Ultimate Goal Setting Made Easy

By Paul Piotrowski on Mar 23, 2007 in Law of Attraction, Wealth and Finance, Productivity

“The year is 2013. Miraculously the world didn’t come to an end last year as some have predicted. Sure there have been changes, but that’s a part of life. This morning I sit in the kitchen, excited to open the wrinkled envelope and I can’t help to feel a bit nervous. I can’t believe it’s been 5 years already. Wow. Well… let’s open this up and have a look.”

No, this isn’t the opening scene to a new science fiction flick coming out this weekend; it’s a description of you exactly five years from tomorrow morning, perhaps. I’m getting ahead of myself a little bit, so let me back up a bit.

Thirteen years ago I began my journey of personal development after picking up my first self-help book. I didn’t advertise that I was reading such a book in fear of ridicule from my friends. Today I look around me as I write this and I see bookshelves all around me full of such books. Who would have known? In high school I hated reading.

In my years of reading and utilizing personal development techniques to better my life, one of the most common yet often overlooked aspects of personal development is proper goal setting. Like it or not, goal setting is as important to the success of your life as an architectural floor plan is to building your house. Notice I didn’t say that it was mandatory; I just said it was important. Why is goal setting important to enjoying a successful life? The reason is very simple. If you don’t have a plan for your life, then your life will be planned by those around you. That may seem like an easy path to take, but it is not going to be a fulfilling path.

Before I share with you what I consider the most effective form of goal setting, let me assure you I’ve heard and thought of all the reasons not to do goal setting already. Here are a few of my favorites:

“ I don’t like planning, you have to live in the moment, live in the now, who knows what will happen tomorrow, let’s enjoy today while it’s here and we’ll worry about tomorrow when it comes!”

“Goal setting takes too long. Then the minute I finish setting all my goals, my life changes and I have to re-start my goal setting all over again. What’s the point?”

“I hate setting goals, because they just remind me what I haven’t accomplished yet and I get depressed. To make matters worse, when I fail to reach my goals I feel even worse. It’s better to just see what happens and be grateful for whatever I can get.”

…

Let me share with you my philosophy on goal setting and how it transcends all of these excuses and any other ones you’ve been thinking. Firstly, let’s quickly get past the whole terminology issue. I’m going to call this process goal setting. I realize that some of you may say that it should be called something else like creating a vision, setting intentions, determining your outcomes or milestones, imagining you ideal scene or whatever other name you want to call this process. You may call it what you wish. Just to keep things simple, I’ll call it goal setting, but you may refer to it any way you wish, ok?

Ok, so what is my philosophy on goal setting? Well, it’s actually very simple. Let’s go through it right now and you’ll see how easy and effective it can be in your life.

Firstly, what I do is I take my life and I break it down into these categories:
1) Health and Fitness
2) Wealth and Finances
3) Family and Relationships
4) Fun and Relaxation
5) Career and Contribution
6) Personal Growth and Spirituality

You may re-label the categories to match your taste. For example, if you prefer to call the second category “Financial Independence” or “Total Abundance”, that’s fine. The important thing is that you realize that it has to do with the financial side of your life. If you don’t consider yourself a spiritual person, just remove spirituality from the list and keep it as “Personal Growth” or just “Growth” if you like. You may also want to add a 7th and 8th category if you wish, but for me I find these cover pretty much everything.

Ok, now all you do is you fire up a word processor, or grab six pieces of paper, or just grab a notebook and start with the first category. On top, you simply write: “Health and Fitness”. Below that, you write the words: “Vision:” Now what you do is you just close your eyes and you think forward into the future a bit. It doesn’t really matter how many years into the future you look, but think somewhere between three and ten years into the future. Basically an amount of time you would consider “a long time”. Let’s say that’s five years from now for you. So think five years into the future and imagine that everything in your life between today and that day went absolutely perfectly in that category. So with “Health and Fitness” perhaps you finally had the self discipline to stick to that diet plan, or to finally make the progress at the gym that you hoped for. Perhaps you achieved the things you wanted in certain sports you play or activities you’re involved in. Think about being in the future five years from now and imagine that in this category of your life, everything fell into place, all the stars aligned and you were able to get to a point here where you are very happy and content with yourself.

Now take that vision, and write it out in as much detail as you can. Remember not to judge it, not to worry about how realistic it is. It is only important to capture what you would like to happen in that period of time, not what you’re guessing will happen. It’s not about making accurate predictions of the future. It’s about writing a story of what could happen if everything went perfectly in your life somehow.

Remember to capture any specific details that are important to you, but don’t focus on them too much if you’re not concerned by them. Meaning, for some people it might be very exciting for them to write out a specific statement like “I now weight 175lbs…” while others might be more excited by a more generic statement such as “I feel healthy and light and have completely overcome my addiction to junk food…” Whatever is important to you is what you should write. Don’t try to go into specifics if they are not important to you, but don’t leave them out if they are important to you.

What next? Next you move onto the next category and follow the exact same procedure. You write the name of the category on top, and you write your vision of that category below that. You make the assumption that everything went perfectly in your life in that category while you envision it and then you capture what you see in writing. It’s really that simple. Do this with all six ( or 7 or 8 ) categories.

Now what? Here’s what I would suggest you do next. If you wrote your categories out on paper, go and make a photocopy of the pages. If you wrote it out in a word processor, print out a copy of each of the six category pages. Then, grab a regular sized white envelope and put a copy of the six pieces of paper in the envelope and seal it. On the front put “DO NOT OPEN UNTIL _____,__, 20__” filling in today’s date 5 years from now. Now take that envelope and store it safely somewhere where it won’t get lost in the next five years. For example you could stick it in your high school yearbook. You probably don’t look at it more then once every five years anyways. Or you could store it in your wedding album, or any other place you keep important documents.

What is this for? It’s basically a time-capsule that allows your future self to see what your vision of the future was five years ago. The reason why this is so powerful is because your subconscious mind now knows you’re serious. About 8 years ago I did something like this. I wrote out 35 goals I wanted to accomplish in life as part of a goal setting workshop I did at the time and we were encouraged to write out goals that we would consider amazing even if they seemed totally unachievable at the time. Last week I was cleaning out some files and I found this booklet and read it. I was totally amazed at my list. I have already accomplished and reached 31 out of the 35 goals I wrote out and the other 4 are no longer desirable for me. I was amazed at how many of the goals I achieved and how specific some of them actually were. For example I wrote out that I wanted a house with a big room with a pool table in it. The funny thing is that I bought a pool table about 3 years ago and totally didn’t even remember writing a goal to do that 8 years ago. I just saw one at the store, had the space for it and decided to buy it. I didn’t realize that I was checking off an item off of an 8 year old goal list. The pool table was one of the minor items on my list but it’s still cool to see how the subconscious mind didn’t forget about it.

It was really cool and inspirational to read my goal list from 8 years ago. It really made me feel grateful for what I’ve been able to accomplish in my life since then. I invite you to do the same. Set some goals and then seal them for your future self to read one day. Not only will it be inspiring for you to see them in the future, but also your subconscious mind will go to work for you to create and attract your dreams whether you’re conscious of it or not.

Let’s assume you’ve done this now. You’ve written a vision for each of your life categories and you’ve sealed a copy of them into an envelope to be opened five years from now. What now? Well, you keep one copy for yourself in this moment and you read it over from time to time whenever you feel inspired to do so. If you feel inspired to create a “TODO” list of action steps to reach some of the goals you set, you may do so, but do not force it. Let your spirit guide you towards the things you want in it’s own way allowing the flow of life to take you there, instead of trying to dictate each step of the way.

This is where most goal setting plans fail long term in my opinion. They try to over-plan everything to the last detail and we rebel against them because we don’t like to feel like slaves to our goals. We want to be able to reach our dreams, but not at the expense of losing our daily freedom to make choices.

Here are some additional questions you may have:

“Are you saying I shouldn’t have a formal goal/action step planning process?”

No. If you wish to take your visions/goals for each category and break them down into specific action steps and milestones, go right ahead. There is nothing wrong with that. If that’s the direction you’re motivated in going, that’s great, but realize that in certain parts of your life you may not want to be so regimented with your plans. Or maybe you may feel motivated to be very detailed in one category, and leave yourself open to be spontaneous in others. You may want to totally plan out your finances and health categories but leave your fun and relationship categories totally open with just your future vision to guide you. That’s perfectly fine.

“Should I set a timeframe for my goals?”

For the visions you create in this exercise, I would not recommend it. I’ve never had any luck with that. I simply look far enough into the future for my mind to think “that’s a long time” and then I work on visualizing an ideal scenario in my mind of what that future may look like. I don’t set a specific deadline or target date in stone, I simply let life bring it to me as soon as possible. If you create action items or milestones towards reaching your visions, you may want to set target dates for those, but I don’t think setting a target date for your visions is necessary. It just creates the anxiety of “What if I don’t reach my goal?” and it also sets a target date you might not need to be restricted to! What if the circumstances allow the goal to be accomplished sooner? Why wait until the date you set? I prefer to just leave the vision as “ASAP” rather then set a date. For individual action items, I would set dates. So if your goal is to be 175lbs, I wouldn’t set a date for that. But as a milestone towards that if you create an action step of “Join local gym.” you may want to set a target date for that.

“Why do we need to mark the envelope 5 years into the future then?”

The envelope just holds your visions of the future. It doesn’t mean any of those visions have to be totally reached by then. It simply shows you what you were thinking five years ago, because we are VERY forgetful with such things. I have an excellent memory and I can tell you that I totally did not remember writing down “pool table” 8 years ago on my list. It was a total surprise for me to see that on there.

If you have any further questions about this topic, feel free to post your questions in our forums at http://www.paulpiotrowski.ca/forum and I’ll be glad to help.

Happy Goal Setting!

Paul