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Earlier in the week, as part of The Success Formula Series, we discussed the importance of setting goals. Today, we’re looking at how to set effective goals.

In my experience, people often set very strong professional goals at work but neglect to do it for any other area of life. While career is typically the most structured part of life, it doesn’t have to be only one that benefits from clearly defined goals. Today, I encourage everyone to take the time to establish at least one solid goal for each area of your life. Here are some examples (some of these may not apply to you):

• Professional
• Relationships (family, friends, co-workers)
• Fitness/Health
• Intellectual
• Community Involvement
• Financial
• Education
• Artistic

A “good” goal has 5 distinct elements. Remember the “SMART” acronym:

Specific
What do you want to achieve? How will you achieve it? Why is it important to you? Clearly define the outcome you want.

Measurable
Establish concrete criteria for measuring your success. Use actual numbers, target dates, or specific events to indicate when your goal has been achieved.

Achievable
Your goals should push you past your comfort point but you should still be able to attain them with effort and commitment.

Relevant
Your goals should be important to you and the outcome should impact your life. Likewise, you should have the ability to directly impact them. Don’t set goals that aren’t significant or that you can’t do anything to impact achievement.

Timely
Your goals should have a time element established. This will keep you on track and prevent you from simply pushing a goal off infinitely into the distant future. It should matter now and you should have a sense of urgency about it.

Use the following tips to help you with your goal setting:

• Keep it simple – just a few sentences for each will be plenty.
• Write your goals down!  “The discipline of writing something down is the first step toward making it happen.” (Lee Iacocca)
• Make a commitment to review your goals regularly.
• Allow your goals to reflect your values. Let your sense of “inner purpose” guide you.
• Visualize achieving your goal. See it, taste it, smell it. Feel your goal before it happens.
• Use motivating, positive language.
• Make your goals emotional. Use words that have an impact on you – energizing, compelling, inspiring words.
• Share your goals with others and ask for their support.
• Reward yourself along the way. Even small achievements deserve recognition. 
• Create goals for different increments of time (one week, one month, three months, one year, five years, ten years, etc.)
• Make sure your goals are yours – not just what others expect of you.
• Be sure to track your progress along the way – we’ll be talking more about this in the next few days. For now, be sure to check out my Goal Tracker Template if you haven’t already.

We’ll be discussing some of these points in more detail over the next week or so. Be sure to check back for the next installment in The Success Formula Series - Creating Your Plan.

Oh, and for a little extra motivation, share your goal in the comments below. Don’t worry - we’re a supportive bunch! There’s nothing like sharing your goal with others to help keep you accountable and strong…

Ok, I’ll start: My goal is to actively help inspire my peers to achieve their career goals by providing advice and resources in a supportive online community which will continue to grow and improve for the benefit of everyone involved.

What do you think?

Today we’re starting the first part of our series that explores the nature of success. We’re looking at the Success Formula: a basic equation that states that success is most often achieved by setting goals, creating a plan and committing your energy to the fulfillment of that plan.

For the next few days, we’ll be talking about goals. Today we’re focusing on the “why” and next, we’ll focus on the “how”.

Setting appropriate goals is a critical part of achieving success because it prompts us to focus on the exact things we are aiming for. Goals are the specific objectives we want to accomplish.

The importance of setting clear goals is difficult to overstate. Goals are commonly considered one of the key factors for achieving success. Consequently, the lack of clearly defined goals is widely considered to be one of the greatest stumbling blocks in achieving success. In fact, almost every book on personal or professional development includes at least one section on the importance of goals. The challenge is that we’ve heard it so many times we tend to ignore it now. It’s such a familiar concept, we overlook it. We know what we should do, yet many of us fail to do it.

“Making a decision is only the beginning of things…When someone makes a decision, he is really diving into a strong current that will carry him to places he had never dreamed of when he first made the decision.”
The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard a lot about The Law of Attraction and books like The Secret (read my book review here). Much like the timeless poem by William Hutchinson Murray (& Goethe) entitled “Until One is Committed,” and the powerful book “The Alchemist” from which the above quote comes, the idea behind The Secret is pretty straight-forward: once you set your mind on what you want, powerful forces align to help you succeed. Once your goal is set, the universe conspires to help you achieve it.

Whether or not you believe in the mystical forces of the world, there is some science behind the idea.

What happens when you set a goal?

When you set a goal, you may consciously begin planning and motivating yourself to achieve it. However, the subconscious mind also kicks in developing an action plan as well. By setting a goal and visualizing the results, the subconscious mind begins to work out the details of how it will actually be accomplished. Ideas and solutions begin popping up as if from nowhere. When you make a decision and begin focusing on achieving a specific goal, the powerful subconscious mind goes to work toying with ideas and developing strategies. It also stays on the lookout for signs along the way – small reassurances that the right road has been taken. Some people dismiss these as mere “coincidences” but perhaps they are much more…signals of the universe helping set your direction and guide you to achieving your goal.

Why are goals necessary?

With goals you create your own future. You can literally shape your destiny. While goals allow us to visualize where we want to go, there may be many different paths - hundreds even - that could get us there. We all have goals whether we know it or not. No matter what your goals are, they are affecting your life every day, in ways you probably don’t fully comprehend.

Goals should be inspiring. Strong and compelling goals drive us to grow and develop ourselves, pushing past our comfort zones and breaking any preconceived notion of “limitation”.  Compelling goals have the power to change lives. Done properly and specifically goals can transform our lives.

Goals help us measure our progress, to see if what we are doing is moving us closer to or further from our ultimate ambition. If our actions are moving us closer to our target then we keep doing what we’re doing. If our actions are moving us further from our target, then we know we must change direction in order to get back on track.

Without goals we flounder. We don’t know which direction we’re going. We constantly shift our aim from one target to another and we don’t even realize we’re doing it. We get consumed in things that are meaningless, that don’t move us forward and only waste time. We fight the wrong battles. We waste energy. We lose focus. We stop achieving and simply exist, allowing ourselves to be pushed and pulled in any direction at any given time. We allow others to create goals for us so we find ourselves working to achieve other people’s dreams. We lose ambition. We lose drive. We lose ourselves.

Up next in our Success Formula Series - How to Set Goals. I’ll be offering some straight-forward advice for how to establish goals that make sense for you. You won’t want to miss it!

And please add your comments…I’m curious to know what you think about The Secret, The Law of Attraction and the importance of goals.

Depending on who you talk to, success is either a straight-forward formula or a mysterious force of nature. I’m a formula person. I believe you can breakdown success and every time, the same elements are behind it. The Success Formula, as I see it, breaks down into just three simple steps: 

1. Set a Goal
2. Create a Plan
3. Commit to the Plan

Now, I’ve written a lot about success in the past and, in a way, I think I always overcomplicated it. In reality, these three steps can help us achieve practically anything. There’s no gimmicks, no schemes, and results aren’t necessarily immediate. It takes hard work and dedication. Whatever it is you dream of doing, whether it’s running a Marathon, getting a promotion, or finding a brand new career, following these steps will greatly increase your chances for success.

Over the next week, I’ll be looking at each step in depth, trying to figure out the best way to go about doing these three things: setting goals (both personal and professional), creating actions plans (without getting wrapped up in the planning process), and committing to the project. And sure, maybe there’s something a little “magical” behind people who experience phenomenal success…I’ll investigate that a bit too! If you have any exceptional knowledge in one of these areas, or just a great tip that you think others will benefit from, please contact me. I’d love some more input. 

So, keep your eye out over the next few days for the Three Part Series: The Success Formula. It’s going to be fun (and fascinating) stuff!

I have to admit it: I like to over-complicate things. It’s in my nature. I have this unbelievable ability to take the most simplistic idea and turn it into a messy, complex nightmare. Why do I do this? Do I love driving other people crazy? Do I enjoy frustrating myself and stressing out my colleagues? Do I like the look on my boyfriend’s face when he wonders how I have taken something so beautifully simple and made it a blueprint for building a rocket to space? Well, that last one is pretty entertaining. But to be honest, I’m not sure why I do it.

Me: Hi, everyone. My name is Chrissy and I’m an Over-Complicator.

Readers: Hi Chrissy!

If I’m really honest with myself, I can recognize that it stems from the fact that I’m a control freak. I want to be the one who runs the show and by overcomplicating the show, I’m casting myself in the “authority” role because I get it (and you don’t).

It’s complicated, I know. I mean it’s not! It’s very simple! You see?? I’m overcomplicating again! Someone stop me…

So what should I do about this problem? It is a problem, you know. If you’ve ever known an Over-Complicator (or if you are one yourself) you undoubtedly know it’s not an attractive character trait. I’ve been told that I like to overcomplicate things because I like to “stress out”. Can you believe that? Who likes to stress out? Apparently, I do. I guess when you overcomplicate things you create unnecessary stress on both yourself and the people around you. Now that must make me a thrill to be around.

This post is my call to action – for me and any other Over-Complicator out there. Today is the day to stop! We must take a step back and simplify our lives - stop making the simple things difficult! We must not allow our inner control freak to run wild! Our friends and colleagues will thank us for it. Today is the day to stop doing in ten steps what can be done in two! Today is the day to throw out useless files and processes that only waste time! Today is the day to stop over-analyzing, over-thinking, over-organizing!

Today is the day to SIMPLIFY!

I won’t complicate this post by creating a big long list of ways you can simplify (for that you can read the Zen Habit’s oxymoronic post entitled “72 Ways to Simplify Your Life“).  

I’ll just wish you a happy weekend and be done with it. You see how easy that was? How simple? I’m really getting the hang of this. Slow progress…

As anyone who reads this blog regularly knows, I am a natural planner. I love it. Organizing, researching – these things are my lifeblood. But, as I mentioned in a recent article, planning can be the comfortable phase of productivity so it’s easy to get wrapped up in it. The real work comes in the “doing” phase.

So while I love planning, I’ve learned to embrace the “just do it” technique, more accurately described as the Learn-As-You-Go method of productivity. In fact, this blog is a product of it. If I had spent all the time I would have liked to in the planning stages of this blog, it wouldn’t even be started yet. It was such a big project – and something I knew nothing about – I knew that if I didn’t just get on with it, I would get overwhelmed and give up. I had to jump right in and let myself sink or swim.  I hoped that once I got moving on the project, inertia and the drive to see it through to the end would keep me afloat.

I’ve found that there are four critical tips to bear in mind when using the Learn-As-You-Go technique. I’d like to share them here but I can also tell you that this is a delicate art. These tips will help you but your process will only be perfected in the moment as you work with it.  

1. Experiment and Don’t Fear Failure

You can’t be afraid of trying anything and everything when you’re using this method. You have to test things out and see what works and what doesn’t. Research won’t ever take the place of good old fashioned experimentation.  Recognize that you may lose a few dollars along the way, you may spend a significant amount of time testing a method or a resource only to find it is completely wrong for your needs, but nothing is wasted.

When I first started this blog, I used a free hosting service and in about two weeks, I realized that was the wrong move.  I needed my own domain name, my own hosting service, and a completely different platform for the kind of blog I wanted to build. I spent weeks working on the old one only to basically scrap it and start over. Was it a waste of time? Not completely. By the time I got the new one set up, I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it. The old one had helped me focus my idea in a way I never could have done on paper. I needed to tangibly create it to know what I wanted and what I didn’t want.

2. Track Success and Failure

When using the Learn-As-You-Go method, every failure is a significant lesson. It’s a step in the right direction because you’ve eliminated something that doesn’t work. As Thomas Edison said when inventing the light bulb, “I didn’t fail ten thousand times. I successfully eliminated, ten thousand times, materials and combinations which wouldn’t work.”

In order for failures to be truly useful, you have to track them, analyze what went wrong and why, and understand how to avoid making the same mistake in the future.

3. Expect Frustration

Just the concept of “Learn-As-You-Go” implies ignorance at the start. I don’t know about you, but for me, ignorance is frustrating. When I don’t know what I’m doing, I get impatient and annoyed with myself. When I was starting this blog, I almost gave up multiple times out of sheer frustration. I felt like I didn’t have the capability to do it. That’s just crazy! It’s important to keep in mind that Learn-As-You-Go can be an emotional process. Don’t beat yourself up for not knowing things – that’s what it’s all about! Take it slow, focus on patience, and don’t let mistakes or small frustrations make you want to give up. It’s all a part of the process.

4. Ask for Advice

One of the things I wish I had known when starting this blog was how open and helpful other bloggers are. If I had realized this, I would have sought more advice from them. As it happened, I had quite a few wonderful mentors along the way who popped up and offered advice at the perfect, crucial time.

If there’s one thing to learn from this it’s just a reminder that people are almost always willing to share advice. If you appear to be willing and receptive, they will share everything they know with you. Don’t be afraid of asking others what they did and how they did it. Sure, not everyone will be helpful. But it doesn’t hurt to ask. And the advice you get will probably be miles better than anything you’d read from a book. Firsthand experience offers a totally personal perspective. And if you’re seeking the advice of people you respect and admire, you know you can trust their opinions.

A Question of Time

So what is more time efficient: thorough research, establishing a concrete plan and then executing it? Or jumping in with both feet and using the Learn-As-You-Go method? Well, it all depends on the project and the person. For me, Learn-As-You-Go is much more effective for projects that appear overwhelming at first. With starting this blog, I couldn’t really wrap my head around all the different little pieces and I never would have figured out some of the technical details without just stumbling my way through. So, while I’ve made a lot of mistakes and spent more time than most people would consider rational, I still think it was faster than the alternative. In reality, the only alternative would have been to read a bunch of books and articles on blogging, carefully weigh the pros and cons of the different technologies, create a detailed plan for the creation and launch of the blog, and then execute those wonderful plans. More than likely, I would have needed a solid Plan B and C along the way, as even the best laid plans….well, you know the rest. I feel certain that for me, with this project, a plan would have only complicated matters. While the process was somewhat messy and frustrating as I stumbled around learning along the way, it was overall a better use of my time.

The Learn-As-You-Go method isn’t for everyone. People who are hands-on learners are much more inclined to find this a helpful technique. If you learn well by reading and researching, you may find the trial-and-error nature of this method frustrating. For many of you, this technique will work well for some projects but not for others. Give it a try and see how it feels. And if you’re an expert in this technique, please add your tips in the comments section below!

When I was a kid, I was chubby. I was adorable but I was also a little pudgy. Not a lot, mind you. It was the normal baby-fat thing. But it was enough to get made fun of by the jerky neighborhood boy and that was enough to give me a complex for years. My sister, on the other hand, was very lean. She was a soccer player, very athletic by nature. While I preferred reading books, she wanted to go swimming or running around outside. I grew up thinking it just wasn’t in my nature to be athletic. I was the nerdy, chubby one. I just accepted that as being the way it was.

I’m turning 30 this year. I’m still nerdy. My sister is still lean and I’m still fighting that complex that started in childhood. But I no longer believe in simply accepting things as they are. I now understand that anything, yes anything, is possible. I believe that I am capable of making a difference not only in my life, but in the lives of others. It’s the reason I started this blog. And it’s the reason I’m doing something I never thought I could do – I’m training to run a half-marathon.

Yep, that’s right. Me, the chubby kid who never had an athletic bone in her body is training to run 13.1 miles! And you know what? I’m rockin’ it!

There are so many reasons I chose to do this. Like I said, I’m turning 30 this year and that’s an incredibly eye-opening age. I wanted to do something BIG for it. Then there was the promise of a “runner’s body”. Hey, I’m not complaining about what I have, but I certainly wouldn’t mind a little more muscle. When I found Team in Training I knew there was another, much more important, reason to be doing this.

Team in Training gets large groups of people together throughout the United States to train for various endurance events. When you join this group, you are joining a team. You train together weekly and follow a coached program for working up to your goal. It’s a big physical commitment. But there’s another part of this as well. Everyone who joins Team in Training also makes a commitment to raise funds for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS). 
 
Being a part of Team in Training has already been one of the most inspirational experiences of my life. I’ve met people who are cancer survivors who are out there training with the rest of us, who understand how important these funds are. The research sponsored by LLS has led to effective treatments of Hodgkin’s disease, lymphoma, and other common cancers such as breast and lung cancer. Some of the people I am running with, including my team mentor Sharon, have benefited from this research personally. It has improved their quality of life tremendously and given them hope.
 
Did you know that Leukemia causes more deaths than any other cancer in people under the age of 20? Twenty-five years ago, only 5% of children diagnosed with it survived. Today, 80% of children with Leukemia and 94% with Hodgkin’s disease will live thanks to the research funded by people involved in projects like Team in Training.
 
The Team in Training endurance events will honor many people - friends and family members that have been lost to cancer. While I know that running 13.1 miles will be challenging, it’s nothing compared to the challenges facing those who are in need of this research.

Joining Team in Training has reminded me of how far we’ve come with finding treatments for cancer. I had 2 Grandparents I never met due to this disease. Doing something now to help fight it is a way of honoring them. If cancer has ever touched your life, or the life of someone you love, you undoubtedly understand the feeling.

I’m writing about this today for several reasons. Of course, I ultimately hope you will donate to this cause and help support my efforts to do something truly worthwhile. Aside from that, I’d like to encourage all of you to do something you might have considered impossible – something that seems out of your league. I don’t believe anything is impossible. Running 13.1 miles is certainly possible. Finding a cure for cancer is as well. These things take work. They take commitment and help from others. But we all have it in us to do something big.

I hope that all of you share my belief that anything is possible. Please consider donating a small amount to my efforts with Team in Training. My goal is to raise $2200 and I know it’s possible. Every penny counts so please don’t be shy about throwing just a few dollars in. I am running for anyone whose life has been touched by cancer so please write to me and share your story if you’d like.

I’m turning 30 this year and I’m doing something that feels appropriate. It feels good. I still identify with the chubby, nerdy girl I was. But I don’t accept it. I don’t feel limited anymore. Yesterday, I ran 5 miles for the first time in my entire life.

I know anything is possible.

Please visit my Team in Training website to donate quickly and easily. If you’d prefer to mail a check, please contact me directly and I’ll provide you with the address. Thank you in advance for your support.

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