How To Set The Right Goals

“One reason why people don’t achieve their goals is because they don’t know what part of them choose the goal.”  ~ John Kehoe

I think goal setting is one of the more important elements of personal growth.  Without goals there is no direction, no life and ultimately no growth.  Setting goals facilitates your evolution.

If you’re going to set goals, you want to make sure they are the “right” goals.  When I say the “right” goals I don’t mean that I’m right and you’re wrong.  There is no right and wrong, there is only what works and what doesn’t work.  You want to set goals that work.

How To Set The Right Goals

There are a lot of tools out there to help you set the right goals.  Just keep in mind that these are just tools and nothing more.  You could have all the right tools for goal setting but they would be useless if you didn’t set the right goals to begin with.

Setting the right goals means getting back to the basics; the principles that help you understand why goals manifest in the first place.  There are two principles that I follow for setting the right goals:

  • They have magnitude (or feeling power)
  • They have direction (meaning they are specific and measurable)

You want to think of velocity when setting the right goal.  If you think back to your math class, velocity is a vector; and a vector has two parts: it has magnitude and direction.  The right goals follow both of these principles.

How To Set The Right Goals – Two Principles

How to Set the Right Goals - Image 1

How to Set the Right Goals – Magnitude

The right goals have velocity.  They have magnitude and direction.

The magnitude of your goal is the feeling behind it.  It gives your goal power.  It puts you in gear.  It drives you to take action.

Taken from the velocity analogy, it’s the speed of your goal.  The greater the magnitude, the faster you go.

How to Set the Right Goals - Image 2

Feeling is absolutely necessary when setting the right goal.  It’s your feeling that brings you into resonance with what you want.  When you resonate with what you want, it attracts the events, people and conditions into your life through the Law of Attraction.

If you want your goals to manifest, feel them.  That means choosing a goal that feels right to you.  It means choosing what you really want.  It sounds simple enough doesn’t it?

It is, but most people still seem to miss the boat.

They don’t set the right goals.  The don’t set goals that feel right to them.  They don’t go after what they really want, they go after what they think they can get.  And since an intellectual goal doesn’t associate feeling power, it is almost useless.

How to Set the Right Goals - Image 3

3 Reasons Why You Don’t Go After What You Really Want

If going after what you really want associates feeling with your goal, then why don’t more people do it?  In my experience there have been three reasons why people don’t go after what they really want.  Here they are:

  • You don’t know what you want – Some people will say, “I don’t know what I really want,” and since they don’t know, they can’t possibly generate those powerful feelings.  So my answer to them is, “find out what you want.”  That means taking a pen/pencil and writing out what you want.  Then taking that initial draft and rewriting and refining it until it feels right for you.  It’s the most basic and necessary way to organize your thinking when setting your goals.
  • You fear failure or success – Another group of people have fear stop them.  They’re afraid that they’ll fail.  The opposite is also true.  Some people are afraid that they’ll succeed and that scares the crap out of them.  And since that fear immobilizes them they consistently recreate the pattern of failing – in other words failing has become a habit.
  • You’re going after what someone else wants – The third group of people will say, “I want a Ferrari, trophy wife and a million dollars in the bank.”  But when you really sit down and listen to what they want, you hear something completely different. You hear what they truly want based on how they feel – and those feelings never lie.

Now here’s the interesting part.  All three of these reasons are non-existent when you’re in harmony with your goal.  In other words, if you set the right goal (meaning it feels right to you), then your reasons go away.

That’s where you want to be; the point where you feel really good about your goal.  That can be a challenge for a great number of us especially when there is resistance; resistance is when a part of us that doesn’t completely agree with that goal.

The Right Goal Triggers Unconscious Resistance

The problem is unconscious.  Your unconscious resistance is what prevents you from feeling your goal.  When you or anyone else goes after what they really want, in most cases there is going to be some form of unconscious resistance.

Why?

Because you’re going after what you really want – and for most of us, that’s something we’ve never done before, and since it hasn’t been done, your mind is gong to coming up with excuses to avoid doing it.

Don’t believe me?

Here are some of the more common ones:

  • I’m not good enough
  • I’m not smart enough
  • I’m too stupid
  • I’m not ready yet
  • I’m too smart
  • I’m too young
  • I’m too old

Keep in mind that these are more than just excuses.  They are your limiting beliefs.  Unconscious thought patterns that have affected the way you consistently act and behave.

Stuart Lichtman calls these your “unconscious blockers.”

In Stuart Lichtman’s book: How to Get Lot’s of Money for Anything Fast he explains in detail how to identify and resolve these blockers.

He teaches two processes: the Base Reframing Process and the Super Achievement Clearing Process.

I’ve used both of these processes and highly recommend them.  I prefer the Base Reframing Process because it gets at those deep unconscious blocks.  You can learn more about Stuart’s book in my review: How to Get Lot’s of Money for Anything Fast!

Once you’ve resolved your blocker, you’ll be well on your way to setting the right goals, and by that I mean feeling them too!

Which brings me to the second principle to setting the right goals: they must have direction.

Click here to read the rest of this article: Setting and Achieving Your Goals

8 Comments

  • Srinivas Rao

    Reply Reply June 29, 2009

    Great post Steve. I think you’ve made some great points about feeling the goal. I probably mentioned this to you before, but I’ve added the technique of using music in my visualization practice to enhance the emotion of any goal.

  • Vitalia

    Reply Reply June 29, 2009

    Hi Steve,

    When it comes to goal-setting, goal-achievement strategies and higher levels of success, these are all of my favorite topics to talk about, however the motivation to reach those goals has to come from within, somewhere from deep inside.

    There are four steps to accomplishment:
    1) Plan purposefully
    2) Prepare prayerfully
    3) Proceed positively
    4) Pursue persistently
    The way that you set your goals has a lot to do with your level of success!

    Thanks for another great and wise article!
    Vitalia

  • Steve

    Reply Reply June 30, 2009

    @ Srini

    It’s sort of funny in a way because I started listening to some Aerosmith the other day while setting a goal. It was their older stuff and it just pumped me right up.

    @ Vitalia

    I was just checking out your website. You might want to consider Yaro Starak’s program Blog Mastermind to help promote your business. All the best,

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