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A Fail-Proof Way to Reach Your Goals
By Flora Morris Brown, Ph.D. | February 18, 2008
Many people have great difficulty visualizing grand goals like becoming a millionaire, owning a beachfront villa or driving a luxury car. No amount of mental calisthentics can help you reach goals that you can’t visualize or believe you can achieve.
One way to ensure your success is to set small reachable goals.
Approach it the way you eat a steak (sorry vegetarians, but work with me here.) There is no doubt that you can finish that sizzling steak on your plate, but never would you try to get the whole thing down in one bite and gulp.
Instead of frustrating yourself with the fact that some goals take time, think about what you can do today and tomorrow that will move you an inch toward that goal.
I spent years longing to travel to Europe, for example, before my first trip. I would browse travel magazines, read travel books and watch travel shows. My friends patiently listened to my daydreams until one of them hit me with a key question: “Do you have a passport?”
All those years of longing to travel abroad, wishing I could save enough money for a trip, and I hadn’t even taken the VERY FIRST step to foreign travel: getting a passport.
Getting a passport was very much within my reach. Post offices and libraries make passports accessible. I didn’t have to know where I was going to travel to apply. As a matter of fact, I discovered, it was less stressful to obtain my passport before making any travel plans, while I was in no rush to receive it.
If I didn’t have the money to immediately buy my passport, smaller steps would have been finding out where to apply and picking up an application. Even just discovering the passport fee is an important small step.
The Chinese proverb is right. “A trip of 1,000 miles begins with one step.”
Think of one of your long-held goals.
What small thing can you do today that will move you toward it?
Now do it.
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Topics: Life choices, Setting goals |