It most certainly is if you don’t do anything with them! Writing down a list of goals you want to achieve is all very well but unless you do something about them, they will soon fade in to the back ground.
Goals for me are my dreams coming true. It may sound a little ‘Disney’ but it is kind of a magical experience when you achieve something you thought was way out of your reach. I have a bit of a routine when it comes to setting goals, slightly OCD in some respects but as it works for me with some outstanding results I am not going to change it!
I know when it’s something I really want to achieve because I literally dream about it and I catch myself drifting off thinking about it at random times. It becomes very easy to visualise and in turn I start to feel that it is already real. Yes this took some practice but like most skills, they can be learned and become easier the more they are used.
Once the goal is decided upon there is a simple way you can work towards seeing it realised. Yes this will take some work and effort on your part but just think about how you will feel when you achieve it, that feeling can then be duplicated time and time again as you push yourself further and further. So what’s the goal? The idea? The dream? Once you have a clear picture of what it is you can start to ‘go get it’. You have probably heard variations of the following statement but there’s a reason for that;
If you don’t know what you want how will you know when you get it?
One of my personal goals was to edit and launch a glossy magazine. Sounds potentially glamorous but without any publishing experience it was a goal that many people said was ‘out of my reach’, they also said, ‘there’s no way you can pull it off!’ I didn’t want to pull anything off, I simply wanted to become an Editor of a publication that would reach across the county of Kent. I wasn’t looking to reinvent the wheel, just add my take on a concept that already existed! So how did this idea, dream or goal get broken down?
- Choose the name
- Register the name with the British Library to obtain my unique ISSN number, (An ISSN to magazines is like ISBN to books)
- Find a printer and a designer
- Source interesting content
- Open up marketing and distribution channels
- Launch it at the first Kent Women in Business Awards
This made the whole process a lot less daunting. We have just published issue 5 so we can safely say I achieved my out of reach goal. Of course the steps above were then broken down in to more detail but you get the idea. Just wanting to be an Editor didn’t make me an Editor, I had to put the effort in. When I was told, ‘you are wasting your time as no one will buy a magazine like this; did I pay attention? No, I started to do market research and discovered that this niche hadn’t yet been explored and people were excited about the concept. This feedback was crucial to how we took the project forward!
You have a choice how you let things affect you. I wasn’t trying to prove a point, I was listening to what my dream was telling me and found a way to make it happen. Was I wasting my time setting, planning and then actioning this goal? Definitely not and it proved to me that pushing myself out of my own comfort zone was in actual fact extremely motivating.
My advice to anyone who has an idea, a dream or a goal is to definitely explore your options. Of course there may be an element of risk but without risk taking there is nothing to gain. As long as you are realistic in what you have to lose you can calculate and accommodate for it. I am not suggesting that you fire your boss on a whim, but with careful planning, preparation, persistence and personality you can achieve whatever it is that you want to.
