Lesson 18

How to write out your goals correctly

I would like you to think about your three goals in turn, for each one repeat, the following process:

Take your first goal and close your eyes, visualise in your mind that you have just successfully completed it. What is happening, how are you feeling, who or what is going on around you? Think about your goal and feel the emotions of success.

Next visualise what is happening three months after the successful completion of your goal. Look back at the time when you completed the goal and think about what is going on now in relation to it.

Now repeat the activity for goals two and three.

The human mind cannot hold two different pictures of the same thing without creating tension. If you scratch your nice shiny car you will have a strong ‘urge’ to get it repaired as soon as possible because that’s the picture in your mind of the way it should look. When you view a new house and the bathroom is not as appealing as the one in your current home you may say ‘this is the first thing we’ll do when we move in.’ But if you don’t get the scratch repaired then after a while you will hardly notice it. The desire to get the car repaired will reduce over time. Likewise, with the bathroom if the refurbishment gets put off it won’t happen. The tension is called ‘creative tension’ or ‘cognitive dissonance.’ Essentially our brains can’t hold two different pictures of the same thing. Imagine an elastic band held between your thumbs, one hand above the other. The elastic band creates a force to bring your thumbs together. Well your brain operates in the same way.

So, if we write a goal specifying exactly what we want, in the first person as if it is already completed then the same creative tension will form in our brain, we can read and visualise that goal several times a day. The key is in the detail using words that trigger emotion and pictures of what we want.

Examples:

Suppose you are a size fourteen and you want to lose weight, here is how to write a goal. You can embellish it as much as you like with lots of emotional words.

‘I look great in the mirror in my size 12 blue dress. The gym was hard at first, but I soon got into the habit of going.’

‘We achieved our stretching sales target of 20% (you can put more specific numbers in) for the last financial year and are celebrating tonight with the whole team in Piccolino’s’

‘It is graduation day looking back three years ago when I enrolled it seems like a lifetime ago. I am just walking on to the stage to receive my scroll from the Assistant Dean. Flash goes the camera!’