By Dr. Scott Zarcinas, Founder 818: Unlocking Your Life

Goal setting is an important aspect of Life Leadership.

The adage of ‘how do you eat an elephant?’ sums this up best: one bite at a time.

Setting Targets, Aims and Goals (TAGs) helps to break down your vision and mission into bite-sized chunks. TAGs help take the overwhelm out of what you need to do to achieve your big picture vision.

One of the habits of success is to write down your goals and read your list every day. Brian Tracey, motivational speaker and author of Eat that Frog! [1] says we should ‘think on paper’.

This is because writing down your goals employs both hemispheres of your brain, the creative right brain and the logical left brain.

The Left and Right Brain

The corpus callosum is the central bundle of nerves that connects the two hemispheres. Without the corpus callosum, the left and right brain cannot communicate with each other.

Setting goals utilises your creative imagination to envisage your future requirements (right brain) and uses your rational logic to work out the steps and strategies required to achieve it (left brain).

If you don’t write down your goals and only keep them in your head, you are only utilising one half of your brain and thereby minimising your chances of success by at least 50%.

Writing your goals on paper, however, utilises your whole brain and maximises the chances of completing them. Yet research tells us that you are 42% more likely to achieve your goals and dreams [2] when you set goals and ‘think on paper’.

Pardon the pun, but setting goals is a no-brainer.

In the Life Leaders club, we teach that GOALS:

1. Generate motivation
2. Overcome obstacles
3. Account for action
4. Leverage time, money and effort
5. Specify results

GOALS:

G: Generate Motivation

Your goals must mean something to you, however, otherwise you won’t be motivated to achieve them.

There are 7 categories of goals that have the best outcomes for your Life Leadership:

• Family & Relationships
• Career & Work
• Money & Finances
• Education & Learning
• Spirituality & Ethics
• Health & Wellbeing
• Fun & Adventure

These 7 categories help motivate and keep you on track to achieve what you want to achieve.

O: Overcome Obstacles

Goals also help you overcome the obstacles that you can expect to encounter on your Life Leadership journey.

When you know your destination (vision), you can work backwards to set out the mission and goals you need to achieve your vision.

Start with the end in mind and you can anticipate the obstacles you’ll face along your journey.

A: Account for Action

Accountability is another important function of goal setting.

Having a Life Leadership mentor to hold you accountable to do the things you say you will do is a great thing to have. When you are held accountable, you are less likely to procrastinate and more likely to take the action you are meant to take.

Accountability stems from the word ‘account’, which means to tally up, to keep score. Goal setting helps you to keep score of the things you need to do to achieve your vision.

If you don’t have a mentor, goals are a good substitute.

L: Leverage Time, Money, and Effort

Archimedes, the ancient Greek mathematician, is quoted as saying, ‘Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I’ll move the world.’

Levers give you leverage, the ability to move large objects with minimal strength. So too goals leverage your time, money and effort to achieve what you want to achieve.

Through leverage, goals save you money and time, and improve your efficiency and effectiveness.

S: Specify Results

Focus, concentration, clarity, these are the qualities of Life Leadership and the trademarks of success.

By specifying the results you want to achieve, goals also give you clarity and focus. Especially when you think on paper. Being specific in your outcomes enables you to laser target the results you want to achieve.

For instance, my mission is to help 5000 people like yourself reach Life Leadership mastery within the next 15 years. Breaking that mission into goals, that’s on average 330 people beginning the Life Leadership journey per year. Which is about 6-7 per week.

If we can achieve more, that’d be great. However, the point is to know what you want to achieve with as much clarity as you can.

The next step is to work out how you go about doing it.

[1] Eat that Frog! by Brian Tracey, Berrett-Koehler, 2001

[2] How to Beat Procrastination by Gail Matthews

*This article is an excerpt from Dr. Scott Zarcinas’ book, It’s Up To You: Why Most People Fail to Live the Life They Want and How to Change It.

Set Your Goal. Take the First Step to Unlock the Life You Want Today!