10 Steps to Setting Life Goals

Personal Improvement

1. Start with Prayer

If you set goals in the context of prayer, there is a much higher likelihood that your goals will glorify God, and if they don’t glorify God, then they aren’t worth setting in the first place.  So start with prayer.

2. Check your Motives

If you set selfish goals, you’d be better off spiritually if you didn’t accomplish them.  That’s why you need to check your motives.

3. Think in Categories

My goals are broken in five categories: 1) family 2) influential 3) experiential 4) physical, and 5) travel.  The obvious omission is a category for spiritual goals, but that is by intention.  All of my goals have a spiritual dimension to them.

4. Be Specific

If a goal isn’t measurable, you have no way of knowing whether or not you’ve accomplished it.  Losing weight isn’t a goal if you don’t have a target weight within a target timeline.

5. Write It Down

I have a saying that I repeat to our family and our staff all the time: the shortest pencil is longer than the longest memory.  If you haven’t written down your goals, you haven’t really set them.  There is something powerful that happens when you verbalize a goal, whether that is in a conversation or in a journal.

6. Include Others

I used to have lots of personal goals, but I have replaced most of them with shared goals.  Nothing cements a relationship like a shared goal.  Goals are relational glue.  I’ve discovered that when you go after a goal with another person, it doubles your joy.

7. Celebrate Along the Way

When you accomplish a goal, celebrate it.  Whenever I write a new book, for example, our family celebrates with a special meal on the day the book is released.  And I get to choose the restaurant!

8. Dream Big

Your life goal list will include goals that are big and small.  It will include goals that are short-term and long-term.  But I have one piece of advice: make sure you have a few big, hairy, audacious goals (BHAGs) on the list.

9. Think Long

The sad truth is that most people spend more time planning their summer vacation than they do planning the rest of their life.  Goal setting is good stewardship.  Instead of letting things happen, goals help us make things happen.  Instead of living out of memory, goals help us live out of imagination.

10.  Pray Hard

Dreaming is a form of praying and praying is a form of dreaming.  The more you dream, the more you’ll pray.  And the more you pray, the more you’ll dream!

Package

Personal Improvement

Life comes in a package…

It is never only happiness or sadness. It is never only health or sickness. All the ups and downs, the ins and outs, the dark and shining are all the part of every-one’s life.

It is never sure that you are going to get the best package or the package you like. As a juggler, juggles many balls or at the same time, but the best juggler gets only two pieces at a time in his hands.

Same is the case with life !

You may have many things in your life but you only get to grip a couple of things WELL and these things keep changing. This changing, juggling and ever transitioning idea is called life. The quality of life depends on how better you juggle – how well is your estimation of holding on and letting go. The perfection in time of holding and letting go – you are responsible for creating or designing the package of your life. You just have to accept the package and learn to live with it. Do your best with whatever you have.

Reasons

Personal Improvement

Religion, race, ethnicity, sects or color, human beings, nowadays tend to find a reason to hate each other. The rich hates the poor and poor kills the rich to get their cut. The black hate white for unjust behavior and disrespectful treatment and the white hate black for their color or their angry nature. Americans hate Russians, Indians hate Pakistanis, Arabs hate non-Arabs and non-Arabs hate the rest of the world. We have gone so much extreme in our hatred that we have stereotyped each other.

As human beings – worldwide, as locals – in each society, we have learned reasons to hate, to get angry or to fight. Some justify their behavior under the flag of religion, some under the flag of country whereas some try to escape with their own lame excuses. We were taught to hate each other for a reason. We teach our children to hate – and then we get amused when they hate us upon committing a mistake or not doing things their way.

No one is born with all that knowledge; we learn everything in this world, from our parents and from our societies. But unfortunately we happen to be taught by the ignorant. Who wasted their lives’ energies in finding other’s mistakes and hating them for these mistakes?

But, it takes a smile; it takes a generous act or a word to love someone to make use of your life in an appropriate manner. You just got to pick the reason, you just got to tell your mind, you just got to think, you just got to act and your world in fact the entire universe around you will change. Sometimes you don’t even need a reason to love people, go out talk to the people. Talk to those poor children as they are your own, and they really will respect you like mom or dad. Try to share your life, try to share your health, your wealth, your time with those you hated till today morning. The more you get to know them the more you will like them, the more decent and charming they will become.

The moment you start loving the world around you, the moment you start feeling the importance each person in this world the very moment all those voice will be silenced forever that had been teaching you the reasons to hate, the reasons to ruin the world, the reasons to destroy your life. Every reason that tells you things will never change disappears and the person you were before this moment, that person’s turn is over. NOW IT’S YOUR TURN. The real you, the new you…

Motivating Yourself the Simple Way

Personal Improvement

How do you motivate yourself to get back on track, deal with setbacks, or lift yourself up?  Motivation is a renewable resource if you know how.  There are lots of ways to motivate you, and the simpler, the better.

In his book, Vision: Your Pathway to Victory, I like how Gordon D’Angelo said we should motivate ourselves:

“When you are trying to motivate yourself in business or in general, you have to make a list of motivating people, motivating books, motivating phrases and other people who want to be motivated with you, who will encourage you, so you bring more of the desired result.  Like vision, bring more of that energy near you to create endurance.”

Well said.  And, so true.   I think it’s a practice many of us use to get our mojo working or get our groove on, but I hadn’t seen it put so simply before.  Motivate yourself the simple way by making lists of motivational books, motivational people, and motivational quotes. Lists are a great way to go (and grow.)

I’m a fan of examples because they can help inspire or prompt you with your own lists.

Here we go …

Motivational People

1. Bruce Lee
2. Chalene Johnson
3. Guy Kawasaki
4. John Maxwell
5. Richard Branson
6. Seth Godin
7. Stephen Covey
8. Tim Ferris
9. Tony Robbins
10. Zig Ziglar

Motivational Books

1. Achieve Anything In Just One Year, by Jason Harvey
2. Be the Hero, by Noah Blumenthal
3. Fat, 40 and Fired, by Nigel Marsh
4. Leaving Microsoft to Change the World, by John Wood
5. Not Fade Away: A Short Life Well Lived, by Laurence Shames
6. Toughest Men in Sports: Looking for the Mental Edge, by Mike Chapman
7. The Last Lecture, by Randy Pausch
8. The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom, by Slavomir Rawicz
9. The Raft, by Robert Trumbull
10. The Undefeated Mind, by Dr. Alex Lickerman

Motivational Quotes

1. “An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
2. “Be the change that you wish to see in the world.” – Mahatma Gandhi
3. “Do the thing we fear, and death of fear is certain.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
4. “Fall seven times, stand up eight.”  – Proverb
5. “I want to be all used up when I die.” — George Bernard Shaw
6. If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.” – Tony Robbins
7. “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” — Winston Churchill
8. “People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.” – Anonymous
9. “There is no such thing as failure. There are only results.” – Tony Robbins
10. “To hell with circumstances; I create opportunities.” – Bruce Lee