Hill Holler

(Continued from Part 1 of The Fear of Goal Setting and How to Overcome it)

Let’s say you play guitar and would love to be in a band, but you’re not very good at the moment and are on the verge of dismissing that thought as a possible career. Hold on a moment!

Why not set yourself a detailed mini-goal of improving your guitar playing in the next six months instead? Decide how you’ll achieve that. Do you need lessons or more practice time? New strings before you start?

Ask yourself what you need to do to make these things happen and do them. Book the lessons. Schedule yourself a set amount of practice time every day. Go buy the strings.

Simple steps but all actions that’ll improve your chances of attaining your new mini-goal. Seeing your smaller goals within larger ones come to fruition is a great motivator.

You also need to be able to measure your success in achieving your goals. We’ll stick with our guitar hero example here.

How exactly will you know when you’re improved enough? Only you can decide that. Include it in your mini-goal statement. Does playing Cavatina like John Williams count for you? Then that’ll do fine.

Your mini goal now says ” By October 2008, I’ll be able to play Cavatina as well as John Williams - or better!”. It does no harm to aim just that little bit further than you think you can achieve.

Keep your goal to the forefront of your mind as best you can. There’s lots of ways to do this. Read it every day. Repeat it to yourself silently. Put a sticky note on your fridge. Add it in scrolling text to your screen saver. Shave it into your leg hair.

Okay, maybe not the last one. Just do whatever you need to remind you of it with a gentle nudge on a regular basis.

One thing that’s worth keeping in mind regarding goal setting is this. Circumstances change and sometimes we need to reassess and review our goals. Often it’s when some big life event happens like a breakup of a long term relationship or redundancy. Our goals should be just as malleable as our thoughts are, so don’t just give them up in a moment of perceived crisis. Take advantage of the opportunity to cast a fresh eye over them and reset them if necessary once the dust settles.

With any goal, large or small, these things are key :

You’ll be surprised how the small ones suddenly set the wheels turning towards attaining the larger ones. You’ll also feel better about yourself for taking action instead of just accepting your lot in life with a sigh.

When you’re finally in that spotlight, you’ll barely remember what life was like before goal setting and why you procrastinated so long. Before you know it, you’ll be setting yourself a new one and even enjoying the process. Whatever your goals are, I wish you the best of luck with them. The biggest step you can take towards achieving them is simply to begin.

The person with a fixed goal, a clear picture of his desire, or an ideal always before him, causes it, through repetition, to be buried deeply in his subconscious mind and is thus enabled, thanks to its generative and sustaining power, to realize his goal in a minimum of time and with a minimum of physical effort. Just pursue the thought unceasingly. Step by step you will achieve realization, for all your faculties and powers become directed to that end. -Claude M. Bristol