Formulate powerful goals using these 7 rules

Photo by Planetxau

The way you formulate goals is important. By choosing the right words you can consciously and unconsciously empower yourself to achieve them. But you can formulate them in a bad way that will have failure and doubt built in. And unfortunately people are inclined to define goals in such a way that they undermine their ability to achieve them.

This tendency comes from the desire not to fail. People try to prevent failure, and as such have a tendency to formulate goals in such a way that it’s remains possible to smooth talk yourself out of it when the actual results appear different from the intended results. This is behavior that will prevent you from achieving what you want to achieve.

There are seven rules to comply to when formulating goals. These rules are meant to empower you and maximize the probability of you actually accomplishing your goal.

1. Be positive. Always formulate your goals in such a way that they represent what you DO want to happen. Don’t say that you want to stop smoking, and also don’t twist it to say you want to go on smoke-free. Why do you want to stop smoking? To live healthier? Say that you’ll only adopt healthy habits, that you want to live a healthy lifestyle or another positive formulation of your goal.
2. Set a realistic date. Be very specific as to when you want to accomplish your goal, but remain realistic. Go extreme on this part, say that you want to accomplish your goal on Tuesday September 23, 2008 at 2:00 pm CET. It might feel silly, but don’t give yourself slack here.
3. Formulate it like you’ve accomplished it already. Talk like you’ve accomplished it already, let your future self speak about your goal. Don’t say “I’m running a marathon in November 2008″, but say “I’ve successfully finished a marathon on November 28, 7:00 pm CET”
4. Be as specific as can be. Be as specific as you can possibly be. The better you can describe what you want to accomplish, the better you can focus your attention on achieving what you want. “Being able to do 50 sit-ups” looks nice, but “Being able to do 50 sit-ups in 2 minutes time on 5 days every week” is much more specific.
5. Make it measurable. You need to make your goal measurable, for the simple reason that you need to be able to verify whether you’ve accomplished it.
6. Be independent. Make sure that you are the deciding factor in accomplishing your goals. Don’t rely on someone or something else or on a specific event to get what you want. You’re activity will be waiting and hoping, and that doesn’t empower you to get your goals accomplished.
7. Express confidence. Refrain from using “doubt-words”. Don’t try or attempt something, don’t wish, don’t aim for. These are all words that have failure built in, they keep it as a viable option. And you don’t want to build failure into your goals.

If you liked this article, please vote for it on Digg or bookmark it on Del.icio.us. Thanks!