First, Know What You Want

Kevin Dooley via Compfight

Extract:

Have you ever failed to go on holiday, planned it, booked it and then just procrastinated or sabotaged yourself? No, of course you haven’t. I’m willing to bet that, barring external events, you’ve hit your goal every time.

Why? How can you plan, organise and deliver a holiday to yourself but not hit lesser goals in your life? How is this possible?

What’s Different About Your Holiday?

You manage to get your holiday because you’re off duty (it’s not an official goal) and in this relaxed state you fall naturally into using the instinctive goal getting process that you were born with. It goes something like this:

• You get the holiday urge and kick this thought around with yourself and with others.
• You begin to imagine what it will be like. You keep doing this, with yourself and maybe with others. A clear (ish) picture emerges and you know what you want and begin looking forward to having it.
• A random series of ideas, suggestions, to do’s and things to prepare all come shooting into your head. Even when you are not expecting them. You find your thoughts return to your holiday in idle moments.
• Eventually you start sorting all this stuff out, putting it in a rough order, thinking about what needs doing first, what steps depend on each other – Must renew passport first because that takes six weeks. Travel agent wants final payment a month before we go etc.
• You start doing things about it – no longer thinking but acting. You check your progress.
• You hit the deadline – there you are at the airport with luggage and passport at the right time.

You do all of this without hesitation and without the help of a seminar, self-help book or coach.

Make Every Goal Like Your Holiday

To get more of your goals, make sure you are using this natural and intuitive process you were born with.

• Know what you want and why you want it – this might take some time.
• Imagine the final result and make sure that it’s something you actually look forward to having. Kick it around in your head and with others.
• Stand by for the rush of unstructured ideas, hints, to do’s, reminders etc as your mind leaps around the problem, connecting it all up and identifying loose ends. A good response to this is to capture everything without judgment (write it down).
• Sort your thoughts out, put them in order, work out what needs doing first and what things depend on each other.
• Act. Do something. Make the first call. Write the first note. Have the first meeting etc.
• As you act, keep going back to your imagination of the final result and making sure that you are on track. Adjust as necessary.
• Hit your deadline – right place, with the right stuff ready to enjoy the result.

Relax. You are good at this stuff. If you can get yourself on holiday then you already possess the skills to get anything you want. Imagine it. Collect ideas. Sort the ideas out. Act. And it’s yours.

(for more on the thinking behind this approach you might want to take a look at the work of David Allen on Getting Things Done)

Elephant hide - yummy

Most wishes remain as wishes because they never get connected to any real steps and then never developed into easy, straightforward actions. It’s like that old proverb:

How do you eat an elephant?

If you were given the task of eating an elephant, how would you do it? The main thing you know is you can only do it one mouthful at a time. And before you could get to mouthfuls you’d have to kill it, then saw it into large chunks and divide those chunks into smaller chunks until you had a mouth sized portion. Only then could you begin to eat. Given enough time you could eat the whole thing – one mouthful at a time.

What are your elephants? Your big, unobtainable wishes that are going nowhere?

Why not stop a moment and make a list, before we go any further?

Here are some examples:

• I’ve always wanted a boat, one the family could use. I’d like to teach my children about boats.
• I like music and always fancied learning the piano or something else.
• And New Zealand, there’s a country I’d like to tour, but I cannot see us ever having time for that.

Got your list? Good. This experiment is about having a serious go at connecting these wishes to the steps needed to make them come true.

First you need to sketch out the big steps you’d need to take to turn your wish into reality. Next you need to take each step and break it down into tiny, single step actions (mouthfuls).

What’s a single step action?

A single step action is something like open drawer, turn on television, print document. In other words it’s a small enough action that if I wrote it on a card and gave it to someone they could go and do it.

So far, so good but why think about wishes that don’t stand a chance of coming true?

Grab a pen and draw yourself a cloud shape at the top of the page. Print the word FANTASY inside it. These wishes, (e.g. your desire to own a boat) are fantasies. They float around in your head and you take them out every so often to polish them. Then you consign them to the back of your mind with a wistful look while you get back to reality.

Now draw a circle somewhere else on your page and print the word STEPS inside it. Join it to the cloud with a line. Next draw an arrow down from STEPS and print ACTIONS at the bottom of your paper.

This process is your chance to challenge what you are doing by linking these fantasies to the major steps that would make them real and then breaking down those steps in to a number of easy actions. When you do this I’m willing to bet one of two things will happen.

1. You will get excited because a fantasy suddenly looks within your grasp.
2. Or once you appreciate the commitment required to make it happen you will decide it is not for you.

Either way, it will no longer be a fantasy taking up space in your head. Dealing with it either by dismissing it for good or making a real plan will free up space to focus on other things you want.

Next time, we’ll look at a real example, one challenge which always comes up in a workshop at this point – How To Win The Lottery

If this process works like I say it should then it should help you win the lottery, right? To find out how, get your copy of “First, Know What You Want” at Amazon or at half-price for your Kindle..