New Year Resolutions Wrap Up

Well, by now you should all be well into your goal setting efforts for 2010!

But if you were a bit slow off the mark or just couldn’t get organised – don’t worry! While the start of a new year is a nice refreshing trigger to start your goal setting efforts, the reality is that there are many other triggers you can use to embark on your goal setting journey, or even to re-evaluate your goals.

Birthdays, seasons, the start of the month and even every Monday are all great times to set goals. In fact, you can actually set goals anytime you like! Any epiphany will do!

I’d like to share a recent experience with you, about the role of dreams in your life’s journey. Dreams are an important part of life, afterall, many of the worlds successful entrepreneurs started with a dream. But it’s important to understand the role of dreams in your life and what you should do with them.

I ran into an old college friend of mine the other day, and we started catching up on old times and what we’ve been doing since graduation. He actually became quite down in the dumps when he realised that all the dreams he’d had as a college student just hadn’t come to fruition all these years later.

So I asked the question, “What have you done to realise your dreams?”. The vacant look gave me the answer.

I remember at College, we always referred to this guy as a dreamer because he had all these great images of how his life would be. He dreamt of dating a supermodel, he dreamt of being a hero, he dreamt of a stella career, and he dreamt of writing an award winning novel.

Some people used to joke about his dreaming, because at times he did seem to drift off into a world of his own. But I always thought it was a good thing to be a dreamer – afterall, many of the worlds successful entrepreneurs started with a dream.

So I talked it over with him, and shared my view of the role of dreams in life’s journey. From this discussion, we identified 3 important facts about dreams – so I thought I’d share these with you.

1. Dreams don’t come true the way you dream them

When we were planning a family, I used to dream of situations and circumstances with our then unborn children. I used to dream about how we would deal with certain discipline issues and education, and so on. Now obviously the chances of those exact situations actually happening are zilch. In fact, my early dreams included two baby girls – and we ended up with two beautiful boys!

But did I get upset when we had two boys? No, because it’s the intent of the dream that matters, rather than the events and sequences of the actual dream.

To me, these dreams were about how I wanted our family to behave – a loving, nurturing family that deals with problems in a positive and constructive way. And that’s what we’ve been working towards as a family, with the inevitable roller-coasters along the way.

So the first thing to understand about dreams is that they don’t come true the way you dream them – it’s practically impossible for them to do so unless you can predict the future. And it’s OK that your dreams don’t come true the way you dream them – it’s the intent of the dream that’s important and that you need to understand, and then make the intent of the dream come true.

2. Not all dreams are meant to come true

Now, I dream a lot – both when I’m asleep and also day dreams. And some of these dreams are reflections of what I want to achieve in life, and others are really just for fun.

For example, I learnt how to play piano as a kid and I still really enjoy playing for a bit of relaxation. So, occasionally I dream about being a concert pianist. Now if I really wanted to be a concert pianist and put in all the long hours of practice and hard work, I may be able to get to the level of concert pianist. But I never have.

And it doesn’t bother me either. Why? Because this dream just isn’t that important to me. It’s just a bit of fun.

So, the second thing to understand about dreams is that not all of them are meant to come true. Instead, you need to sort through your dreams and determine which ones are really important to you – which ones are you prepared to put in the effort to achieve – and then realise that the others are just a bit of entertainment for your mind. And there’s nothing wrong with a good dream or story for entertainment (just like TV).

And be realistic!

3. Dreams don’t come true unless you make them come true

And this is where my college mate was completely stunned. He fully expected his dreams to fall into his lap without any effort on his part at all. And while this may happen to the one in a billion person on the planet, you can bet it won’t happen to you!

You can also bet that those successful entrepreneurs that started with a dream didn’t sit around waiting for it to happen – they made it happen!

I used the example of his dream to write a novel and asked, “What have you done about writing your novel”. His response was , “It hasn’t come to me yet”. With a bit of probing, I found out that he was essentially expecting to wake up one morning with a fully developed novel in his head that all he had to do was put it onto paper.

Now this is really where goal setting can turn your dreams into something tangible that can be achieved, and where you can develop a nice little action plan to start working towards your dreams.

So we worked through a strategy for his novel, and the first step was to research how to write a novel (there’s some great stuff on the internet).

So the moral of the story is that it’s OK to be a dreamer – in fact, it’s great to have dreams and visions of how you want your life to be. The important thing is to be realistic about what your dreams mean and which ones you really want to achieve. Once you know this, and develop a strategy to achieve them, then there’s no stopping you!

But no matter what your dreams are, or when or why you get started on your goal setting journey, you’re going to need some resources to help you. So here are some FREE ones to help you on your journey:

Life Planning Program is a workbook style program that you can work through at your own pace, and is supported by practical tools, templates and assessments – which are all FREE!

We like to call this program a ‘Life Planning’ Program rather than a ‘Goal Setting’ program - the term ‘Goal Setting' implies something specific.

Or you could try one of the following FREE E-Courses on goal setting.

• Goal Setting E-Course: Foundations and Keystones – this course helps you work through the foundations and keystones of the goal setting process by helping you understand what’s really important to you and how YOU influence your own goal setting destiny. This course is great for goal setting beginners!
• Goal Setting E-Course: Making your Roadmap to success – this course is a natural progression from the Goal Setting Foundations E-Course and helps you turn these strong foundations into achievable goals through the effective and proven process of SMART goal setting and action planning.
• Mini goal setting E-course – this is a shorter version of the above 2 courses rolled into one simple E-course. This course is great if you already have some goal setting experience under your belt and understand the basics of the goal setting process. The course refreshes the most important parts of the goal setting process, so you don’t lose your way.

These E-courses and the workbook are all based on the same concept of understanding yourself first, before you can understand what goals you really want to achieve. We’ve had some extremely positive feedback from the workbook (the e-courses are based on the workbook) so please give it a go. And it’s FREE.

Here’s some more mostly free resources:

• 7 Little Known Goal Setting Tips - FREE E-book from Arina Nikitina, or read her 5 Success Tips
• How to Create the Life You Always Wanted - Free Ebook
• Video E-Course on Mind Mapping, and try the FREE trial of NovaMind Map software
• Try the FREE Trial of Goal Pro goal setting software to see how it’s done
• FREE ebook – “The Time Management Secrets that will Set You Free”
• GoalSync – for keeping your goals in your mind
• Goals on Track – online system for tracking your goals
• Personal Strategic Plan from the Goals Guy that steps you through the process of preparing your own blueprint for your perfect life

So until the next edition of the Goal Kicker, happy thoughts and dreams. Let’s see if we can help you achieve them.

Best regards