Writing Down Your Goals
Will Help You Achieve Them
What is a goal?
It is more than a wish for something better.
In fact, it is a declaration of what needs to change in one's life.
As a declaration, goals are written down.
Why is it so important to write down goals?
The first and most common sense reason is that we will forget them. Plenty of us have minds
like steel sieves.
Writing down our goals is like putting rocks in with all that sand. Rocks are too big to go through the sieve so they stay.
Writing down goals is not like New Year's resolutions. New Year's resolutions are vague for the most part.
They are general ideas of
things we would like to accomplish that are initiated to get into the spirit of the season.
We want our goals to be more concrete and
lasting than that.
Goals are written down to:
- Help us remember them
- Help us decide what is most necessary
- Put a name to the face-focus
- Make us accountable to ourselves and others
True goals are worthy of being remembered. "I want to lose weight" is easy to forget. That can be five pounds or fifty pounds.
Two weeks from now when we are attending that cookout, losing weight will be the farthest from our mind, if we never wrote that goal
down in the first place.
All dreams are not goals and therefore not equally important.
Wanting to be a millionaire is a desire. It is not necessary to have
a million dollars to live comfortably.
A goal to create yearly income in the amount of $100,000 will let the average person live without
financial strain. That is the goal, not becoming a millionaire.
Written goals are no longer floating about our heads in the ether.
They have taken on shape and form. We can see the new car (candy
apple red with racing stripes) now instead of just the word "car".
Words add flesh to our goals.
If we put in writing that we want to own that candy apple red convertible instead of just a new car,
every time we put money away for it, we will see exactly what we are sacrificing for.
Visualization helps when sticking to goals.
That piece of paper with our goals upon it can be kept close to our bed, in the bathroom, or on the fridge. It can be shared with
close family members who we count on for support.
Just the act of looking at that piece of paper with our goals printed on it, renews
our commitment to the goal.
Do you have goals to achieve? Write them down. They'll last longer that way.
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