All you need is the plan, the road map, and the courage to press on to your destination.
Earl Nightingale
Michael Masterson, bestselling author and founder early to raise newsletter recently wrote a very insightful article on developing a master plan for success in business. Mr Masterson is an advocate of the ready, fire, aim approach to starting business.
He was making a point about what it means to be ready.
He made a point that it was good to set goals but you needed to have a plan.
Not having a plan to achieve your goals will only leave you with wishes and dreams and it will cost you.
This brings me to what I want to share with you today….
How to approach goal setting -the questions you need to ask when it comes to goal setting.
Before we go into the key questions, I believe you need to set goals several aspect of your life.
Specifically you need goals in eight areas.
- Personal goals. Things you want for yourself
- Family goals. These are goals you intend to do with and for your family
- Financial goals. These are goals you want to set to secure your long term financial security
- Business and career goals. These are goals for your career because your choice of career is important
- Health goals. This will determine how long you intend to live because your health is important
- Social goals. These are goals you set in terms of giving back to your community
- Spiritual goals. These are goals you set to attain higher levels of inner peace and spiritual understanding
- Education goals. If you want to be the best in your field, you must have a lifelong learning plan
Key Questions you need to ask for clarity
You need to ask yourself questions on a regular basis to help you become clear about your goals in life.
Here are some series of questions that you can ask yourself.
- What are your most important values, virtues and qualities in life? What is important to you? What do you value more than anything else does? If you are able to answer these questions-about your values, virtues and qualities-you will not have stress in your life. Because all human problems can be resolved by returning to your values
- What would you do, how would you change your life, if you won a million dollars cash, tax free tomorrow?
- How would you change your life if you suddenly had a million dollars at your disposal? What would be the first thing you would do? What would be the second Thing? What would you get into or get out? What would you buy or what financial situation would you resolve?
- The purpose of the last two questions is to help you determine what you would do if you had all the time and money you needed. This question could go off to strike you like lighting and enable you to clearly what you really want for your life
- Here is another question. What would you do , how would you change your life, if you learned today that you have only six months left to live?
- Imagine you have you are going to enjoy perfect health for another 180 days and then drop stone dead. How would you change your life? Who would you want to spend the time with? What would you finish up or complete? What would suddenly be very important to you? What would no longer be important to you at all?
- The above questions are values questions. These questions force you to ask and answer what is truly important in your life. When you have a short time, left to live all the unimportant things drop way and you come face-to-face with things you really care about.
- Here’s another question. What have you always wanted to do but been afraid to attempt? You need to address this question. Because the two biggest obstacle to success in adult life are the fears of failure and the fears of criticism
- What sorts of activities give you your greatest feeling of importance?
- What sort of things do you do that give you wonderful feelings of self-esteem, self-respect and personal pride?
- What are the sorts of activities, throughout your life, that have made you feel the happiest and most fulfilled? The answer to this set of question is often your “heart’s desire”. This is the one special thing, you have come to this planet to do
- What one great thing would you dare to do if you knew you knew you could not fail?
- If you were guaranteed of success in any one goal small, large, short term or long term, what would it be?
- What one great thing would you dare to dream if you knew absolutely that you could not fail?
Your life only begins to change when you decide on your major definite purpose and then work on it every single day.
I have asked you to think about many questions.
The purpose of these questions is to help you think through who you are and what you really want.
The ultimate of goal setting is for you to get to the point you can select the most important goal that you want more than anything else.
Your life only begins to become great when you decide upon your major definite purpose and then get to work on it every single day.
In my next post we shall look at how to put your master plan to action.
Think rich and grow Rich
Akin Osho