DavidDeFord

Visualization can be a powerful tool for you to keep your motivation high enough to achieve your goals. By seeing or feeling your ultimate success, you can build your enthusiasm and strengthen your resolve.

Affirmations

A powerful tool in achieving your desires is to build confidence in your ability to accomplish them. If you don’t feel you have the power, you won’t. However, if you know that you can achieve your desire—you will.

Confidence is an important key in accomplishment.

Several times a day, tell yourself that you will make it. Experience the feelings of success. Let your subconscious know that you have the tools, the wisdom, and the desire to accomplish your dream.

By doing so every day, you will gain the confidence you need. Be consistent. When you begin to doubt, replace those feelings with ones of confidence.

I am not advocating affirmations, where you pretend you already have achieved your dream. That’s where you say to yourself, “I am fit and trim” to yourself over and over again. If you are fat, you should continue to tell yourself you are fat. Just don’t say to yourself, “I am fat, and I’ll always be fat.”

If you practice affirmations, manipulating your mind to think that you already have what you want, you will likely feel no compulsion to change.

I once entered into a business opportunity that promised great earnings. The person persuading me to join the venture said that he was on tap to make $300,000 in his first year. I jumped in with great enthusiasm and expectation.

In meetings, I heard dozens of people saying they were making upper-six-figure incomes. I soon learned that the only way to persuade prospects was to make that same claim. Also, I finally figured out that the other associates were practicing the principle of affirmations. They taught their fellow-associates to act, think, and talk as if they had already achieved their dream. In other words, they lied to me and to every other prospect.

Affirmations can be lies to yourself and others. Don’t fall into that trap. Be honest with yourself. Admit your lack. It’s okay to see and feel success before it begins—just don’t lie to yourself.

Useful Affirmations

To make affirmations work, you must always realize that by feeling the success you seek, you understand that you have not yet achieved them. You should affirm that you CAN have them—that you DESERVE them. But your affirmations are seen always in the context that you WILL achieve them.

Use All Five Senses

Visualize your achievement with all of your senses. By involving them all, you can better perceive the victory. For instance, if you want to get to your ideal weight, use your senses like this:

• Sight: visualize yourself at your goal weight
• Taste: taste the victory
• Feel: feel the excitement at having accomplished something so big
• Hear: hear the compliments you receive for looking so good
• Smell: well, smell the rice cakes you will never have to eat again.

Experiencing your success before it occurs will bring to you greater confidence and stronger will.

Selected quotes:

The basic goal-reaching principle is to understand that you go as far as you can see, and when you get there you will always be able to see farther. Zig Ziglar

Visualize this thing you want. See it, feel it, believe in it. Make your mental blueprint and begin. Robert Collier

One of the most important steps of goal achievement is to determine “WHY” you want to achieve your goals, and “WHO” is counting on you. We all have our reasons for desiring achievement.

I need to reach my ideal weight because I have had a great deal of heart disease in my family. To reduce my risk, I must reduce my waist. My wife is counting on me to retire along with her. We have missions to serve and grandchildren to watch grow up. My grown children count on me for support—they need me. I must stay healthy for them.

Why do you want to reach your dreams?

Who is counting on you? Write down their names. By reviewing these reasons regularly, you can stay focused on your goals, and keep your incentive strong.

Here are some examples of reasons to achieve the listed goal:

Become debt-free

• To use your whole income on living and growing your nest egg
• To reduce your stress
• To position you to live on less in case of lay-off or industry downturn
• To position you to take the risk of going into your dream business

Become fit

• To feel better
• To increase your energy and endurance
• To improve your mental functioning
• To keep up with your children’s activities
• To achieve some dream, like crossing the Grand Canyon, running a 10K or marathon, or bicycling coast-to-coast across America

Receive an education

• To get into the career you have dreamed about
• To start your dream business
• To open your career possibilities and give yourself choices
• To advance in your current company
• To stop working for a parent

Seek a career you love

• To use your talents more productively
• To make more money
• To improve your self-image
• To better love your work

As you focus on “WHY” you want to achieve your goal, and on “WHO” is counting on your success, you position yourself to dig deeper when the way becomes difficult. These tools help you stay on track in the inevitable tough times.

Lately, stop-smoking products have begun to use this concept in their commercials. In one, they show little kids and tell some of the things we do for them because we love them:

• We make them wear coats in cold weather
• We don’t let them swim alone
• We don’t let them swim until after an hour after they have eaten

Then, they talk about seeing them grow up and strongly state that if you don’t stop smoking, you won’t be able to see them through.

Identifying reasons, higher purposes, for your goals will help you accomplish them.

Difficulty is a necessary ingredient in lofty achievement—else the achievement cannot be considered lofty. In the movie, A League of Their Own, Geena Davis’ character, Dottie, the catcher of the highly-ranked women’s baseball team, tells her manager, Tom Hanks’ character Jimmy that she is quitting—that it just got too hard. He responds, “It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard everyone would do it. Hard is what makes it great!”

Achieving your dreams should be difficult—it needs to be, that’s what makes it great. That is the essence of achievement.

Selected quotes:
“Reasons come first. Answers come second.” Jim Rohn

“The sweetness of victory is magnified by the effort it took to achieve it.” Chris Widener

“Success is not measured by what you accomplish but by the opposition you have encountered, and the courage with which you have maintained the struggle against overwhelming odds.” Orison Swett Marden

“Show me someone who has done something worthwhile, and I’ll show you someone who has overcome adversity.” Lou Holtz

Selecting your goals, of course, is a very important step. You must choose wisely. Most of us short change ourselves in selecting goals. We often choose well below our dreams and our abilities.

Zig Ziglar says that if you don’t know where you want to go, you’ll surely get there. The first step we take in planning any vacation is to decide where we want to go, or what we want to do.

Where do you want to go in life? What do you want to do, have, and be? Do you want to lose your extra pounds? How about becoming debt free? What earnings or sales goals have you set?

Success is a choice. Failure is usually the result of not choosing.

Your Dream List
Begin your goal selection process by making a dream list. What would you wish for yourself if you had no limitations? Jot down anything that comes to mind.

Don’t let your brain jump in front of your heart. Let it flow, writing down whatever comes to your mind—don’t argue with yourself.

In fact, as you prepare your dream list, expand it to 100 things I would like to do before I die. List what you would like to do or accomplish on your own, and what you would like to do you’re your family. Include your spouse or significant other in this dreaming.

One Great Thing

Now, what one great thing would you dare to dream if success was certain—writing a book, becoming completely debt-free, a college degree? What is your greatest dream? Write it down.

Henry David Thoreau said,

“Have you built your castles in the air? Good, that’s where they should be built. Now, go to work and build foundations under them.”

Examine your great dream. How badly do you want it? Is it worth the cost in time, funds, and energy? It probably is worth it if it’s your great dream. Now, how long should it take you to realize the dream? Will it take a year, two, three, or a decade? Set an ultimate date you want to strive for realization of your dream.

Step Goals
Make some related short-range and mid-range step goals to move you in the direction of your dream. For example, if you want to become debt-free, add up the total amount of your debt. Then, decide what you want to reduce it to by the end of the month, and then set another goal of where you want to have your debt at the end of the quarter. Write them down.

Now that you have selected your great dream, and set long-, mid-, and short-range goals for achieving it, select another dream from your list. If possible, find one that compliments your great dream. Also, find one or two dreams that are unrelated to the area of your life of your great dream. If your great dream is related to your career, select a dream or two in your personal, family, or spiritual life. Balance your goal achievement efforts to insure that you don’t give away what is most important in pursuit of one dream.

Select Four or Five

Now that you have identified the Great Dream, select four or five current major goals. If you choose more than four or five major goals, you will have little ability to keep the focus you will need to make them all happen.

For instance, I would like to:

• Reach my ideal weight;
• Become 100% debt-free
• Write and publish best-sellers
• Build a world-wide speaking career
• Have over 100,000 subscribers to my e-zine
• See all of my children fully committed to my faith
• Leave corporate life
• Escort my wife into her dream home
• Spend several weeks per year in humanitarian work
• Ride my bicycle across the United States (in one trip)
• Volunteer several nights per month
• Donate $100,000 per year to my favorite charity
• Hike the Grand Canyon rim-to-rim
• Serve multiple missions for our church
• Float or ride bicycle the entire length of the Mississippi River
• Send my kids and their spouses to the locations of their church missions
• See Niagara Falls, Yosemite, the Black Hills, Palmyra, New York, Kirtland, Ohio
• Hike all or some of the Appalachian Trail
• etc.

All of these I want to share with my wife.

It makes no sense for me to concentrate on all of these goals today. I have selected five. As I achieve those, I’ll add more.

What Will These Goals Make of Me?

Ask yourself the following for each goal:

• “Will achieving this goal strengthen my family?”
• “Will it contribute to or violate my values?”
• “Will it keep me from deserving the achievement of a great dream?”
• “Can I become committed to achieving this goal?”

There is a great difference between being committed to a goal and being merely interested in it. In waking up on a rainy morning, an interested jogger must decide whether to run or not. A committed jogger must decide which rain gear to wear.

What Do You Need to Know?

In order to achieve your selected goals, what do you need to know? List the information you will need to obtain. How will you obtain it? Do you need a college degree? What books do you need to read? Perform a web search. You may find an e-course or an e-zine dealing with the subject.

Go after the required information aggressively. There is no information you can’t obtain.

Carry Them With You

Select the short-, mid-, and long-range goals related to these other dreams as you did for your great dream.

Now that you have selected these interim goals and written them down, type them into your computer and print them out, or write them on a small piece of paper that you can carry around with you. You may want to encase them in plastic to keep them looking fresh. Pull them out and review them several times a day—as you wait for a class or meeting to begin. Focus on your dreams and goals. The more you focus on your dreams, the quicker you’ll realize them.

You become what you think about all of the time. Thus, by referring to your goals often, they will become an important part of you.

The act of writing your goals on paper or in your computer will stimulate you to action. If you don’t write them down, you are just wishing—and wishing means passively hoping.

Mark McCormack reports in his book What They Don’t Teach you at Harvard Business School of a Harvard study conducted on the 1979 graduates of their MBA program. They asked the nearly graduated students, “Have you set clear, written goals for your future and made plans to accomplish them?” They found that only 3 percent of the graduates had written goals and plans. Thirteen percent had goals, but did not write them. And the remaining 84% had no specific goals. They only looked toward graduation and their summer plans.

Ten years later, they re-interviewed the class members. They found that those who had goals, but had not written them had average earnings twice of those 84% who had had no goals at all. Shockingly, the 3% who had written goals and plans before graduation had average earnings ten times higher than the other 97%.

Written goals count!

My Wife’s Example

As our children began to grow up and leave home, my wife, who had been a stay-at-home mom for over 20 years, needed to decide what she would next do with her life. At first, she went to work part-time as a receptionist in a dental office. Then, she had an opportunity at that office to begin assisting the dentist with his patients. She liked the work, and considered going back to school to become a dental hygienist. As we discussed her options, she said aloud the great dream of going to dental school and becoming a dentist. In the instant of saying the words, she knew in her heart that she should pursue it.

As she counted the cost, she saw that she would first need four years of undergraduate work, then four years of dental school. She anticipated the school debt, and the time commitment. It still felt right.

Eight years later, at the age of 49, she graduated from Creighton Dental School as a full Doctor of Dental Surgery. She had accomplished her great dream. She now loves practicing dentistry, and knows that the great difficulty of those school years have paid off.

You can do the same—your great dream has waited long enough. Build your castles in the air, and make plans to reach it.

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Selected quotes:

“Goals give you more than a reason to get up in the morning; they are an incentive to keep you going all day. Goals tend to tap the deeper resources and draw the best out of life.” Harvey Mackay

“Goals. There’s no telling what you can do when you get inspired by them. There’s no telling what you can do when you believe in them. There’s no telling what will happen when you act upon them.”  Jim Rohn

“Goals in writing are dreams with deadlines.” Brian Tracy

“Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men.” Goethe

“Man, alone, has the power to transform his thoughts into physical reality; man, alone, can dream and make his dreams come true.” Napoleon Hill