Step 3: Writing Goals Down
Step 4: Postive Motivation
Step 5: Negative Motivation
Step 6: Identifying and Overcoming Limiting Beliefs
Step 7: Changing Habits and Behaviors

Set your goals if you want to be successful. How many times have you heard this before? It’s something we’ve heard our whole lives indeed.

One of the reasons many people don’t do this, is because they don’t know how to set them. In order for you to set your goals effectively, you need to know the right steps!

I have carefully crafted the perfect goal setting program that walks you through, step by step on how to achieve your dreams. You simply cannot go wrong using my amazing system! What’s more, is that I’ve practiced this goal setting system on many clients that I have counselled and coached. It simply works!

What is unique about my process of setting goals, is that I, or rather the program – holds your hand throughout all of the necessary steps. From brainstorming, to wiping out ‘viruses’ in our belief systems, – my program and its steps will blow you away!

Why have my carefully chosen elements of goal setting blown me and others away? First, it is a very active process unlike no other, that focuses on the power of learning to ask yourself the right motivational questions. You simply learn how to be your own coach.

Once you can learn to ask yourself the right questions, you will learn how to motivate yourself. I cannot stress enough how important self-motivation is in the goal setting process. Writing down the actual goals is the easy part. Everything else, such as getting yourself to follow through, is more challenging.

You must set your goals with motivation, and that is exactly what this website is all about. So, without further ado, let me give you a brief overview of what is all entailed in my cutting-edge goal setting program that I’m presenting to you for free!

What My Free Online Goal Setting Program Will Offer You:

• Brainstorm by writing down on paper, everything you have always wanted to be, do, or achieve
• Prioritize which goals are most important for you to focus on now. Choose your top goal, and for the rest of the exercises, apply my elements of goal setting like crazy! (Then later, you’ll repeat the process with ALL your goals)
• Learn the Power of smart goals, how successful people interpret this ’smart’ acronym, and of course – the most effective way to write down your goals
• Using my strategic questions, you will complete a full analysis inventory and identify the powerful neuroassociations and subconscious beliefs that you are currently holding – ones that prevent you from moving forward
• Experience dynamic personal breakthroughs using my unique linguistic system that helps you create new, positive beliefs or ways of thinking and feeling that are completely aligned with your goals
• Apply my cutting-edge strategies that will help you identify what behaviours are holding you back, and how to substitute them with more effective behaviours

I will also show you how to utilize a virtually unknown secret based on the law of attraction that can be used to break down any limiting belief, and that can also be used to strengthen new beliefs at your core! You’ll love this one! It also applies to eradicating poor habits, and building new, effective habits.

Learn how to also identify barriers that come your way as you are on the path to reaching your goals, and ways to jump over these obstacles no problem!

Are you ready to learn my advanced steps on how to set goals?

Are you like me and obsessed about personal growth and development? If so, you are going to love my goal setting program! If you are all about finding the life-changing insights that will help you set your goals effectively, you’ll appreciate these goal setting tips.

The way I will teach or coach you on how to set your goals, is truly a method unlike no other in my opinion. It is thorough, and it focuses 100% on ensuring that you have the motivation at every single step!

A person can set goals all they want, but if they haven’t learned the power of self-motivation, their goals will only be set with stagnation. Do you want motivation, or stagnation? Hmm…easy answer there!

So, without further ado, it’s time for you to get ready for some “ah-ha” moments, and personal breakthroughs that will ensure you experience quantum leaps in your achievement. If you’re ready for the challenge, then grab a notebook or some paper, and begin here with step one!