4 Achievement Power Tips

 

Do you often set yourself goals, but fail to achieve them? These 4 tips may seem simple, but they can have a very powerful effect on your ability to achieve your goals and dreams.

1. Clear the clutter from your life

Quite often, your outer environment is a reflection of the way you think and feel. Look at your living or work space. Do they always seem disorganised and cluttered? It’s important that you start to order your environment to reflect the ordered life you're building.

Clear away unnecessary clutter from your surroundings and your digital life (we live so much of our lives digitally, that it’s easy to forget that our digital lives can have just as much of an impact on us as our physical lives).

By organising your environment you’re sending a very clear message to your subconscious mind that you intend to get organised. When you begin to organise your environment, it allows you to develop the basic skills needed for organising your life and helps to free up the mental space to work on your goals. By having a clear mind and working space, your attention and focus can now be better spent on your goals and the actions it will take to achieve them.

2. Don’t be too rigid on achieving your goals in exactly the manner you intend to

A major factor in people not achieving their goals is their inability to be flexible and restructure their plans or change direction when circumstances dictate that these should be done. Whilst you can remain fixed on the end result, keep an open mind on how you’re going to achieve it and allow yourself to adapt to changing circumstances and information. 

3. Don’t focus on the ‘mistakes’ and ‘failures’

A major mistake that people can make whilst working on their goals is to focus on what they believe to be mistakes and failures. Your energy goes where your attention goes, so focusing on what you think is a mistake or a failure will only increase the negativity that you’re feeling, which will make you feel less motivated and will create more ‘mistakes’ and ‘failures’ for you to find.

Instead of focusing on your ‘mistakes’ and ‘failures’, analyse them and look for the lesson that they’re trying to teach you. Focus on the learning opportunities, the solutions that you’ve now found or, at the very least, focus on the fact you’ve now been given an opportunity to learn and improve, which in turn means that ‘you’re still in the game’. Apply what you’ve learnt from your ‘mistakes’ and ‘failures’ and use them as references for the future.

4. Make sure you follow through on your plans

Persistence can accomplish things that nothing else can. How many times have people been close to achieving a goal but then, without knowing just how close they really were, they've quit?

You may be someone who has drive and motivation at the start of a new goal, but you find that your enthusiasm starts to wane when the end result doesn’t come as quickly as you’d like or you start facing tough challenges and set-backs. Keep persisting. People who persist, especially in the tough and challenging times, are those who ALWAYS win!

Dr Wayne Dyer’s 5 Lessons To Live By

 

Dr Wayne Dyer was a renowned author and speaker in the fields of self-development and spiritual growth, and is well known for his teachings on the law of attraction.

In this video, Dr Wayne Dyer shares 5 lessons that we can live our lives by:

Lesson 1: When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change

Lesson 2: There are no justified resentments

Lesson 3: What you think is what you become

Lesson 4: Have a mind that is open to everything and attached to nothing

Lesson 5: Don’t die with your music still in you

“There are many ways to get the things that we want for ourselves in our lives, but basically it all begins with how we choose to think. As you think, so shall you be”

– Dr Wayne Dyer

Imagine Yourself As...

Have you ever dreamt of seeing yourself as an astronaut, a professional athlete, a famous artist or musician, or anything else that may have seemed fantastical?

“No, that’s not me, I can’t do that”, the quiet timid voice inside your head whispers as your dreams escape into your conscious thoughts.

Take a moment to reflect on how many times during the day your mind rejects what your imagination dreams up. It may come as no surprise to you that many of us live our lives with self-limiting beliefs and behaviours. When we come to realise that it’s our own self-limiting beliefs and behaviours that are creating and constraining our realities, and which are keeping us from embracing our imagination and living the life of our dreams, we can then start to take action and move from a restrictive mindset to one where we manifest our goals and dreams and live the life that we truly want to live.

When we look at life through new visions and thoughts, making our daily choices with positive life-affirming thoughts, we can begin to make the shift to a mindset where we manifest what we want, rather than manifesting what we don’t want!

Manifesting is defined as a product of change brought through the direction of consciousness. We manifest our lives through the thoughts and beliefs that we carry through life, whether they be positive or negative.

When we start thinking with this awareness in mind, we can take an active role in accepting our imagination as a catalyst for making the changes that we want in our lives and to start realising our dreams.

Isn’t the thought of having this control of our lives empowering? Replacing our negative thoughts and beliefs with positive ones is the first step in manifesting the life that we desire.

We live our lives according to our beliefs and the way we see the world. By changing our beliefs and thoughts, we start to change the way we see the world, and our lives start to reflect our new beliefs.

One quick and easy way of replacing negative thoughts and beliefs is to start writing down positive affirmations.

An affirmation is simply something that you tell yourself. For instance, say you wanted to be able to speak in public, but you’ve either had a previous bad experience or you feel shy and nervous about speaking in front of people, you might currently be telling yourself something along the lines of “I’ll never be a good public speaker”. By changing what you say to yourself, for example “I am someone who speaks in public with ease and joy, someone who the world wants to hear”, you start to change your beliefs and thoughts so that you become the person that lives your dream life.

Start coming up with positive affirmations to replace your old thought patterns and beliefs. Write them down on a piece of paper daily and say them to yourself throughout the day to remind yourself of the new thought patterns you want and to start replacing those negative thought patterns that are currently buried deep in your subconscious. As you do this, you’ll be well on your way to creating the mindset that helps you to create the life that you want and which may currently only seem like a fantasy.

Start today by identifying your self-limiting thoughts and beliefs, and then replace them with positive life-affirming ones, and soon you’ll start seeing your life change in the way that you’ve always dreamt of!

How To Create An Effective Action Plan

I've previously talked about the importance of setting goals and having a plan to achieve them. 

But are you struggling to create an effective action plan to help you achieve your goals?

If you are, then watch this video where Brian Tracy goes through the steps you can go through to create an effective action plan for achieving your goals.

“Your problem is to bridge the gap between where you are now and the goals you intend to reach”

– Brian Tracy

Simple Tips To Improve Your Communication And Relationship Skills

Have you ever found yourself unable to make new friends? Do you want your current relationships to go further and deeper, but you find yourself struggling to get the intimacy that you'd like?

Understanding the levels of communication can help you to make new friends and build on your current relationships.

We can break down communication into four levels: ‘Small talk’, ‘fact disclosure’, ‘share viewpoints and opinions’ and ‘share personal feelings’.

• Small Talk

In new relationships and when you meet new people, the safest place to start is to talk about surface issues. For example, making a comment about the weather, current events or the surroundings you’re in.

This is called “small talk”, and is used to ‘size up’ the other person to determine the comfort zone between the two of you. There is no need to disclose any personal information with the other person at this stage, as this initial interaction helps you to determine how ‘safe’ they are on your first meeting.

If you’re comfortable with each other at a surface level you can easily slip into the next level of communication: fact disclosure.

• Fact Disclosure

Fact disclosure is slightly deeper than small talk in that you disclose facts about yourself without triggering topics of emotional interest.

The purpose of fact disclosure is to find out if you have something in common. You can use these common areas to build a friendship. You may want to talk about your career, occupation, hobbies, or where you live.

It’s best to avoid topics like marriage, divorce, politics, sex and religion in this second level of communication. If you find a topic of mutual interest you may want to progress to the next level of communication: share viewpoints and opinions.

• Share Viewpoints and Opinions

Once you’ve established that the other person is ‘safe’ through small talk, and have found areas of common interest, you can build rapport by sharing your opinions and viewpoints.

By sharing your opinions and viewpoints you allow yourself to become vulnerable to the scrutiny and objections of the other person. Enter this level of communication once you are comfortable that you both share positive feelings through the first two levels.

Be prepared to listen, and be open, to the opinions of your new friend. This will enable your friendship to first survive, and then thrive.

Make sure you don’t use your opinions as a form of ‘character assassination’ of other people. You may be thought of as a negative person and this may cause your new friend to distance themselves from you.

Once you’ve built rapport and established a solid relationship, you can go to the fourth level of communication, where you start sharing personal feelings.

• Share Personal Feelings

After building up the trust, finding things in common and listening to their viewpoints and opinions, you may feel comfortable enough to share your personal feelings with your new acquaintance. This level is when the acquaintance becomes a genuine friend.

Things of deep value to you can be shared without feeling threatened. You listen closely to each other without the need to ‘solve’ your friend’s problem. You are happy to reflect their feelings back to them – forming a bond of empathy and compassion between the two of you.

If you know how to handle your own feelings, attitudes and behaviours whilst maintaining your friendship at this level, you’ll build a successful friendship that can last a lifetime.

7 Steps To Achieving Your Goals

How many times have you heard that once you’ve set your goals you’re half-way to achieving them?

But what are goals, and how exactly do you go about achieving them?

In this article, I’ll give you 7 steps to help you set your goals and follow them through so that you can achieve the things that you want to achieve in your life.

1. What is a goal?

Before you can set any goal, you first need to understand what a goal is. A goal is a target which you can achieve in measurable and attainable steps. It is more than just a desire, wish or need. A desire or a wish is less tangible and is often just fleeting. Who doesn't desire or wish to win the lottery? A goal is a desire, wish or need that is achievable by clear actions that you can take.

2. How do you set a goal?

Setting a goal is a process which starts with identifying an achievable need or desire, i.e. the end result and outcome. First you must decide what you want. Some of the questions that you can ask yourself include:

• "What do I want to own?"
• "Where do I want to live or travel to?"
• "What status, career or qualifications would I like to have?"
• "How much money do I want to have?"
• "How do I want to spend my time?"
• "Who do I want to spend my time with?"

A goal can relate to any desire, wish or need that you have and be achievable by clearly defined actions that you can take.

You then break the goal down into small individual steps or actions. Achievable goals are goals where you can influence their outcome through your actions and measure your progress towards them. Achieving long-term life-changing goals is a process of achieving, step-by-step, short and medium-term goals and actions.

3. What actions are required?

Goals require action on your part. You must first decide what actions are required to achieve your goal. Your first action is to always write your goals down. Putting pen to paper gives your goals an existence of their own.

Writing a plan of the necessary steps is an essential step in achieving your goals. You don’t need to have every step worked out (for your longer-term goals you may only have an outline of what the later steps will likely be), but without a goal plan you’ll eventually reduce your goal to a wish or desire, and wishes only become real by chance.

4. Analyse the plan

Once you’ve set your goal plan and identified the actions and steps to achieve your goal, you then need to analyse your plan. This helps you to identify whether you need to change any actions, or move them around, what resources you might need to tackle those actions, and when you can possibly achieve those actions. This analysis allows you to start working out the detail of how you’re going to accomplish each individual action. This helps you provide some substance and detail to your outline goal plan, which will help you get clearer in your mind what you need to do to achieve the steps in your plan.

These actions can become smaller shorter-term goals leading to major longer-term goals.

5. What actions do I need to take today?

Every day ask yourself "What actions do I need to take today to make progress on my goal?". By now you should have a good plan in place, so check your plan and make sure that you take the identified actions every day. As you progress towards your goal you may discover that additional actions, or changes to the actions you first identified in your goal plan, are needed. That’s okay, just adjust your goal plan as required. Remember to keep your goal rigid, but be willing to be flexible on how you get there.

6. Review your achievements every week and month

Every week review your progress against the actions you identified for the week. Check what you've done and what you may have missed. Adjust your plan for the next week or month to help you get back on track.

Your plan should take into account what you will need to do today, tomorrow, this week, next week, the next month, the next 3 months, 6 months, and so on (depending on how big your goal is). This longer-term planning helps you to see the work that will likely be involved and get it clear in your mind. This longer-term planning will also help you to be realistic when working on long-term goals, and reduce the chances of you feeling overwhelmed by the amount of work involved or impatient when the goal hasn’t materialised immediately. Always write down your results so that you can keep a track of your progress and to see how far you’ve come. Writing down the results of your reviews will also help you set better plans for future goals, as you’ll have more experience of setting and working on actions and goal plans.

7. What if things go wrong?

Maybe this step should be ’When things go wrong‘! Goals should be difficult because they move you outside your comfort zone and require you to do things differently than you’ve been doing. To be successful you have to face your own fear of failure and to take risks. There will inevitably be setbacks. The majority of them will be minor, but it’s likely that you’ll experience a large setback at some point, particularly when you’re working on long-term or big goals. It’s important that you expect them and remember that they are part of the process.

When you’re analysing your goal plan (see step 4 above), you can take time to identify what potential setbacks and challenges you may face at each step, and then plan how you could respond to those setbacks and challenges. By doing this, you’re increasing the likelihood of staying positive when things don’t go to plan as you won’t be as surprised or disheartened when the setbacks and challenges arise. You’re also more likely to pass through the setback and challenge quicker as you will have already thought about the actions that you can take in response to that setback or challenge.

So, now that you have 7 steps to help you achieve your goals, what goals are you going to set for yourself?