Your ability to plan, set goals, and create action plans to accomplish your goals is the mark of someone who is truly successful. This skill to set goals is a life-long endeavor. It is a habit that must be cultivated daily for a lifetime. This single activity will have the greatest impact on your life over any other achievement skill.

To be disciplined in setting goals is to sit down with paper and pen and make a list of things you want to acquire, attract or accomplish in the next several years. Earl Nightingale said, "The problem with people is not achieving the goals we set, it is actually the process of setting them in the first place." We are all goal seeking organisms. Your subconscious mind will work on the goal you give it until it is accomplished. You must only set this vast powerful computer in motion by setting the goal.

To achieve a well rounded, joyous life we need to be working toward our goals. When it comes to goals the journey is almost better than the destination. Success was defined by Nightingale as the progressive realization of a worthy goal. You become successful once you set the goal and work towards it. Success is not found only at the attainment level, but also in the striving toward attainment.

You need goals in all areas of your life. It is not good enough to set your sights on your business or commission earnings, transaction sides. You need goals in family, spiritual, physical, financial, and mental areas of your life. This is the only way to achieve balance.

Organize your goals in all areas based on priority. Put the most important ones on the top.

Our overall goal for our life should be to be a continuous goal setter. We need to become so focused and clear on what we desire that every hour and every day we are doing the things that are moving us in our direction of choice and toward our goals.

Studies have shown that you will save ten minutes in execution for every minute that you invest in planning or goal setting. What an incredible return on your investment of time. How often would you invest in an investment that you put in a dollar and got ten dollars back?

Seven Keys of Goal Setting

1. Your goals must be specific, detailed, and clear. You must invest the time to put them in written form. There is a direct link between your writing the goal, seeing it being written, and burning it into your subconscious mind. The goals you desire must be specific, not vague. To set a goal to be rich or be happy will not draw you to it. Well-written goals are like magnets they will you to your desired result. Your goal must be concrete and tangible. Highly defined goals are attained fuzzy goals are forgotten.

2. The goals you set you must be measurable. How can one truly measure happiness? You have to be able to analyze and evaluate your progress and your results in a tangible way. Many people have a goal of being rich. You need to know specifically how much money rich is. Your need to know the specific time period you want to achieve it by. Now that’s a goal.

3. The best goals have deadlines. They have a time by which you need to accomplish them by. They also have interim steps along the way that can be monitored. These sub-deadlines or schedules are critical to success. There are no unrealistic goals; there are merely unrealistic timeframes.
4. Goals need to challenge your to capacity or beyond your current capacity. They will stretch you and mold you into a new person. Jim Rohn wisely said, "It’s not the money that makes the millionaire successful; it’s what he had to become (as a person) to earn a million dollars." If you took the money away from that millionaire that millionaire, would make it back twice as fast as before, because he learned the skill to make it in the first place.

5. Your goals need to possess congruency with your values and beliefs. You goals also have to be harmonious with each other. Let me give you an example, I want to lose 40 pounds, but I also want to eat Dreyer’s Rocky Road ice cream every night before I go to bed. One of these goals will need to give way to the other. They are not congruent with each other. There is no way I can achieve both at the same time. You can not achieve goals that are actually contradictory.

6. Your goals must have balance between your personal life, family, financial, spiritual, physical, mental, and business goals. Just as a wheel needs balance to rotate properly; we need balance to get any where in life.

7. The largest most difficult goal in life is to define your purpose goal. We all have one goal that is at the core of our being. Our life moves to greatness when we decide upon a definite purpose or focus for our life.

I can speak from personal experience. When I determined my "core purpose" was to make meaningful impact in people’s lives for all the people I come in contact with, my perspective changed dramatically. My enjoyment of my day to day "work life" increased.