Productivity Coach's Corner: How Goals Work

You can experience anything you want. Goals, dreams, and wishes do come true. What you focus on the most will show up!

When you read those last lines, what did you think? "Yeah, right. What does this guy know?" Have you listened to your self-talk recently? How is it serving or supporting you? Are you beginning with negative or positive ends in mind?

Often misunderstood and put off for some formal event (like yearly reviews), goal setting is a really simple—and very important—process. Did you know goals are rarely just met; instead, we identify a course, and continue to change lanes as we get closer to our original outcome.

What is most important to you? Where would you like to point your time, focus, and resources over the next one to two years? There are two very good reasons to develop goals. Goals give us:

1) A reason to engage our creativity.
2) An opportunity to enhance our awareness.

Creativity: Clearly identify what you want, and you'll get there faster. For example, look around you as you are reading this for anything that is the color red. Quick, how many sources of the color red are there? Be sure to look all around, in front, behind, below, and to the side. Now, without looking away from this piece of paper, remember where all of the things are in the room that are blue. Now, close your eyes and do it from memory. If you did this, you will have closed your eyes and tried to "see" through all the red in your memory, working hard to remember the blue. Did you notice there may have been something blue right in front of you outside your focus? Why? You were only focused on red!

Awareness: Our senses are heightened and our world seems to respond by providing new information (or, information that was always there, we just had not noticed it yet) to get closer to that goal. Here is an activity we lead people through in seminars. Get a blank piece of paper and a pen. Now take out a one-dollar bill. Take a good look at the front. On the paper make a list of everything you know is on the reverse side of the dollar bill. And don't turn it over to look yet! Make a list for about a minute. Did you notice that even though you have SEEN the back of a dollar bill, you might not REMEMBER everything there? In fact, if you look carefully (go ahead, look at the back), you will find things you have NEVER EVER SEEN until just now.

This has so much to do with goal setting. If you have seen everything about a project you are managing, stop and reconsider. Look at the backside; raise your perspective; initiate a new way to focus on that thing; find something you have never seen before, and use it to your advantage.

What would you like to experience over the next year? Write some of these down in your calendar, on the exact date one year from today. Through effective and deliberate goal setting, you will get all of this and more.
Goals, dreams, and wishes do come true! Direct your focus toward something and it will show up. And you can let us know in a year how it went!