The Art Of Achievement

 

Have you ever wondered how some people have everything that they dream of, whilst for many others their dreams simply remain a fantasy?

Fortunately, it's not a question of genetics, upbringing or luck. It's simply down to the thinking strategies that we use.

Here are some quick tips on how you can improve your thinking strategies to help you turn your dreams into a reality:

• Identify what's important to you

If a goal is in line with your values, you get the energy, motivation and inspiration that leads you towards your goal.

Most of us have experienced this type of energy and motivation at some time in our lives when we’re doing something that we truly love and that no-one has to tell us to do.

Whilst it may seem obvious to align your goals with your values, it’s surprising how few people take the time to truly identify their values and use them to help them move towards the things that they truly want in life. Because people spend so little time aligning their goals with their values, they end up having a high failure rate when it comes to actually achieving them.

You only have to look at the setting of New Year's resolutions to see this in action. People set New Year's resolutions with such good intentions and convinced that ‘this year’ they will be achieved. But how many of these resolutions are achieved? Have you set New Year's resolutions? Think about how many you actually achieved. Was it a lot? Or was it only a few?

What do you think the difference was between the resolutions that you achieved and the ones that you didn’t?

If we have a greater understanding of our values, set our goals in line with them, and address some of the other key areas listed here, we are rewarded with the energy, motivation and inspiration to make our goals happen.

• Optimise how you use your time

To optimise your time working on, and towards, what you want, you must first gain a greater insight into what is important to you (we’re talking about values again!). Once you’ve identified what’s important to you, you must then distinguish between the activities that you do, identifying which are important to you, which are urgent and which are neither.

In my experience this is not a regularly practiced technique. Too many people are reacting to what’s happening in their lives, rather than taking control of what’s happening and what to do, and quite often leave important tasks until they become urgent. You’ll see examples of this throughout your day. Are you leaving the paying of bills until the last minute or are you working for a demanding boss or chaotic organisation. This reactive approach to tasks can lead to a sense of near-permanent overwhelm.

Once you understand which tasks you’re spending your time on, and which ones you should focus on to achieve your goals, you’ll find that the number of important goals that you achieve will increase and be achieved more quickly than you first thought possible.

• Start with what you have now, and with the end in mind

Now that you have established goals that are in line with your values, identified the actions you need to take and optimised your time so that you can work on your priority actions, you still need to take the most important step in achieving any goal – you need to make a start. No destination will ever be reached without taking the first step.

Waiting until everything is perfect before starting on a goal is one of the biggest sources of procrastination for people. It’s important that you start working on your goals with what you have, and where you are now.

Keep your goal in mind, and make sure you stay realistic about what you can achieve with the resources that have right now, and how long your goals could take. Thinking you can achieve your goals in a very short space of time, or without the necessary resources, will soon lead to disappointment, which will turn to frustration and little or no significant progress, and which can ultimately result in you giving up on your goals and dreams.

At the end of the day, we have 3 main resources: Our energy (both physical and mental), our time, and our money. It’s important that we learn how to make the best use of these resources, and how we can target them to help us to achieve the goals that are important to us.

• Meeting challenges

Whilst we can plan our goals and the action steps that we think we’re going to need to take to achieve them, no amount of planning will cater for every eventuality. 

Many people see unplanned challenges as problems that prevent progress and the achievement of their goals, and they soon start feeling frustrated before eventually giving up. 

People that achieve their goals are not put off by these events, they see them as being ‘on the way’ to achieving their goals, rather than ‘in the way’. They view challenges as exciting parts of the process, and opportunities to grow and develop personally. They allow these challenges to provide them with the energy to get through the challenges and help maintain them on course towards achieving their goal. 

With the right mindset, the journey to the achievement of your goals can be viewed as one opportunity after another to reinforce your ability to succeed.

• How you use your imagination

All human beings are blessed with incredibly powerful imaginations. However, many people spend their days imagining negative outcomes of the future. Imagining negative outcomes leads to worry, stress and fear and that drains you of your energy and motivation.

Imagining a positive outcome of the future releases more of the energy and motivation that you need to succeed at your goals.

The good news is that the structure that we use in our minds to imagine negative outcomes is the same as that which we use for imagining positive outcomes! 

With the right level of self-awareness and conscious action, you can start to use your skill of imagining negative events and generating fear, stress and worry, to start creating images of positive events and outcomes that generate excitement and anticipation and which can help propel you towards your goals.

• Forming your goals well

When forming your goals, it’s essential that you consider more than just the end result that you’re trying to achieve. 

It’s important that you also have a compelling view of what you will ‘lose’ when you achieve your goal. 

Many times the likely loss will be holding you back from achieving what you want because you haven’t adapted your thinking around the loss. As a result your subconscious holds onto the fear of your ‘loss’ and ends up pushing your goal away. 

Let’s imagine you had a goal to learn a particular skill, but you also had a fear of failure. As soon as you set your goal to learn the new skill, you might start to worry that people will soon be asking you to use your new skill, only for you to fail. Acquiring the new skill can mean that you ‘lose’ your sense of comfort with your current situation. And the fear of this loss can sabotage your efforts towards achieving your goal, even though you may be convinced that the goal is in your best interests. 

When you factor the perceived loss into your future vision, along with what you will achieve, your chances of success are increased considerably.

• Believing that what you want is both possible and that it is for you

Many people hold negative beliefs about whether their goals are achievable, and even whether they really deserve to achieve their goals.

It’s important to overcome any negative and limiting beliefs, or you’ll sabotage the end result before you’ve even started. Fortunately, we’re not born with our beliefs, we’ve picked them up over time from our parents, the people around us and the information that we’ve taken in, and the negative beliefs that we developed through childhood and into the present moment can be changed.

Take the time to identify your beliefs, and see which one’s might be holding you back from achieving your goals. Once you’ve identified a limiting belief, you can then start to work on changing it to a more empowering belief, one which will not only help you to achieve your goals, but which will propel you to achieve them faster than you ever thought possible!