Life Success Habits

Well, I guess its no surprise that I would start the year with a blog about goal setting – but rather than delve back into the old basics of setting goals, action plans etc, I thought I would provide you with a few fresh ideas:

Go electronic with your goals board – On New Years Eve day I quietly sipped a few glasses of champagne whilst I searched the net for images that represented things I wished to achieve. After saving these images to my computer, I built them into a collage using Photoshop. With a single click of the mouse, i now have my goals clearly displayed on my desktop.

Do your goals backwards – this idea is attributed to an email I received from Peter Conti. I liked it so much I thought I would pass it on. The idea is that instead of mentally seeing and/or writing your goals in the future or present tense, write them in past tense, as though you have already achieved them. This synchs in with the sense of gratitude taught by The Secret, and outlined in the ‘Your Right To Wealth’ series on our website.

Operationalize Your Goals – this is not new, but an essential item to be included. Setting goals is an important activity to keep your life on track, but unless you translate your goals into operable actions, they stay firmly as goals and not achievements. So make sure for every goal you ask yourself [ keep this in the past tense also]:

• What steps did I take to achieve this goal
• What resources did I need
• What did I need to be to make this goal happen

To a Successful 2008

In my last blog I talked about how important it is for you to decide for YOURSELF what constitutes success for YOU.

Once you have come to terms with your own values and goals – the next most important step to achieving that success in BELIEVING IN YOURSELF.

It doesn’t matter what others think of your plans. And believe me, everyone will have an opinion. Whilst I always listen to what they have to say, I then just thank them for their input and say nothing further. If they have a new piece of knowledge that helps you further define how best to achieve or not achieve your goals – then you have gained some more valuable insight. If they haven’t then nothing they said matters in terms of your chosen life path.

It is not for any one person to choose the path of another – and parents – that means you do NOT have the right to chose the path for your children. At best you should enrich their knowledge of options available and the pros and cons of each – then leave it up to them.

Believing in yourself is essential to keeping your focus and putting out the right vibes that make things happen. It gets you through the tough work and reminds you why you are making the effort. What others think of you or what you are doing is none of your business.

Go For It

I was rereading some previous blogs on success and it prompted me to reconsider what ‘success’ really means. To some, success is achieving your goals. To others, it’s being happy when you do.

So often we define success in terms of what society or someone else regards as success – a great job, good marriage, healthy secure family, financial security…….

But in my mind, these things are only success to you, if they are what you genuinely desire with all your heart. There are two aspects of achieving success:

1. Defining your success goals
2. Defining your path to reach those goals.

For instance, if  one of your goals is to have $5million. You can take an honest path, a dishonest path, a manual laboring path or a strategic intellectual path. There are also costs associated with each path. Do you achieve this in 10 years at the cost of other goals such as relationship and health; or are you willing to take a little longer and build on other goals at the same time.

We each must make our own decisions. After a number of ‘life crashes’ – whilst in the eyes of most people I am extremely successful; I don’t share their view. Sure I may be hard on myself, but I couldn’t reconcile what I had to show for the effort I had put in. I made some very bad mistakes in trusting other people, and have paid a very heavy price, both in financial terms and my willingness to allow others control over my financial assets again.

So I have changed my path – instead of expecting to retire in 2 years – I have just taken two years off to pursue some personal passions. This has cost my business quite a lot in terms of loss of market momentum; hence it will now take me at least 5 years to achieve what I would have in those two years. But I decided to take some of my ‘retirement’ years in advance. I am not sure that I want to retire anyway – what is that really all about. As I am many years from the standard retirement age, it is hard for me to understand what I may feel at that age. So my goal is not to retire at any particular age – but it is to have the option to retire at any time after a particular age. These subleties in definition make all the difference to how we approach our goals. So what is your personal success definition?

Nicola