Hi everyone, since our first workbook article – the essential guide to goal setting part 1, you should now have written at least 100 things you would like to achieve in your life. Perhaps you have even divided them into the six types of goals – intellectual, spiritual, emotional, physical, relationship and financial.
To live a truly balanced life, it is important that you have at least one goal in each section. The lack of goals in one or more sections, will have a negative impact on the others so do your best to have at least one on-going goal in each section.
So the next question you should be asking is “what should I do with my comprehensive goals and dreams list?”
Great question – thank you for asking. Take your comprehensive goal list and divide it further into short and long term goals. Forget intermediate. It is either a long term goal/dream or a short term one.
Short term goals can take you any time from a week to two years to achieve. Examples of short term goals include:-
- Fly to Fuji
- Get my partner a surprise present once a month
- Go to the gym once a week
Long term goals will take you at least two years to achieve. If you do manage to achieve your long term goals faster, well done you! Now get bigger goals. Examples of long term goals include:-
- Become a top earning actor
- Ensure my grand-children have enough finance to live
- Put on a major Broadway play
- Learning to enjoy both failure and success
Note: there will be some cross-over between your long term and short term goals. In addition, we all have different speeds of working. For example, some people will achieve the same long term goal much faster than another person. Remember this is your life, not someone else’s. If you compete with others, then the likelihood of you hurting another part of your life will be high. These are your goals not theirs.
You should now have two sheets of paper. On sheet one, you will have your long term goals. On the other sheet, you will have your short term goals. Now some major work is going to happen. Get two more sheets of paper.
Your long term goals
On the first piece of paper, write down your top three long term goals for each section. These three goals mean more to you than any of the other goals. You must do this.
On your top three long term goals list, think about each goal in each section. Now write down which goal should have your priority out of all the goals on your sheet and put the number one next to it. Whichever goal is chosen will now dictate the priorities of all the other long term goals. For example, if your number one long term goal is to become a millionaire which is a financial goal, then
- your spiritual goal will be to develop a wealthy mindset, how to give back, how to
- your physical goal will be to ensure you have a balanced diet, proper sleep and get 3 hours of exercise every week
- your emotional goal will be to ensure
- your intellectual goal will be to educate yourself on money, use joint venture agreements, and how the various financial strategies can be used to help you acquire money. These financial strategies need to be used with whatever your main passion is. It does not matter whether your passion is sky-diving, dancing, creating businesses, plumbing, doing legal work. There are a variety of ways to create an income stream from your main passion.
- Your social goal will be how to network with the write people who can help you achieve success and to ensure you have enough time to spend with your family.
On average it will take roughly five years of concentrated effort to achieve your first goal. If your second major goal has similar skill sets to the first goal then you will be able to achieve the second goal much faster.
For example, it took me five years to be one of the top instructors in my field. As an instructor, I was constantly designing, writing, and editing course material. Because of all the writing as a technical author to support my teaching, my next goal of becoming an established well-paid writer came within three years.
Note: It is important that you only focus on one long term goal. It is possible to achieve several long term goals at the same time, however to achieve this mammoth project, those long term goals would need to be linked. For example to become a famous singer and to become a highly paid singer can happen at the same time.
If you have never made and achieved your goals before, just focus on the one goal for now. One key reason why people fail to reach their goals is because of lack of focus.
Your short term goals
Let’s look at your short term goals.
Many of the short term goals will be hit regardless of whether you have a goal plan or not. The very fact that you have written down these short term goals will ensure that your subconscious mind will make it happen.
For example, I love travelling. I love visiting new places and spending time within the culture of the place. My work and teaching has taken me to over 60 countries.
Because I work with the people of the country, many students and work colleagues take me to visit their family and to non-tourist places. In essence my work which also happens to be my passion allows me to fulfil a goal to better understand other people’s cultures rather than being the tourist.
However, for those of you who are determined to find a formula, let me share one that has worked successfully for me. Look at your long term goal. Now take all short term goals that are similar to your long term goal. These short term goals will have first priority. Make it a point to treat yourself to one short term goal for every milestone you hit in your long term goal journey.
Your action points
- Find the list of goals you created in part one of our online goal setting workbook.
- Get two pieces of paper or turn on your computer and use a spreadsheet
- Divide all your goals into long term and short term goals
- Choose your top three long term goals
- Out of your top three long goals, prioritise which is your number one goal
- Choose five supporting long term balance goals in the other goal types based on your number one long term goal
- Find all your short term goals that in some way support your long term goal
That’s it for part two. In part three, we begin the journey of achieving your long term goal. Remember, long term goals are often big and seem unreachable. If you have not already read part one of our essential guide to goal setting article workbook, please do. It is super important for you to understand each of the six types of goals.
Next week, we share with you how to make these long term goals and dreams achievable by breaking these large goals into smaller manageable chunks.
If you enjoyed this article, please do leave a comment and join our fiveyearstofinancialfreedom community.
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