goal setting is critical to achieving your dreams – by sonia vohnout

Success can mean different things to different people. Success is defined individually. What does success mean to you? To me, success is about having and achieving our dreams. You must set goals and achieve them!  So today I am going to summarize how to go about setting and achieving goals.

To be a “balanced” individual, you must successfully achieve goals in several areas of  your life. The major areas of your life include:

1. Personal Development:
   • Body –physical goals (health/appearance)
   • Mind – intellectual goals (learning, reading books)
   • Being – spiritual goals (meditation, praying, etc)
2. Career and Business
3. Time – organizational goals
4. People
   • Relationships – goals concerning the most important people in your life
   • Community and charity – goals to help others and be part of a community
5. Money – your financial and wealth goals

Setting and achieving goals requires the following critical 9 steps:

1. Write your goals down –  For each of the major areas of your life listed above, set and write at least 3 goals. You must write the following information for each goal and put this information where you can see it daily:
   • What do you want?
   • Why do you want it?
   • When do you want the goal achieved (due date)?
   • What are your expectations?
   • What are the anticipated hurdles and sacrifices you expect?
2. Be passionate – love what you do
3. Have talent or ability – achieving goals requires that you be good at what you are doing
4. Be responsible – don’t blame others if life is not going perfect for you, and do not complain. You are not a victim.  Remember that everything we do in life or we have in life is in one way or another the result of our actions and thoughts.
5. Have support – having an accountability partner or a support group will help you stay accountable to your commitments.
6. Stay positive –
   • Do not be around “toxic” people, they will hold you back and bring you down.  A toxic person will not make you feel positive or good. Avoid toxic people like the plague!!
   • You must talk positive to yourself, negative self-talk fosters negative self-image and will sabotage our success more then anyone else. Remember Winston Churchill’s quote: “A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”
7. Be aware – you need to stay aware of what is happening around you
8. Be flexible and adapt to change – if you make a mistake, fix it and keep going.  If the situation or conditions around you change, then be ready to auto-correct and keep going! I like the book “Who Moved My Cheese?” by Spencer Johnson.
9. Be persistent – The key to success is how we view our failures and rejections. Ralph Waldo Emerson said “Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.” And as Winston Churchill said “Never, never, never, never give up.”

What does success mean to you? How do you go about setting goals and achieving them?

Until next time!

Sonia

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