Do you find there comes a time when you are compelled to set goals whether in life or business and the journey towards those goals simply must be embarked upon?

Sometimes when you are in search of success in your life you might find yourself focusing on the goal, instead of on the journey towards that goal. The challenge is when you do this, you miss out on many of the lessons to be gained along the way, which will support not only with this goal but also future goals.

When you begin a goal journey, there is often a tickle of excitement, the fun of experimentation, a sense of momentum and motivation. Then when you accomplish your end goal, there is a wonderful feeling of satisfaction and fulfillment. The starting point and the end point are something for you to celebrate and so is the journey in between!

Suggestion Alert!

So you don’t miss out on any of the lessons along the journey from beginning to end, here is a useful technique to use:

Depending on your goal, whether it is becoming a more effective and confident presenter, build a more profitable business, improve your performance as a professional athelete or weight loss...really it does not matter...keep a journal of the process.

Keeping a written journal (either paper and pen, or online) can help you discover your thought and behavior patterns, positive and negative habits and can help you discover the thinking process you use and make you more aware of the actions you take...or don’t take. Some of these things will be obvious to you – they will not be surprising, at all. But some of the things you will learn about yourself will come as a total surprise, and herein lie the valuable lessons - the difference that makes the difference.

By learning what works, and what doesn’t work, how you tend to react to when things go well and when they do not, you have an opportunity to begin to learn to adjust your course based on where you are at that moment. And being “in the now” is a life lesson that can’t be underestimated!

When you take the time to examine the how and why of your process, you learn valuable lessons about your action and reaction. These lessons can be used in all areas of your life to facilitate achieving bigger, better, more useful goals. When you are aware of your strengths and weaknesses, you can use that knowledge to play to your strengths and minimise your weaknesses.

But if you are unaware of the intricacies of your journey, you will miss these incredibly valuable insights and lessons.

Keeping your eye on the goal while becoming aware of the journey is the fastest way to embracing the success you’re after!

DOWNLOAD: My Task Journal

When you set a goal does it sometimes feel like you’re getting nowhere? I mean, you  put in the work and you put in the time, but it always feels like you're no closer to getting what you want.

Believe me, I know how frustrating that can be.

When you think about the advantages of behaviour-based goals, a few things come to mind immediately.
You might be excited to get more done. As you know yourself this possible with hard work and dedication, but setting the right goals makes it much easier.

Increase Productivity
Being a goal-oriented person means 

​You want to improve your performance at work but you start noticing your energy or motivation is slipping and its getting in the way of your high performance.  When you drive your car there is a fuel gauge that lets you know how much fuel you have left in the tank. How about you, what lets you know it is time to stop? 

NLP - Neuro Linguistic Programming - is a set of tools developed as a result of analysing people who achieve results. The great thing is the tools have been taken apart and structured as bite sized pieces in a logical sequence which means if you follow the steps anyone can up their performance. Curious to know more? Have a look at this short video...

Let me know your thoughts and what part of it makes most sense to you. If you've any questions ask in the comments and I'll be delighted to answer them.

Thinking is like a bit like writing; it is a process. A lot depends on the order in which you do things either on the page or in your head. So if you were to write, “The dog bit the man” I suspect you would expect your reader to have a different experience, than if you wrote, “The man bit the dog” even though you have used the same words and only lightly changed the order. So as you can see the order and sequence is important. 

Also if you were to add colour to your to writing by using adverbs and adjectives – you do remember those, don’t you – by saying “The big black dog charged the man and grabbed him by the arm…?” now you have even more of a response from the reader, possibly even a slight quickening of the heart rate (an unconscious physiological response) and a more detailed picture in the mind’s eye.  

In your mind you can also adjust the quality of your thinking by adding or removing colour or other details. Now that may strike you as a bit odd. But just think about it for a minute – let’s pretend you have decided to buy a new barbeque and you want to get a gas barbeque but definitely not a charcoal one because you think they are slow, smoky and often don’t deliver a great result. As you think about it now, notice the pictures you are making inside your head....I suspect the picture of the food from the gas barbeque looks bright, big and maybe even a movie, in other words attractive, while the food from the charcoal one looks less appetising. Or think about ordering food in a restaurant, you possibly have a picture in mind of what the food will look and taste like. Now of course if the served food does not match your imagined picture - depending on the qualities of your reference pictures - you will be either disappointed or delighted. Of course this may be just my mind’s eye talking. 

You might be thinking, so what? Just think about it, as you discover you can change the picture qualities in your mind’s eye you can learn how to change your motivation, make your goals more compelling and generally make it easier for yourself and others to achieve their goals and ambitions. So as you think about a future event now and if you discover you are feeling a bit unsure about it, just ask yourself are you seeing it completing the way you want it i.e. successfully? If not change your outcome picture until you are seeing the best result for you and notice how it feels. You might find any anxiety you had been experiencing simply dissolves and you have positive anticipation now.

Experiment Alert :-)
As you choose to begin noticing your anticipatory pictures more I would love to hear what you discover, so do comment below.

By Julie Silfverberg

As a result goal setting is very popular at this time of year for some and other have resolved not to do it anymore. In fact research show the majority of people have fallen off the wagon, so to speak, by 21 January. So what’s the problem, how does this happen? Oftentimes it may be bringing your old bad habits on into the future, creating the same old problems, instead of the desired solutions coming to fruition. So perhaps this year, for a change, you might find it interesting to look at what you can leave behind, instead of considering a whole bunch of things that you need to do. Like everything, there is more than one way to skin the cat. In a way you can think of it as; less is more. So my suggestion is consider; what you could stop doing, what can you leave in the past, what might you simply forget to do that would enable you to achieve your goals more easily.

Let’s look at the top three goals people set for themselves in the New Year.
·      Weight loss
·      Get more organised
·      Save more money

So in order to achieve your goal;
1.     What could you stop doing?
2.     What can you leave in the past? So it gets no further than 2013.
3.     What can you forget to do?

I’m going to make some suggestions here, these specific ones might not suit you, but I’m hoping they might provoke you into thinking what you could do or in this case not do!

First: Weight loss
1.     Stop eating in front of the telly
2.     Leave in the past the thought that you can’t lose weight
3.     Forget to eat crisps

Second: Get organised
1.     Stop multitasking
2.     Leave in the past the thought that messy desk proves you’re really busy
3.     Forget to hold onto every piece of paper and crosses your desk

Finally: Save more
1.     Stop using your credit card
2.     Leave in the past the thought that you’ll always struggle with your finances
3.     Forget to buy things that you don’t actually need, whether it is five cappuccinos a week or a new pair     of shoes you saw in the sales - but in fact don’t need right now

What do you think could this work for you?

I don't know about you but I seem to be hearing more and more people talking about burnout. People in business, at work, in families. It is tough for the people going through burnout themselves and it is also tough for their families, colleagues and friends.

How do you know you, a colleague or a family member is close to burnout? You know because they are "not themselves". During burnout you can feel; exhausted, helpless, trapped, irritable and quick to inappropriate anger, with that little voice in your head going "why bother". It is a scary, uncomfortable place. You might notice 

You started your business, it has been growing and where are you now? You may find now you are very busy fulfilling all the roles in the company. In fact you might have no free time. You are working all the hours that God gives and it still doesn’t seem to be enough. Maybe business has plateaued and even beginning to slip backwards. Maybe you want to step up a gear but can’t find the time or the resources to make the gear shift. You know you are working in your business with no time at all to be able to step back and make decisions for the next stage of business development – to be able to work on the business.

Some questions to ask yourself for the future:

Last Sunday I went out to meet a friend for a nice relaxing cappuccino in a cafe, where - due to past experience - my expectation was of lovely strong coffee, you know a bit of a kick due to the 'oomph' of the espresso with that soft yet firm froth almost like a marshmallow. In fact my friends sometimes laugh at my gauging of the quality of a cappuccino through the height and firmness of the foam. But I think, after all, I can make an excellent coffee at home, so when I go out I am looking for something a little different, even special.