Personal Development;Life Enhancement;Achievement
Posts tagged des moines iowa consulting
Have You Checked In Lately?
Jun 1st
“With ordinary talent and extraordinary perseverance, all things are attainable”. ~Thomas Foxwell Buxton
How are you doing this year? Specifically, how are you doing with the goals that you set out to accomplish this year? Five months of this year are already behind us and if you are off track there is still time to make adjustments and bring it all home.
For me, I set some some very challenging goals for this year. You can look at them here and also read some of the background about the creation of them: Jack’s Original Goals for 2009. So how am I doing? I already have some mixed results.
Here again are my top five goals for the next twelve months:
- Health: I will return to my optimal bodyweight before the end of 2009.
- Family: My wife and I will take our family to New York for a great vacation to celebrate my elder daughter’s completion of her graduate program.
- Business: I will blog 5 days per week – every week of 2009.
- Finances: I will earn more in 2009 than I ever have before – at least 25% more.
- Fun: I will run in the USA’s largest cross-country race: The Living History Farms Seven Miler.
Here is a quick recap:
Goal 1) This is a health focused goal – my largest challenge in the past decade. It has now become impossible to achieve this goal in the remaining 7 months. I need to look at what happened here, make adjustments and recommit (I have already done this, but I will explain what I did and what I am doing so you can see the process. You won’t always get your goals done in the time that you originally allocate. How you react when this happens is critical!)
Goal 2) This is a family and fun related goal. We are well on track to making this goal happen.
Goal 3) This is a business related goal. This is a complex goal – a seemingly simple task with multiple rewards and changes. This goal cannot happen now although the results behind the goal are exceeding my expectations. Again, I will adjust and show you what I am doing.
Goal 4) This is a finances or money goal. I am certainly going to exceed this goal for the year.
Goal 5) This is a fun and health related goal. I can achieve some of this goal – but not all of it. We will talk about it.
Well, that is a new beginning for me. How about for you? Come back next time and see an example of what to do when you aren’t on track.
Till next time…Jack
“Don’t be afraid to give your best to what seemingly are small jobs. Every time you conquer one it makes you that much stronger. If you do the little jobs well, the big ones will tend to take care of themselves.” ~Dale Carnegie
Planning for Success Part Three
Feb 5th
“Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.” ~Albert Einstein
The last entry ending with a description of and homework for “capture.” Did you do a capture around a goal and why it is important to you? Here is my capture for why I intend to return to my optimal bodyweight by the end of this year:
- I am tired of being tired.
- I want the energy and vitality to really live my life again.
- I want to be able to jog again.
- I want to be able to play tennis again.
- I want to compete again in running road races.
- I want to look great in a swimsuit.
- I want to climb Mount Kilimanjaro.
- I want to run with the bulls in Spain.
- I want to be around to play with my grandchildren.
- I want to feel attractive again.
- I want to feel great about my appearance on stage when I am working and performing.
- I want my family to be proud of me.
- I want to feel energized and strong.
- I want the energy to live my dreams.
- I want to feel how great it feels to be an athlete again.
- I want to buy a new elegant wardrobe at my ideal weight.
- I want to see the wonder in the eyes of people when they see me again.
- I want my mother to see me in shape again while she is still living.
- I don’t want to get diabetes and this runs in my family and being overweight makes it much worse.
- I want to live a long life and have the energy and health to really enjoy it.
That may be enough for this entry. If you read those over, you will find that some of these are things that I want to move towards – positive motivation – and some of them are things that I want to move away from – negative motivation. When I was first studying NLP they taught us both positive and negative motivation strategies. The also taught us to create a compulsion – a place where you are simultaneously driven away from what you do not want and pulled towards what you do want. Although I am not going to create a near phobic response More >
Your Vision of the Future Part Eight
Jan 29th
“A successful person is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks that others throw at him or her.” ~David Brinkley
Did you get a chance to read through my personal vision for this next year? If not, take a few minutes and read it over; you will find it as part of yesterday’s entry. I want to point out a few of the special features of my vision statement for the coming year that you might consider incorporating into yours.
- Everything in my vision assumes that I have already been successful. I mentally want to be in the place where I expect to succeed. Sure, something could happen that prevents me from achieving one or more of my goals, but every day, as I read my vision, I am going to put myself in the mental frame of mind that I succeeded – that I found a way and made it happen.
- I talk in my vision about how it feels when I have made my goal into my reality. I talk about how great it feels to have achieved this. I am creating an anchor of feeling great that I am attaching to thinking about each of my goals and to taking action on each of my goals. More >
Your Vision of the Future Part Seven
Jan 28th
“Vision is the art of seeing the invisible.” ~Jonathan Swift
I thought I would share my personal vision today for the next twelve months. Seeing my example, built from my top five goals might be useful.
Here again are my top five goals for the next twelve months:
- Health: I will return to my optimal bodyweight before the end of 2009.
- Family: My wife and I will take our family to New York for a great vacation to celebrate my elder daughter’s completion of her graduate program.
- Business: I will blog 5 days per week – every week of 2009.
- Finances: I will earn more in 2009 than I ever have before – at least 25% more.
- Fun: I will run in the USA’s largest cross-country race: The Living History Farms Seven Miler.
Here is the vision that I built from those goals:
It is the morning of December 31st and I have had a marvelous year. I feel More >
Your Vision of the Future Part Five
Jan 23rd
“If you can find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn’t lead anywhere.” ~Frank A. Clark
How did you do with selecting your five most important goals for the coming year? I know that this was challenging for some of you – it was very challenging for me the first time I did this exercise. Remember, you are not giving up on your other goals for the year – you are committing to five goals that you will absolutely focus on achieving and the process of doing that will help many if not all of your other goals to happen along the way.
So, I am going to assume that you have selected five goals for the coming year. We are going to be using these to create a vision for what your life will be like in twelve months – once you have manifested these goals in your life. Here is your assignment and it does not need to be done perfectly, it just needs to be done: Write a story, your own life story, for a time twelve months from now. You have successfully achieved your five most important goals. Talk about what you feel like with these goals achieved. Talk about what having these goals manifested in your life allows you to do. Talk about the positive effects in your life from these goals now being done. Talk about whatever motivates you; especially talk about how great it feels to you and how great it feels for the significant others in your life to see you and experience you with these goals completed.
Have fun with this. We will fine-tune it next time and talk about how to use this vision.
Till next time…Jack
“Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave.” ~Rainer Maria Rilke
Your Vision of the Future Part Four
Jan 22nd
“Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be.” ~Grandma Moses
Did you balance out your goals so that you have a nice mix of short, medium and long-term things written down? Great! Now here is your next task: I want you to go thru all of your goals for the next twelve months and choose five of them to focus on. Choose the five most exciting and compelling and empowering goals. Many of my seminar attendees have a problem making this decision at first. “But I want all of my goals!” – I hear this all of the time. And I understand! I want you to have all of your goals, but you cannot focus on all of them at one time and be successful. It just doesn’t work.
What you can do is choose the five goals, spread across the categories of your life, that by accomplishing in the next year, you will almost as a side effect accomplish your other goals. I call these goals the drivers. As an example, here is a recap of my Top Five Commitments for 2009:
- Health: I will return to my optimal bodyweight before the end of 2009
- Family: My wife and I will take our family to New York for a great vacation to celebrate my elder daughter’s completion of her graduate program
- Business: I will blog 5 days per week – every week of 2009
- Finances: I will earn more in 2009 than I ever have before – at least 25% more
- Fun: I will run in the USA’s largest cross-country race: The Living History Farms Seven Miler.
Are these all of my goals for 2009? Not even close! But by focusing on these, by putting my concentration here, I can virtually guarantee that I will succeed in manifesting these goals and along the way, most if not all of my other goals for 2009 will also happen.
So, go ahead, choose your “Top Five” for 2009. Make sure that they are not all in one category and make sure that they are exciting. If they aren’t exciting, then rewrite them until they are. Next time we will take these goals and put them into a workable vision – something that you can use and enjoy and benefit from every day.
Till next time…Jack
“My life has a superb cast but I can’t figure out the plot.” ~Ashleigh Brilliant
Your Vision of the Future Part Three
Jan 21st
“Let us so live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.” ~Mark Twain
How did you do with the inventory of your dreams? Was it fun to write them down? How were the timelines? Did you find that most of your goals were many years away? If so, then go back now and add some shorter term goals – goals that you can create in the next year or two. Perhaps you found that most of your goals were things that you intended to complete in the near future – in this case go back and add some long term goals. These long term goals are in some ways your mission – what you are really here to accomplish in your lifetime.
That is all that you need to do today – just go and make sure that you a good mix of short term goals (things that you intend to accomplish in the next year or so), medium term goals (three to five years for completion) and finally long term goals (five years to twenty years or more). One last comment, if you aren’t excited by your goals, go back and rewrite them. Your goals should excite you when you read them. If they aren’t exciting, then you are not being honest with yourself about what you really want.
Till next time…Jack
“What work I have done I have done because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn’t have done it. Who was it who said, “Blessed is the man who has found his work”? Whoever it was he had the right idea in his mind. Mark you, he says his work–not somebody else’s work. The work that is really a man’s own work is play and not work at all. Cursed is the man who has found some other man’s work and cannot lose it. When we talk about the great workers of the world we really mean the great players of the world. The fellows who groan and sweat under the weary load of toil that they bear never can hope to do anything great. How can they when their souls are in a ferment of revolt against the employment of their hands and brains? The product of slavery, intellectual or physical, can never be great.” ~Mark Twain