Everyone wants to know the success secret to setting and achieving goals. Many great thinkers, achievers and coaches recommend the secret of living one day at a time.
Why is this so powerful? Because it laser-focuses your energy into 24 hours instead of leaking it into the past – or dreaming it away into the future.
Success Secret to Setting and Achieving Goals
Brad Larsen, a life coach and corporate consultant in Northern Utah expands and gives tips on this one-day-at-a-time concept in the Southern-Examiner here. He says:
At times, achieving our goals seems so far off or slow that we get discouraged, procrastinate or just give up. We fall back into old, comfortable habits that lead nowhere…
You will never find success with sporadic bursts of activity, get-rich-quick schemes or ethical compromises. The greatest successes are built slowly and deliberately through focused, consistent, high-quality efforts on a daily basis.
He recommends that by living one day at a time the success secret to setting and achieving goals comes about as a result of “successful days strung together.”
Five Steps to Achieving Goals Daily
Larsen also offers a five-step system to increase productivity and avoid procrastion day by day that I have found helpful in my own life.
• Each night, write down, prioritize and visualize the completion of your goals and tasks for the next day. This includes everything such as projects, email, advertising, cold-calling, relaxing, budgeting and so on.• In the morning, review those goals and again visualize their completion. This process will start your subconscious and conscious mind working toward these goals. It will also replace negative self-talk with positive self-talk.
• Assign a specific time frame to each goal or group of tasks, anywhere from 15 minutes to two hours. Research has shown that the most effective duration is no more than 30 minutes, without a break.
• Choose a task according to its priority, start a timer and focus on nothing but accomplishing that task. Remain totally focused on the task at hand. Don’t try to do future work. Focus on today only.
• When time is up, move on or take a short break. It’s not the number of things you do, but the quality and the efficiency that counts. Eventually, you’ll be able to increase the number of tasks and will perform them even better.
If everything is done to the best of your ability, you can fall asleep that night knowing you accomplished something phenomenal. Be careful — it can become addictive!
Why does this system work so well?
• An identified end result or goal. Our brains are goal-seeking machines. When you give your brain a goal, it wants to find ways to achieve it.
• A specific deadline or time frame. Once your brain has been given a goal, the deadline motivates it to act. The closer the deadline, the more your brain revs up.
• Believability. This system forces you to break everything down into manageable chunks. Therefore, you don’t see an overwhelming, out-of-control mass of tasks. When you believe you can do something, you will do it.
Just for Today
As they say in the 12-Step programs for addicts: live “Just for Today” because you can do for one day things that would daunt you if you thought you had to do them forever. Similarly you can do one-day-at-a-time more than you ever thought possible in terms of your dreams and goals by following this simple success secret to setting and achieving goals.