GOALS
Part-2
How to Get Everything You Want –
Faster Than You Ever Thought Possible
By Brian Tracy
© COPYRIGHTS
This book is copyrighted content of the concerned author as well as Matrubharti
Matrubharti has exclusive digital publishing rights of this book.
Any illegal copies in physical or digital format are strictly prohibited.
Matrubharti can challenge such illegal distribution / copies / usage in court.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
_________________________________________________
Dedication
Preface
Introduction
Chapter-3
Create Your Own Future
Chapter-4
Clarify Your Values
Conclusion: Take Action Today
DEDICATION
To Rick Metcalf, a good friend, a great American, an extraordinary entrepreneur,
one of the best salesmen who ever lived, and an inspiration to everyone who knew him.
I only wish you could be here to read this book. You left us all too soon.
PREFACE
This book is for ambitious people who want to get ahead faster. If this is the way you think and feel, you are the person for whom this book is written. The ideas contained in the pages ahead will save you years of hard work in achieving the goals that are most important to you.
I have spoken more than 2000 times before audiences of as many as 23,000 people, in 24 countries. My seminars and talks have varied in length from five minutes to five days. In every case, I have focused on sharing the best ideas I could find on the particular subject with that audience at that moment. After countless talks on various themes, if I was only given five minutes to speak to you, and I could only convey one thought that would help you to be more successful, I would tell you to “write down your goals, make plans to achieve them, and work on your plans every single day.”
This advice, if you followed it, would be of more help to you than anything else you could ever learn. Many university graduates have told me that this simple concept has been more valuable to them than four years of study. This idea has changed my life, and the lives of millions of other people. It will change yours as well.
The Turning Point
A group of successful men got together in Chicago some time ago, talking about the experiences of their lives. All of them were millionaires and multi-millionaires. Like most successful people, they were both humble and grateful for what they had achieved, and for the blessings that life had bestowed upon them. As they discussed the reasons why they had managed to achieve so much in life, the wisest man among them spoke up and said that, in his estimate, “success is goals, and all else is commentary.”
Your time and your life are precious. The biggest waste of time and life is for you to spend years accomplishing something that you could have achieved in only a few months. By following the practical, proven process of goal setting and goal achieving laid out in this book, you will be able to accomplish vastly more in a shorter period of time than you have ever imagined before. The speed at which you move onward and upward will amaze both yourself and all the people around you. By following these simple and easy-to-apply methods and techniques, you can move quickly from rags to riches in the months and years ahead. You can transform your experience from poverty and frustration to affluence and satisfaction. You can go far beyond your friends and family and achieve more in life than most other people you know.
In my talks, seminars and consulting, I have worked with more than two million people all around the world. I have found, over and over, that an average person with clear goals will run circles around a genius who is not sure what he or she really wants.
My personal mission statement has not changed in years. It is: “To help people achieve their goals faster than they ever would in the absence of my help.”
This book contains the distilled essence of all that I have learned in the areas of success, achievement and goal attainment. By following the steps explained in the pages ahead, you will move to the front of the line in life. For my children, this book is meant to be a road map and a guide to help you get from wherever you are to wherever you want to go. For my friends and readers of this book, my reason for writing it is to give you a proven system that you can use to move onto the fast track in your own life.
Welcome! A great new adventure is about to begin.
INTRODUCTION
This is a wonderful time to be alive. There have never been more opportunities for creative and determined people to achieve more of their goals than they can today. Regardless of short-term ups and downs in the economy and in your life, we are entering into an age of peace and prosperity superior to any previous era in human history.
In the year 1900, there were five thousand millionaires in America. By the year 2000, there were more than five million, most of them selfmade, in one generation. Experts predict that there will be another ten to twenty million millionaires created in the next two decades. Your goal should be to become one of them. This book will show you how.
A Slow Start
When I was 18, I left high school without graduating. My first job was as a dishwasher in the back of a small hotel. From there, I moved on to washing cars, and then washing floors with a janitorial service. For the next few years, I drifted and worked at various laboring jobs, earning my living by the sweat of my brow. I worked in sawmills and factories. I worked on farms and ranches. I worked in the tall timber with a chain saw and dug wells when the logging season ended.
I worked as a construction laborer on tall buildings, and as a seaman on a Norwegian Freighter in the North Atlantic. Often I slept in my car, or in cheap rooming houses. When I was 23, I was working as an itinerant farm laborer during the harvest, sleeping on the hay in the barn and eating with the farmer’s family. I was uneducated, unskilled, and at the end of the harvest, unemployed once more.
When I could no longer find a laboring job, I got a job in straight commission sales, cold calling from office-to-office and from door-todoor. I would often work all day long to make a single sale so that I could pay for my rooming house and have a place to sleep that night. This was not a great start at life.
The Day My Life Changed
Then one day, I took out a piece of paper and wrote down an outrageous goal for myself. It was to earn $1,000 per month in doorto-door and office-to-office selling. I folded up the piece of paper, put it away and never found it again.
But 30 days later, my entire life had changed. During that time, I discovered a technique for closing sales that tripled my income from the very first day. Meanwhile, the owner of my company sold out to an entrepreneur who had just moved into town. Exactly thirty days after I had written down my goal, he took me aside and offered me $1,000 per month to head up the sales force and teach the other people what it was that I was doing that enabled me to be selling so much more than anyone else. I accepted his offer and from that day forward, my life was never the same.
Within eighteen months, I had moved from that job to another, and then to another. I went from personal selling to becoming a sales manager with people selling for me. I recruited and built a 95 person sales force. I went literally from worrying about my next meal to walking around with a pocket full of $20 dollar bills.
I began teaching my salespeople how to write out their goals, and how to sell more effectively. In almost no time at all, they doubled and tripled and increased their incomes as much as ten times. Many of them are today millionaires and multi-millionaires.
It’s important to note that, since those days in my mid-20s, my life has not been a smooth series of upward steps. It has included many ups and downs, marked by occasional successes and temporary failures. I have traveled, lived and worked in more than 80 countries, learning French, German and Spanish along the way, and working in 22 different fields.
As the result of inexperience, and sometimes sheer stupidity, I have spent or lost everything I made and had to start over again - several times. In every case when this happened, I would begin by sitting down with a piece of paper and laying out a new set of goals for myself, using the methods that I’ll explain in the pages ahead.
After several years of hit and miss goal setting and goal achieving, I finally decided to collect everything I had learned into a single system. By assembling these ideas and strategies in one place, I
developed a goal setting methodology and process, with a beginning, middle and end, and began to follow it every day.
Within one year, following this blueprint for goal achieving, my life had changed once more. In January of that year, I was living in a rented apartment with rented furniture. I was $35,000 in debt and driving a used car that wasn’t paid for. By December, I was living in my own $100,000 condominium. I had a new Mercedes, had paid off all my debts and I had $50,000 in the bank.
Then I really got serious about success. I realized that this “goal setting” stuff was incredibly powerful. I invested hundreds and then thousands of hours reading and researching on goal setting and goal achieving, synthesizing the best ideas I could find into a complete goal setting and achieving process that worked with incredible effectiveness.
Anyone Can Do It
In 1981, I began teaching my system in workshops and seminars that have now reached more than two million people in 35 countries. I began audiotaping and video taping my courses so that others could use them. We have now trained hundreds of thousands of people in these principles, in multiple languages, all over the world.
What I found was that these ideas work everywhere, for everyone, in virtually every country, no matter what your education, experience or background may be when you begin.
Most of all, these ideas have made it possible for me, and many thousands of others, to take complete control over our lives. The regular and systematic practice of goal setting has taken us from poverty to prosperity, from frustration to fulfillment, from underachievement to success and satisfaction. This system will do the same for you.
What I learned early on is that any plan is better than no plan at all. And it is not necessary to reinvent the wheel. All the answers have already been found. There are hundreds of thousands, and even millions of men and women who have started with nothing and achieved great success following these principles. And what others have done, you can do as well, if you just learn how.
In the pages ahead, you will learn twenty-one of the most important ideas and strategies ever discovered for achieving everything that you could ever want in life. You will find that there are no limits to what you can accomplish except for the limits you place on your own imagination. And since there are no limits to what you can imagine, there are no limits to what you can achieve. This is one of the greatest discoveries of all. Let us begin.
“A journey of a thousand leagues begins with a single step. Confucius
CHAPTER 3
Create Your Own Future
“You will become large as your controlling desire;
or as great as your dominant aspiration.”
_______________________________________
James Allen
In more than 3300 studies of leaders conducted over the years, there is a special quality that stands out, one quality that all great leaders have in common. It is the quality of vision. Leaders have vision. Nonleaders do not.
Earlier I said that the most important discovery in all of human history is that, “You become what you think about — most of the time.” What is it then that leaders think about, most of the time? And the answer is that leaders think about the future and where they are going, and what they can do to get there.
Non-leaders, on the other hand, think about the present, and the pleasures and problems of the moment. They think and worry about the past, and what has happened that cannot be changed.
Think About The Future We call this leadership quality “Future-Orientation.” Leaders think about the future and what they want to accomplish, and where they want to arrive sometime down the road. Leaders think about what they want, and what can be done to achieve it. The good news is that, when you begin to think about your future as well, you begin to think like a leader, and you will soon get the same results that leaders get.
Dr. Edward Banfield of Harvard concluded, after more than 50 years of research, that “long-time perspective” was the most important determinant of financial and personal success in life. Banfield defined long-time perspective as the “ability to think several years into the future while making decisions in the present.” This is one of the most important discoveries ever made. Just think! The further you think into the future, the better decisions you will make in the present to assure that that future becomes a reality.
Become A Millionaire For example, if you save $100 per month from the age of 20 to the age of 65, and you invested that money in a mutual fund earning an average of 10% per annum over time, you would be worth more than $1,118,000 dollars when you retired.
Anyone who really wanted to could save $100 per month, if he or she had a long enough time perspective. What this means is that every single person starting work today can become a millionaire over time if they begin early enough, save consistently enough, and hold to their long-term vision of financial independence.
Create A Five Year Fantasy
In personal strategic planning, you should begin with a long-term view of your life, as well. You should begin by practicing idealization in everything you do. In the process of idealization, you create a five-year fantasy for yourself, and begin thinking about what your life would look life in five years if it were perfect in every respect.
The biggest single obstacle to setting goals is “self-limiting beliefs.” These are areas where you believe yourself to be limited in some way. You may believe yourself to be inadequate or inferior in areas such as intelligence, ability, talent, creativity, personality or something else. As a result, you sell yourself short. By underestimating yourself, you set either no goals, or low goals that are far below what you are truly capable of accomplishing.
Imagine No Limitations By combining idealization and future-orientation, you cancel or neutralize this process of self-limitation. You imagine for the moment that you have no limitations at all. You imagine that you have all the time, talents and abilities you could ever require to achieve any goal you could set for yourself. No matter where you are in life, you imagine that you have all the friends, contacts and relationships you need to open every door and achieve anything you could really want. You imagine that you have no limitations whatsoever on what you could be, have or do in the pursuit of the goals that are really important to you.
Practice Blue Sky Thinking In Charles Garfield’s studies of “Peak Performers,” he made an interesting discovery. He analyzed men and women who had achieved only average results at work for many years, but who suddenly exploded into great success and accomplishment. He found that at the “take-off point,” every one of them began engaging in what he called “Blue Sky Thinking.”
In blue-sky thinking, you imagine that all things are possible for you, just like looking up into a clear blue sky, with no limits. You project forward several years and imagine that your life were perfect in every respect sometime in the future. You then look back to where you are today and ask yourself these this question: “What would have to have happened for me to have created my perfect future?” You then come back to where you are in the present in your own mind, and you ask, “What would have to happen from this point forward for me to achieve all my goals sometime in the future?”
Refuse To Compromise Your Dreams When you practice idealization and future-orientation, you make no compromises with your dreams and visions for yourself and your future. You don’t settle for smaller goals or half successes. Instead, you “dream big dreams” and project forward mentally as though you are one of the most powerful people in the universe. You create your perfect future. You decide what you really want, before you come back to the present moment and deal with what is possible for you within your current situation.
Start with your business and career. Imagine that your work life was perfect five years from now. Answer these questions:
1. What would it look like? 2. What would you be doing? 3. Where would you be doing it? 4. Who would you be working with? What level of responsibility would you have? 5. What kind of skills and abilities would you have? 6. What kind of goals would you be accomplishing? 7. What level of status would you have in your field?
Practice No Limit Thinking When you answer these questions, imagine that you have no limits. Imagine that everything is possible for you. Peter Drucker once said, “We greatly overestimate what we can accomplish in one year. But we greatly underestimate what we can accomplish in five years.” Don’t let this happen to you.
Now, idealize your perfect financial life sometime in the future:
How much do you want to be earning five years from today?
What sort of lifestyle do you want to have? What kind of home do you want to live in?
What kind of car do you want to drive?
What kind of material luxuries do you want to provide for yourself and your family?
How much do you want to have in the bank?
How much do you want to be saving and investing each month and each year?
How much do you want to be worth when you retire? Imagine that you have a “magic slate.” You can write down anything you want. You can erase anything that may have happened in the past, and create whatever picture you desire for your future. You can clean the slate at any time and start over. You have no limits.
Imagine Your Perfect Family Life
Look at your family and relationships today, and project five years into the future:
If your family life were perfect five years from now, what would it look like?
Who would you be with? Who would you no longer be with?
Where and how would you be living?
What kind of living standards would you have?
What kind of relationships would you have with the most important people in your life, five years from now, if everything were perfect in every respect?
When you fantasize and imagine your perfect future, the only question you ask is, “How?” This is the most powerful question of all. Asking it repeatedly stimulates your creativity and triggers ideas to help you accomplish your goals. Unsuccessful people always wonder whether or not a particular goal is possible. High achievers on the other hand only ask the question, “How?” They then set to work to find ways to make their visions and goals into realities.
Ideal Health and Fitness Review your levels of health and fitness in every area:
If you were a perfect physical specimen five years from now, how would you look, feel and appear?
What would be your ideal weight?
How much would you exercise each week?
What would be your overall level of health?
What changes would you have to start making today in your diet, exercise routines and health habits to enjoy superb physical health sometime in the future?
You then imagine that you are an important and influential person, a “player” in your community. You are making a significant contribution to the world around you. You are making a difference with your life and in the lives of other people. If your social and community status and involvement were ideal:
What would you be doing?
What organizations would you be working with or contributing to?
What are the causes that you strongly believe in and support, and how could you become more involved in those areas?
Just Do It! The primary difference between high achievers and low achievers is “action-orientation.” Men and women who accomplish tremendous things in life are intensely action oriented. They are moving all the time. They are always busy. If they have an idea, they take action on it immediately.
On the other hand, low achievers and non-achievers are full of good intentions, but they always have an excuse for not taking action today. It is well said that, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
Examine yourself in terms of your personal inventory of skills, knowledge, talent, education and ability. If you were developed to the highest level possible for you (and there is virtually no limit), answer these questions:
What additional knowledge and skills would you have acquired five years from now?
In what areas would you be recognized as absolutely excellent in what you do?
What would you be doing each day in order to develop the knowledge and skills you need to be one of the top performers in your field sometime in the future?
Once you have answered these questions, the only question you ask is, “How?” How do you attain the skills and expertise you will require to lead your field in the years ahead?
Design Your Perfect Calendar Especially, decide how you would like to live, day in and day out, your ideal lifestyle. Design your perfect calendar, from January 1st to December 31st:
What would you like to do on your weekends and vacations?
How much time would you like to take off each week, month and year?
Where would you like to go?
How would you organize your year if you had no limitations, and complete control over your time?
In the Bible it says, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” What this means is that, if you lack an exciting vision for your future, you will “perish” inside in terms of lacking motivation and enthusiasm for what you are doing. But the reverse of this is that, with an exciting future vision, you will be continuously motivated and stimulated every day to take the actions necessary to make your ideal vision a reality.
The Key To Happiness You remember that, “Happiness is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal.” When you have clear, exciting goals and ideals, you will feel happier about yourself and your world. You will be more positive and optimistic. You will be more cheerful and enthusiastic. You will feel internally motivated to get up and get going every morning, because every step you are taking will be moving you in the direction of something that is important to you.
Resolve to think about your ideal future most of the time. Remember, the very best days of your life lie ahead. The happiest moments you will ever experience are still to come. The highest income you will ever earn is going to materialize in the months and years ahead. The future is going to be better than anything that may have happened in your past. There are no limits.
The clearer you can be about your long term future, the more rapidly you will attract people and circumstances into your life to help make that future a reality. The greater clarity you have about who you are and what you want, the more you will achieve and the faster you will achieve it in every area of your life.
Create Your Own Future:
Imagine that there is a solution to every problem, a way to overcome every limitation, and no limit on your achieving every goal you can set for yourself. What would you do differently?
Practice “back from the future thinking.” Project forward five years and look back to the present. What would have to have happened for your world to be ideal?
Imagine your financial life were perfect in every way. How much would you be earning? How much would you be worth? What steps could you take, starting today, to make these goals a reality?
Imagine your family and personal life was perfect. What would it look like? What should you start doing more of, or less of, starting today?
Plan your perfect calendar. Design your year from January to December as if you had no limitations. What would you change, starting today?
Imagine that your levels of health and fitness were perfect in every way. What could you do, starting today, to make your vision for yourself into a reality?
CHAPTER 4
Clarify Your Values
“One universe made up of all that is: and one God in it all,
and one principle of being, and one law,
the reason shared by all thinking creatures, and one truth.”
_____________________________________________________
Marcus Aurelius
One of the most important characteristics of leaders, and top people in every area of life, is that they know who they are, what they believe in and what they stand for. Average people are usually confused about their goals, values and ideals, and as a result, they go back and forth and accomplish very little. Men and women who become leaders, on the other hand, with the same or even fewer abilities and opportunities, go onto accomplish great things in whatever they attempt.
Life is lived from the inside out. The very core of your personality is your values. Your values are what make you the person you are. Everything you do on the outside is dictated and determined by your values on the inside, whether clear or fuzzy. The greater clarity you have regarding your values on the inside, the more precise and effective will be your actions on the outside.
The Five Levels Of Personality You can imagine your personality by thinking of a target with concentric rings, from the inside to the outside. Your personality is also made up of five rings, starting from the center, your values, and radiating outward to the next circle, your beliefs.
Your values determine your beliefs, about yourself and the world around you. If you have positive values, such as love, compassion and generosity, you will believe that people in your world are deserving of these values, and you will treat them accordingly.
Expect The Best Your beliefs in turn determine the third ring of your personality, your expectations. If you have positive values, you will believe yourself to be a good person. If you believe yourself to be a good person, you will expect good things to happen to you. If you expect good things to happen to you, you will be positive, cheerful and future oriented. You will look for the good in other people and situations.
The fourth level of your personality, determined by your expectations, is your attitude. Your attitude will be an outward manifestation or reflection of your values, beliefs and expectations. For example, if your value is that this is a good world to live in, and your belief is that you are going to be very successful in life, you will expect that everything that happens to you is helping you in some way. As a result, you will have a positive mental attitude toward other people and they will respond positively toward you. You will be a more cheerful and optimistic person. You will be someone that others want to work with and for, buy from, sell to and generally help to be more successful. This is why a positive mental attitude seems to go hand in hand with great success in every walk of life.
The fifth ring, or level of life, is your actions. Your actions on the outside will ultimately be a reflection of your innermost values, beliefs and expectations on the inside. This is why what you achieve in life and work will be determined more by what is going on inside of you than by any other factor.
As Within, So Without You can always tell how a person thinks, most of the time, by looking at the conditions of their outer lives. A positive, optimistic, goal and future oriented person — on the inside — will enjoy a happy, successful and prosperous life on the outside, most of the time.
Aristotle said that the ultimate aim or purpose of human life is to achieve your own happiness. You are the very happiest when what you are doing on the outside is congruent with your values on the inside. When you are living in complete alignment with what you consider to be good and right and true, you will automatically feel happy and positive about yourself and your world.
Your goals must be congruent with your values, and your values must be congruent with your goals. This is why clarifying your values is often the starting point to high achievement and peak performance. Values clarification requires that you think through what is really important to you in life. You then organize your entire life around these values.
Any attempt to live on the outside in a manner that contradicts the values you hold on the inside will cause you stress, negativity, unhappiness, pessimism and even anger and frustration. Your chief responsibility to yourself in the creation of a great life is therefore for you to develop absolute clarity about your values in everything you do.
Know What You Really Want Stephen Covey once said, “Be sure that, as you scramble up the ladder of success, it is leaning against the right building.” Carly Simon once sang a famous line, “Is this all there is?” Many people work hard on the outside to achieve goals that they think they want, only to find, at the end of the day, that they get no joy or satisfaction from their accomplishments. This occurs when the outer accomplishment is not in harmony with your inner values. Don’t let this happen to you.
Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” This applies to your values as much as to any other area of your life. Values clarification is something you do on a “go-forward” basis. You continually stop the clock, like a time out in a football game, and ask, “What are my values in this area?”
In the Bible it says, “What does it benefit a man if he achieves the whole world but loses his own soul?” The happiest people in the world today are those who are living in harmony with their innermost convictions and values. The unhappiest people are those who are attempting to live incongruent with what they truly value and believe.
Trust Your Intuition Self-trust is the foundation of greatness. Self-trust comes from listening to your intuition, to your “still, small voice” within. Men and women begin to become great when they begin to listen to their inner voices, and absolutely trust that they are being guided by a higher power, each step of the way.
Living in alignment with your true values is the royal road to selfconfidence, self-respect and personal pride. In fact, almost every human problem can be resolved by returning to values. Whenever you experience stress of any kind, look into yourself and ask, “In what way am I compromising my innermost values in this situation?”
Watch Your Behavior How can you tell what your values really are? The answer is simple. You always demonstrate your true values in your actions, and especially your actions under pressure. Whenever you are forced to choose between one behavior and another, you will always act consistent with what is most important and valuable to you at that moment.
Values, in fact, are organized in a hierarchy. You have a series of values, some of them very intense and important, and some of them weaker and less important. One of the most important exercises you can engage in, to determine who you really are, and what you really want, is to organize your values by priority. Once you are clear about the relative importance of your values, you cans then organize your outer life so that it is in alignment with them.
Examine Your Past Behavior There are some insightful ways to help you to determine your true values. First of all, you can look at your past. How have you behaved under pressure in the past? What choices did you make with your time or money when you were forced to choose? Your answers will give you an indication of your predominant values at that time.
Dale Carnegie once wrote, “Tell me what gives a person his greatest feeling of importance, and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life.” What makes you feel important? What raises your self-esteem? What increases your sense of self-respect and personal pride? What have you accomplished in your past life that has given you the greatest sense of pride and satisfaction? These answers will give you good indications of your true values.
Determine Your Heart’s Desire The spiritual teacher Emmet Fox wrote about the importance of discovering your “Heart’s Desire.” What is your heart’s desire? What is it that, deep down in your heart, more than anything else, you would like to be, have or do in life? As a friend of mine asks, “What do you want to be famous for?”
What words would you like people to use to describe you when you are not there? What would you like people to say about you when you have passed on? What would you like someone to say about you at your funeral? How do you want your family, friends and children to remember you? How would you want them to talk about you after you had left this earth? How would you like people to talk to them about you?
What kind of a reputation do you have today? What kind of a reputation would you like to have sometime in the future? What would you have to begin doing today in order to create the kind of reputation that you desire?
Your Past Is Not Your Future Many people have had difficult experiences growing up. They have fallen onto hard times and become associated with the wrong people. They have behaved in ways that were illegal or socially unacceptable. Sometimes they have even been convicted and sent to prison for their crimes. But at a certain point in life, they decided to change. They thought seriously about the kind of person that they wanted to be known as, and thought of, in the future. They decided to change their lives by changing the values that they lived by. By making these decisions and sticking to them, they changed their lives. And what others have done, you can do as well.
Remember, “It doesn’t matter where you’re coming from; all that really matters is where you’re going.”
If you were an outstanding person, in every respect, how would you behave toward others? What sort of impression would you leave on others after you had met them and spoken with them? Imagine you could be a completely excellent person, how would you be different from today?
How Much You Like Yourself In psychology, your level of self-esteem determines your level of happiness. Self-esteem is defined as: “How much you like yourself.” Your self-esteem, in turn, is determined by your self-image. This is the way you see yourself and think about yourself in your day-to-day interactions with others. Your self-image is shaped by your selfideal. Your self-ideal is made up of the virtues, values, goals, hopes, dreams and aspirations that you have for yourself sometime in the future.
Here is what psychologists have discovered: The more your behavior in the moment is consistent with what you feel your ideal behavior should be, the more you like and respect yourself, and the happier you are.
On the other hand, whenever you behave in a way that is inconsistent with your ideal of your very best behavior, you experience a negative self-image. You feel yourself to be performing below your best, below what you truly aspire to. As a result, your self-esteem and your level of happiness decrease.
Perform At Your Best The moment that you begin walking, talking and behaving in ways that are consistent with your highest ideals, your self-image improves, your self-esteem increases and you feel happier about yourself and your world.
For example, whenever you are complimented or praised by another person, or given a prize or an award for accomplishment, your selfesteem goes up, sometimes dramatically. You feel happy about yourself. You feel that your whole life is in harmony, and that you are living congruent with your highest ideals. You feel successful and valuable.
Your aim should be to deliberately and systematically create the circumstances that raise your self-esteem in everything you do. You should live your life as if you were already the outstanding person that you intend to be sometime in the future.
Know What You Believe What are your values today with regard to your work and your career? Do you believe in the values of integrity, hard work, dependability, creativity, cooperation, initiative, ambition, and getting along well with people? People who live these values in their work are vastly more successful and more highly esteemed than people who do not.
What are your values with regard to your family? Do you believe in the importance of unconditional love, continuous encouragement and reinforcement, patience, forgiveness, generosity, warmth and attentiveness? People who practice these values consistently with the important people in their lives are much happier than people who do not.
What are your values with regard to money and financial success? Do you believe in the importance of honesty, industry, thrift, frugality, education, excellent performance, quality and persistence? People who practice these values are far more successful in their financial lives than those who do not, and far faster as well.
What about your health? Do you believe in the importance of selfdiscipline, self-mastery, and self-control, with regard to diet, exercise and rest? Do you set high standards for your levels of health and fitness and then work every day to live up to those standards? People who practice these values live longer, healthier lives than people who do not.
Think Only About What You Want Remember, you become what you think about — most of the time. Successful, happy people think about their values, and how they can live and practice those values in every part of their lives, every single day.
The big payoff is that, the more you live your life consistent with your values, the happier, healthier, more positive and energetic you will be.
Be True To Yourself
Perhaps the most important value of all is that of integrity. A billionaire once said to me, “Integrity is not so much a value in itself; it is rather the value that guarantees all the other values.” Wow! This was a great insight for me. Once you have decided that you are going to live consistent with a value, your level of integrity determines whether or not you follow through on your commitment. The more you discipline yourself to live consistent with the very best you know, the greater is your level of personal integrity. And the higher your level of integrity, the happier and more powerful you will feel in everything you do.
Truly great men and women are always described as having high levels of integrity. They live their lives consistent with their highest values, even when no one is looking. Mediocre men and women on the other hand, are always cutting corners and compromising their integrity, especially when no one is watching.
Live In Truth With Yourself and Others Decide today to be a man or woman of honor. Resolve to tell the truth, and to live in truth with yourself and others. Crystallize your values in each area of your life. Write them down. Think of how you would behave if you were living consistent with those values, and then, refuse to compromise them for any reason.
Once you accept complete responsibility for your life, and for everything that happens to you, and then create an ideal picture of your perfect future and clarify your values, you are now ready to begin setting clear, specific goals in every area of your life. You are now on the launching ramp and ready to take off toward the stars.
Clarify Your Values:
Make a list of your 3-5 most important values in life today. What do you really believe in, and stand for?
What qualities and values are you best known for today among the people who know you?
What do you consider to be the most important values guiding your relationships with others in your life?
What are your values regarding money and financial success? Are you practicing these values daily?
Describe your picture of an ideal person, the person you would most want to be, if you had no limitations?
Write your own obituary, to be read to your friends and family at your funeral, exactly as you would like to be remembered.
What one change could you make in your behavior today that would help you to live in greater harmony with your values?
Conclusion
Take Action Today
You have now learned perhaps the most comprehensive strategy for setting and achieving goals that has ever been put together in one book. By practicing these rules and principles, you can accomplish more in the coming months and years than most people accomplish in a lifetime.
The most important quality you can develop for lifelong success is the habit of taking action on your plans, goals, ideas and insights. The more often you try, the sooner you will triumph. There is a direct relationship between the number of things you attempt and your accomplishments in life. Here are the 21 steps for setting and achieving goals, and for living a wonderful life.
Unlock Your Potential – Always remember that your true potential is unlimited. Whatever you have accomplished in life up to now has only been a preparation for the amazing things you can accomplish in the future.
Take Charge of Your Life – You are completely responsible for everything you are today, for everything you think, say and do, and for everything you become from this moment forward. Refuse to make excuses or to blame others. Instead, make progress toward your goals every day.
Create Your Own Future – Imagine that you have no limitations on what you can do, be or have in the months and years ahead. Think about and plan your future as if you had all the resources you needed to create any life that you desire.
Clarify Your Values – Your innermost values and convictions define you as a person. Take the time to think through what you really believe in and care about in each area of your life. Refuse to deviate from what you feel is right for you.
Determine Your True Goals – Decide for yourself what you really want to accomplish in every area of your life. Clarity is essential for happiness and high performance living.
Decide Upon Your Major Definite Purpose – You need a central purpose to build your life around. There must be a single goal that will help you to achieve your other goals more than any other. Decide what it is for you and work on it all the time.
Analyze Your Beliefs – Your beliefs about your own abilities, and about the world around you, will have more of an impact on your feelings and actions than any other factor. Make sure that your beliefs are positive and consistent with achieving everything that is possible for you.
Start At The Beginning – Do a careful analysis of your starting point before you set off toward the achievement of your goal. Determine your exact situation today and be both honest and realistic about what you want to accomplish in the future.
Measure Your Progress – Set clear benchmarks, measures, metrics and scorecards for yourself on the road to your goals. These measures help you to assess how well you are doing and enable you to make necessary adjustments and corrections as you go along.
Remove The Roadblocks – Success boils down to the ability to solve problems and remove obstacles on the path to your goal. Fortunately, problem solving is a skill you can master with practice, and thereby achieve your goals faster than you ever thought possible.
Become An Expert In Your Field – You have within you, right now, the ability to be one of the very best at what you do, to join the top 10% in your field. Set this as a goal, work on it every day, and never stop working at it until you get there.
Associate With The Right People – Your choices of people with whom to live, work and socialize will have more of an effect on your success than any other factor. Resolve today to associate only with people you like, respect and admire. Fly with the eagles if you want to be an eagle yourself.
Make a Plan Of Action – An ordinary person with a well thought-out plan will run circles around a genius without one. Your ability to plan and organize in advance will enable you to accomplish even the biggest and most complex goals.
Manage Your Time Well – Learn how to double and triple your productivity, performance and output by practicing practical and proven time management principles. Always set priorities before you begin, and then concentrate on the most valuable use of your time.
Review Your Goals Daily – Take time every day, every week, every month to review and reevaluate your goals and objectives. Make sure that you are still on track and that you are still working toward things that are important to you. Be prepared to modify your goals and plans with new information.
Visualize Your Goals Continually – Direct the movies of your mind. Your imagination is your preview of your life’s coming attractions. Repeatedly “see” your goals as if they already existed. Your clear, exciting mental images activate all your mental powers and attract your goals into your life.
Activate Your Superconscious Mind – You have within you and around you an incredible power that will bring you everything and anything you want or need. Take the time regularly to tap into this amazing source of ideas and insights for goal attainment.
Remain Flexible At All Times – Be clear about your goal but be flexible about the process of achieving it. Be constantly open to new, better, faster, cheaper ways to achieve the same result, and if something is not working, be willing to try a different approach.
Unlock Your Inborn Creativity – You have more creative ability to solve problems and come up with new and better ways for goal attainment than you have ever used. You are a potential genius. You can tap into your intelligence to overcome any obstacle and achieve any goal you can set for yourself.
Do Something Every Day – Use the “Momentum Principle of Success” by getting started toward your goal and then doing something every day that moves you closer to what you want to accomplish. Action orientation is essential to your success.
Persist Until You Succeed – In the final analysis, your ability to persist longer than anyone else is the one quality that will guarantee great success in life. Persistence is self-discipline in action, and is the true measure of your belief in yourself. Resolve in advance that you will never, never give up!
There they are, the twenty-one most important principles of goal setting and goal achieving ever discovered. Your regular review and practice of these principles will enable you to live an extraordinary life. Nothing can stop you now.
Good luck!
