Fwd: Goal Setting - How To Set Goals That Motivate & Inspire by Gavin Ingham

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Mark's Morning Motivation" <motivation@chattertonworld.com>
Date: 15 Jul 2014 05:48
Subject: Goal Setting - How To Set Goals That Motivate & Inspire by Gavin Ingham
To:
Cc:

One of the questions that people often ask me is, "Does goal setting work?" And, in fact, they often come at it even more negatively and they say, "Goal setting doesn't work, does it?" In today's newsletter I am going to be sharing with you why goal setting is a complete waste of time much of the time and why you have to be setting goals if you want to achieve BIG success.

A lot of people think goal setting is a waste of time. One of the reasons they think this is that most people have had some kind of negative experience with goal setting. These take various forms. Sometimes it's that you embraced the goal, you set goals but then you didn't achieve them… and you were disappointed. So, in your head, goal setting didn't work. Sometimes they were goals that someone else set for you but you were never that bothered about them in the first place, so you were never going to hit them anyway.

I see plenty of salespeople who are given targets… they never believed that they could achieve those targets, they never cared about achieving those targets, they never took the actions to achieve those targets so, surprise surprise, they didn't hit those targets. And then, someone beat them with a stick (hopefully metaphorically) for not achieving those targets.

Maybe it was the same at school, maybe you were set goals for the grades that you needed to get, or the university you needed to go to and perhaps you didn't achieve those. So for many people goals are something that other people do to us and they are something that people have used to criticise us. They are often something that we know that we will end up failing at in the end.

None of these are positive things for us at all. And none of these reinforce the power of goal setting. So, for many people, goal setting doesn't work. However, goal setting does work. It works when it is done properly but it needs to be all about what's important to you. And that's the critical piece.

When I ask people in conferences, "Do you have goals? Have you articulated them? Have you written them down?" you find out that most people haven't. Most speakers leave it at that. They'd say, "Hey! Look! Only 5% of people have goals and only 2% of people have written goals. Or only 10% of people have goals and only 5% have written goals." And they then say that proves that the reason goals don't work is that people don't set any. That's clearly a nonsense because it's obvious that people who don't set goals cannot benefit from goals they did not set!!

I am more interested in the people who do set goals and then don't hit them. I am more interested in the people who come up short and why that is. Why do some people set goals that work and for others goal setting is seemingly a waste of time? Why do some people swear at goal setting and some people swear by goal setting? I think it is because many people are not setting the right goals.

Your goals have to be important to you. They have to be for you. When you tell me about your goal, if you don't get excited, if you don't light up, if you don't have some kind of passion or energy coming through, then that's probably not the right goal for you. Or, if it is the right goal, you're not connecting with it properly. And until you get the right goal and you connect with it properly, goal setting is not going to work for you.

How do you know it is the right goal for you? Start talking about it. Start thinking about it. Start visualising it. And as you do that, if you start to get a bit of excitement, a bit of drive, a bit of energy, then it's probably the right goal for you. Or it's probably near to the right goal for you. When you set goals, your goal has to be something that will keep you up late at night working and get you up early in the morning with a spring in your step. It needs to get you up to a "10″ without even having to think about it, be something that challenges you to raise the bar, something that you just know you just have to do.

When you look at the most successful people, they are the ones who are on the right path. They are the people who enjoy what they do, they are the people who are moving in the direction of something important to them. They know how to set goals that motivate and inspire. They know that it's important.

Think about it this way, if you don't have a goal that attracts you, if you don't have a goal that motivates you, if you don't have a goal that enthuses you and excites you then how are you ever going to know if you've got where you wanted to go? So, yes goal setting does work if you know how to set goals but it has to be about you, it has to be for you and it has to be something that you buy into.

Never let someone else set goals for you that you don't believe in or want. Set them for yourself or own them like you did.