Get Going! Steps for Clarifying and Achieving Your Goals

“If you advance confidently in the direction of your dreams and endeavour to live the life which you have imagined, you will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” – Henry David Thoreau

What is it that causes us to give up before we’ve even started?  Why do we give in to apathy and resignation? Or on the other hand, why do we over-invest in the outcome of our endeavour to such an extent that we are drained, debilitated, and full of self-doubt when it doesn’t go the way we planned? Because, like children, we really do want the world to work the way we want it to… right now!

This is because we allow ourselves to be hindered by limiting beliefs of what is good and what is bad, what is working and what isn’t.

Often when we hit a roadblock, we claim that the process isn’t working, when in truth it is. It has just shown us that that direction contains a roadblock, and we need to go another way.  If you hit a roadblock when you’re driving to work, you don’t just give up going to work, you find another way to get there. That’s life.

We set ourselves up for stress and pain when we assume that if things don’t go the way we expect them to, they are wrong, and it’s just not working. As Carolyn Myss says, “Something that happens or doesn’t happen today that makes no sense may be laying the groundwork for something that will happen five months or five years from now.”

So how do we get beyond the frustration, doubt, anxiety, and fear that we feel when our lives don’t go the way we want them to?

A simple way is to pretend you’re a bird. Rise above the situation and look at it from a different point of view. Take a long look, fly around for a while looking at things from that point of view, and see situations and opportunities that you hadn’t noticed from the ground. From the long view, see who or what else is looking for the same thing that you are, and maybe you can combine your efforts. Rise above the issue, and yourself, to see the bigger picture. Once you’ve done that, you can take the following steps toward clarifying your goals and developing your strategies to achieve those goals.

Simple Steps and Strategies for Achieving Your Goals

• Close your eyes, relax, and allow yourself to be open to all possibilities.
• Imagine how you will look when you have achieved your goal.
• Feel success, and feel the energy surrounding you when you discover that success.
• Hear others around you congratulating you on achieving your goal.
• Now move yourself right into that picture of success, feeling your body shift and change.
• Look back from that successful time to now, and notice the change in the thought process and the steps you took to achieve that success. Notice how you decide differently.
• Take note of the first three steps you took on your path to success.
• Make a commitment to take those steps within the next three days.
• Open your eyes and write down your commitment.

And you are ready now to get going!