HOW TO WISELY MASTER YOUR FUTURE - PART III

There are two kinds of people: those who make things happen, and those who have things happen to them. If you are to be mastering your Future, you are or must be in the first category.

When you have things happening to you – you are looking at yourself as a victim of circumstances, the blame for not achieving what you wanted to achieve will always be someone else’s and you will never take responsibility for your results (and when I say results, I also refer to undesired results). While being in this ‘victim’ position might be somewhat comfortable, and you might wanna say to yourself ‘I was right, I can’t do this…’, this attitude will never get you where you wanna go.

The people who make things happen for them take responsibility for their actions and results, whether desired or not; they sit in the driver’s seat and make things happen the way they want them to happen. And if something doesn’t work the way they envisioned, they adapt and find another way to achieve their goals.

I see this trend on some current articles, promoting the idea to stop chasing goals and living our lives more instead, kind of a flower power approach. While I can appreciate we all need breaks and relaxation, having goals is what keeps us focused and emerged in whatever we need a break from!

You can think of having goals in the same way as having a GPS. If you have a GPS and you set your destination, you know where you’re going and how to get there. In the same way, if you have clear, specific, measurable goals, you know what you’re aiming for and you can establish the steps you want to take to achieve your goal.

When you focus on achieving your goals, you decide where you’re going, what you’re doing with your life and how you’re achieving whatever you’ve set to achieve. You are Mastering your Future.

Goals – Criteria & Methods

There are enough ‘Top tips for achieving your goals’ articles out there to keep you reading for months! I am deliberately choosing to refrain from turning this post into a ‘top tips’ piece.

The three things I am mentioning though are:

Good, old SMART (or SMARTER) criteria is awesome, simple and to the point. Most other methods have the SMART criteria at their core, guiding you to set, in one way or another, SMART goals. I wrote more about the SMART criteria here.
Goals need to be written down. If your goals are “in your head”, you are not processing your goal fully with your conscious mind and most likely your goal in not SMART.
You want to set goals in all areas of your life. Goals in different areas of your life support each other – regular exercise enables you to be fitter and more focused; this also improves your performance at work.

Reading, however, doesn’t accomplish goals, so implementing, or taking action, is the key. Most people who read about ‘top tips’ articles, stick to the reading, which is just a way of procrastinating. Few people though, do take action as well, and they are the ones who would make whatever method work for them. How do they do it? They set their goals, they have the drive to achieve them and they take all the action required. Simple, right?

Fear of not achieving your goals

Everyone has goals they achieved and goals they didn’t achieve. Here are a few reasons why people don’t achieve their goals:

The goal wasn’t specific enough – Are you buying a plane ticket for Mallorca, Los Angeles or to destination ‘holiday’? It’s the same with goals – you need to know what specifically you’re aiming to achieve, in order to achieve it.
It wasn’t their goal – Your mum might want you to become a doctor, and if you want to be a lawyer, the ‘doctor goal’ isn’t yours: you won’t have the drive to work for it and even if you do, you’ll hate it!
Other things were more important – If you keep on postponing working on your goal, if everything else is more important than your goal, than the goal isn’t meaningful to you.
Other things got in the way – When the goal doesn’t have a positive impact at all levels, you encounter obstacles. If your goal is to double your profits by doubling the work you do, and that would mean you wouldn’t have time to workout anymore, and therefore it would be detrimental to your health, then other people, circumstances and self-sabotage will stop you from achieving your goal.
Limiting beliefs – “I can’t” / “I’m not good enough” / “I don’t deserve…” – I wrote about how to delete limiting beliefs and limiting decisions in How to Wisely Master your Past.

GOALS ON STEROIDS

To Master our Future, we want to set goals in all areas of our lives and consistently achieve our goals. Sometimes there are things holding us back from achieving them, like negative emotions, limiting beliefs and limiting decisions. In order to be able to consistently achieve our goals, a key factor is to let go of anything that’s holding us back. With a set of techniques from Time Line Therapy™, you can delete your negative emotions and limiting beliefs and decisions from your past with a process that is easy, fast and comfortable.
Without anything holding you back, you will feel empowered to set daring and exciting goals for yourself. By following the SMART criteria, your goals become specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound; meaning you will have set your internal GPS for the destination you intended: achieving your goal. Now you can even take it a step further and, with Time Line Therapy™, you can place your compelling goals into your future.
Next, take massive action! You are empowered to create your Future, you have set your goals, this is the time when you take 100 responsibility to make your Future happen, just the way you imagined it!
And when you achieve your goals, remember to always celebrate your wins!