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Living your life powered by purpose, driven towards a vision of a perfect life is intended to create joyful moments throughout your life. It is not meant to drive you to never-ending work, or a lack of satisfaction with anything but the achievement of your goals.

Living your life focused on your purpose, vision, and goals has the danger of leaving us discontented. Without gratitude, it can feel as if we won’t ever be happy unless we achieve every piece of our vision.

Don’t let this happen to you!

Take time every day to appreciate the little things around you. Express your appreciation for your loved ones. Tell your co-workers how grateful you are for their support. Enjoy the beauty of nature that is around us every day.

When you are grateful for the things you have, the people around you, and the experiences you encounter, every moment can be a moment filled with excitement, appreciation, and contentment.

While our vision and our goals are focused on the future, life happens as a series of “now’s.” It is our job to make the most of these moments and to appreciate them as they come. We can chase our goals for our entire life without feeling a moment of satisfaction, or we can chase our goals and feel immense satisfaction in every moment of our entire life.

Dwelling on the past or worrying about the future are fool’s games. You deserve better than to waste your precious time thinking about things that you cannot affect. Every second that we spend worrying about the past or the future are current moments that we could have been enjoying.

The process in this book is a proven formula. If you follow it and believe in it, you will succeed, and that success will make incredibly happy. However, if that achievement of goals is the only thing that you allow to make you happy, you’ll end up miserable.

The process of setting and achieving goals is a life long one. When you’ve accomplished something, you’ll naturally want to move on to the next thing. Therefore, if the accomplishment of goals is what you decide will make you happy, you’ll always be left searching for more.

You can chase happiness, and choose to be happy with your life regardless of what you do, but you were put on this earth for a purpose, and without pursuing it, you will come to a point in your life when you’ll regret that decision. Happiness without achievement is unfulfilling. It leaves us with a sense of wanting more.

Be happy now. Enjoy the process of living your purpose and chasing your dreams. Be happy with whatever results you achieve. Then keep working. A life of achievements without happiness is also unfulfilling. This is like chasing after the wind. As soon as you think you’ve got it, it’ll be gone.

As human beings, we need both. The good news is, both can exist at the same time. Allow yourself to be content with whatever life has dealt you right now, chase your dreams with a sense of wonder and excitement, and be grateful for whatever results you achieve.

Have a joyful day!

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By now, you should have a pretty exciting picture of 2013 in your mind, full of goals, affirmations, visualizations, a vision for the future, and a life purpose powering it all.

Now, all that’s left is to do it!

You’re going to step out on the first day of this new journey, and it’s going to be exhilarating, exciting, and maybe a bit scary. You’ll go through great days and you’ll have bad days. You’ll win some, and you’ll lose some.

On those bad days, the ones where you feel like you went backward when you were sure you’d go forward, are when having accountability is essential.

Having support in achieving your goals can be the best indicator of achievement. If someone believes in you and will help you, and they’re expecting success out of you, you’re far more likely to put the effort in.

If the only person you answer to is yourself, the bad days will drag you down more. If you don’t have someone counting on you, it’s easier to just skip out on some of the work.

Depending on the type of goal you’re working on, accountability can come in different forms.

For a career or a financial goal, you might want to seek out a mentor. Someone who has already accomplished the things you want to accomplish, and who is willing to help you get there.

For a fitness goal, find a workout buddy. Or hire a personal trainer. If you know that someone is at the gym waiting for you to show up, it is much more difficult to stay in bed and skip the workout. Especially if you’ve already paid them to be there!

For a spirituality goal, plan to attend worship or study, pray, or meditate with a friend.

Mastermind groups are also wonderful ways to build accountability into your week. I covered that topic extensively here.

The more accountability you build into your life, the more intensely you’ll find yourself working. We are very good at lying to ourselves when it comes to our activities, but results don’t lie. An accountability partner looks at your results, and you either did it or you didn’t.

For the most motivationally challenged individuals, or those looking for the highest levels of success, a daily accountability partner might be the answer you’re looking for. With this setup, two success minded individuals agree to check in with each other once per day, every day. You’ll share your “First Five” activities you’re going to take today, your results from the prior day, and any successes or roadblocks you encountered.

Daily accountability partners can be a spouse, a close friend, a business associate or a relative. You might even reach out using LinkedIn or Facebook to find one of your acquaintances that is interested in applying the principle of accountability into their day.

After all the ground we’ve covered, the last thing that I want for you is to get discouraged when you have a few bad days and go back to your old habits. I want success for you as badly as I want it for myself.

Building accountability into every one of your goals is like putting a lock on a cage. With accountability, you’re committed to your goal, and there’s no getting out of it!

Today’s Action Step

Who can hold you accountable to each of your goals? Consider mentors, friends, family members and business associates. If all else fails, ask your Facebook friends or Twitter followers to hold you accountable to post your results toward your goals every day.

If you haven’t done so already, please click here to visit and like my new Facebook page for Andrew Schultz Training!

Have a joyful day!

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Have you ever wondered what the difference is between the successful and the massively successful?

In the last post, we discussed how to use affirmations to keep your motivation levels at their peak. But what if I told you there was a way to take this step of positively affirming your goals to an entirely different dimension?

That process is called visualization. Visualization is not a difficult process. In fact, in the last post’s action step, I asked you to do a little bit of visualization when imagining yourself as if you had completed your goal.

The subconscious mind plays an enormous part in the reality that we manifest. The orders that our mind gives to our body determines the actions that we take, the thoughts that we think, even the decisions we make.

How many times has your heart beaten today without a single conscious thought? How many breaths have you taken? How has your food digested and turned into energy without you making a decision for it to do so?

All day long, your subconscious mind works like a drill Sargent at basic training, barking orders to your body and your conscious mind that they obey like obedient military recruits.

That drill sargent, however, isn’t someone else. It’s not another person. It’s not your mother, your father, your spouse, or your peer group. That drill sargent is you. And you can reprogram your drill sargent.

In our conscious world, we can make decisions and take physical actions as a result of those decisions. Decide to wiggle your right index finger. There, you just did it.

In our subconscious world, we can have this same effect on our inner drill sargent, giving him a new set of orders that he will demand of our thoughts, our actions, and our decisions. It just works a little differently.

A drill sargent’s focus is on outcomes. His goal is to turn new military recruits into trained soldiers, and he will use any means necessary to achieve that outcome. What is the definition of a trained soldier? Whatever his superior officers tell him that it is.

Chances are, that drill sargent went through hundreds of hours of training, making sure he fully understood his objective. It is imperative that he achieve his mission, otherwise, the military commanders will have sub-par soldiers on their battlefields.  If the commanders decided that their soldiers needed to have different characteristics, they’d retrain the drill sargents, and they would start turning out differently equipped soldiers.

Our subconscious mind creates our reality. If we want a new reality, we just need to retrain our subconscious. Teach it exactly what we want it to turn out for us in our lives. This is what visualization can do.

To put the power of visualization into effect in achieving the goals you’ve set for yourself, take these simple steps.

Close your eyes.

Imagine your goal as if it is being completed right now. Not after you’ve finished, but the process of actually taking the final step and finishing your goal.

Play this moment in your mind like a movie. When you do, use all of your senses.

• Vision – What do you see? Notice the details. Light, darkness, indoors or outdoors.
• Smell – Where you are, how does it smell? Any familiar odors or scents? Fresh cut grass, sweat, oil on your equipment.
• Hearing – Do you hear any noises? Is there cheering, clapping, talking?
• Taste – Is there any taste or flavor involved? Feeling quenched or thirsty?
• Touch – How does your skin feel? Hot, clammy, wet? Any textures against your skin from your clothing. The feel of your equipment in your hand. Head gear you might have on?
• Intuition – Any feeling in your gut?

The world’s most elite athletes understand the power of visualization. Jack Nicklaus, one of the all time greats in the game of golf, may have been one of the first to put it to use. Now, an entire field, sports psychology, teaches athletes how to achieve greater physical gains by first visualizing their results.

Visualizing yourself successfully achieving your goals will help your subconscious recognize more opportunities for you. It will build your confidence in your ability to succeed. Perhaps most importantly, it will clearly define what success looks like for you. Perhaps you’ve never been in the shape that you want to be in, so you don’t know how it really feels to have six pack abs, but you can visualize it! You might not know how it feels to make $100,000 in a year, but you can visualize getting large paychecks!

It’s important to set goals that stretch you, and sometimes that means that you need to set goals that you don’t yet know how to achieve. For these goals especially, visualization is the ultimate key to success.

Today’s Action Step

Go through your list of goals. Close your eyes and visualize each of them being completed. Allow yourself to feel the feelings you will have when you cross that line. It should feel exciting, fulfilling, and rewarding, so enjoy it!

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Have a joyful day!

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Have you ever lost motivation while pursuing a goal? Affirmations can help to keep your motivation level high.

An affirmation, to put it simply, is a short statement expressing your goal as if it is already complete.

We’ve discussed the power of goals have on our subconscious mind, and how a goal can put our mind to work finding solutions to problems, drawing us closer to achievement of the goal.

Affirmations put this effect into overdrive by forcing us to imagine the goal as if it has already been completed. It helps to throw in a couple of feeling or action words.

For example, if my goal was to weigh 190 pounds by October 1, 2013. An affirmation for that goal might be: “Today is October 1, 2013. I feel incredible knowing that I have reached my ideal weight of 190 pounds.”

What happens in your subconscious when you are telling yourself that you’ve already done something that you haven’t actually done? It creates an unresolved problem, and your mind will work to make that statement true. Remember the law of attraction, that says that we get more of what we think about?

This law is at work in your life right now. Most of us just don’t realize it. We think that our thoughts are a result of our physical state, when in fact, the opposite is true. Our physical state is a result of our thoughts. Everything you are experiencing right now is a result of a thought, belief, or assumption you’ve made about yourself.

If you’re feeling happy, you might think it’s because good things have happened recently. But if you had been grouchy, would those same good things have happened? Or might things have turned out differently if you had behaved differently?

Affirmations use this truth to change our physical state into one that we choose.  Knowing that we can influence outcomes by putting ourselves in the right frame of mind, if we change our thoughts, we can change our outcomes.

When we set new goals, they are almost always exciting to us, because at the time, we feel the hope, the excitement and the passion for achieving something new. But those feelings can fade over time when we start getting into the daily work of achievement. Setting affirmations now will help keep your mind in the same place it is right now.

When we set affirmations before we start working on our goals, we’re capturing this excitement and passion that we have when goals are new. They allow us to keep the same motivation to achieve throughout the pursuit of our goal that we had when we were just getting started.

It’s tempting, when setting a new goal, to just dive in and start working. And that passion is admirable. However, taking a short pause to complete this step will allow you to work longer, harder, and maintain this level of motivation long past the beginning stages, when motivation is easy.

Your affirmations will become an important part of the achiever’s perfect day, which I’ll be outlining very soon. You’ll be repeating these affirmations daily, which does a couple of very important things for you.

The daily repetition will keep your focus on your goals. Repeating them to yourself daily will remind you of what you have decided to make a priority in your life.

Also, when you tell yourself daily about how you’re going to feel when you’ve accomplished your goals, it builds excitement. These goals that you’ve set throughout this series are things that are fulfilling a vision and a purpose for you and for your life. How exciting will it be when they’re accomplished? When you’re reminding yourself of this excitement every day, your days will begin to fill with a burning desire to make that feeling of accomplishment a reality.

You’ll write out an affirmation for each of your goals. I suggest recording them in a couple of different ways.

First, type them into a new document that you can print. Print a couple copies and hang them where ever you will see them daily. Next to your bathroom mirror and on your refrigerator for example.

Then, write each of them out on it’s own 3×5 index card. These cards are the perfect size to carry around in a pocket, a purse, or a briefcase. You can easily pull them out and review them when you have time.

Today’s Action Step

Look at each of the goals you’ve chosen to actively work on. Now close your eyes and imagine the feelings you’ll have when you’ve accomplished it. Allow yourself to feel the feelings you’ll feel. Imagine what others will say to you. Imagine the celebration you’ll have.

Now, as concisely as possible, put those feelings into a short one or two sentence statement, describing your goal as completed, and describing these feelings. Write them down as I described above and repeat them to yourself daily at least twice. I recommend once in the morning, and once right before you close your eyes to go to bed.

If you haven’t done so already, please click here to visit and like my new Facebook page for Andrew Schultz Training!

Have a joyful day!

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How many things do you spend your time on that could be done by someone else?

When you’re setting new goals, you need to have time to accomplish those goals. We spend an awful lot of time doing very menial tasks. Tasks that could easily be done by someone else entirely.

Since we only have a limited amount of time each day, you are making a statement about how you value your time when you choose to invest it in a particular activity. If you could be paying someone $10/hour or less to do a task that you’re doing yourself, but you choose to do it yourself anyway, that’s the value you are assigning to your time.

Would you pay $10 for an extra hour with your family? Would you pay $10 for an extra hour to be productive at your job? Would you pay $10 to get tasks done that allow you time to spend volunteering for a charity that fills your heart and mind with love and gratitude? If you’re choosing to spend an hour running to pick up the dry cleaning and pick up a few things at Target, you’ve made a statement that picking up dry cleaning and shopping are more important to you than your goals.

Yes, I’m saying that you need a personal assistant, because if you’re spending your time doing things that are not integral to your life goals, you’re wasting your time.

How does a CEO create value beyond himself? By having other people doing the work so he can think about big picture issues. If the CEO was answering phone calls from angry customers in one of the call centers, is he providing real value to his company?

You are the CEO of your life, not a call center operator.

You might be thinking right now that your life doesn’t require a personal assistant, or that you couldn’t give up control over your life to another person. But you’re not handing over your core responsibilities to this person. You’re not saying, “today, I want you to train for my marathon for me, meet with my clients, and study chapter 8 of Romans for my bible study.” You’re saying, run to the grocery store and pick up bread, milk, and eggs, so I can train for my marathon, meet with clients and study chapter 8 of Romans.”

So what if he picks up the wrong kind of bread. So what if he gets 1% milk instead of skim? What’s more important? Having time to do the things that you want to do, or eating a few slices of a different brand of bread?

The tasks you spend time on are not as complicated as you probably make them out to be. And they probably take more time than you really think. That task that you think only you can do, but it’s okay because it will only take a minute? By the time you’ve done it, it really took 10 minutes. And most tasks on most to-do lists can be done by a ninth grader.

There’s a college student or a stay at home mom somewhere within 10 minutes of your house that would be happy to have the extra few dollars. And you’ll be happy to have the extra time.

There are volumes written on how to select the right personal assistant, things that they can do for you, and how to effectively train and delegate to an assistant. Read them, learn from them, and use them. It takes practice to delegate and outsource your personal life. But doing so opens up worlds of possibilities.

Today’s Action Step

Write down 10 things that take your time that you would have been qualified to do when you were 14. Give an honest assessment of the amount of time those things take each week and total it up. Multiply the total number of hours by $10. Would you pay that amount of money to have all of those things out of your way so that you can focus on your new goals?

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Have a joyful day!

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Why is it that so many new year’s resolutions are forgotten about, or left by the wayside, by the end of January?

When we take on new goals, they require new actions. Last Friday, we discussed making daily progress on your goals, no matter how slight the progress may be.

Well guess what? When the calendar changes from 2012 to 2013, unless you’ve done something about it, you have the same commitments, the same obligations, and the same life that you had the day before. New goals require new priorities. New priorities require time.

When these priorities aren’t acknowledged and addressed, the new goal never finds it’s rightful place in your life. Rather than becoming an important part of your day, as time passes, the activities required to achieve that goal will get skipped, allowed to slide, or forgotten about altogether.

After a few weeks of trying to force the resolution into an already-full life without establishing it’s priority, we give up. Often, we’ll make lots of excuses like “I guess it wasn’t meant to be” or “I’ll get back to it when I have more time,” when in reality, it IS meant to be, and you’ll never have more time.

Are any of the goals you’ve chosen ones that you’ve tried to accomplish in the past without success? Take an honest look at what threw you off track in the past, then design strategies to avoid making those mistakes again.

Here are some ways you can make your goals a priority, so that they don’t get lost in the busy-ness of the every day.

• Take a time inventory. This eye-opening experience involves writing down everything you do for an entire week. Set an alarm to go off every 15 minutes and briefly jot down what you did for those minutes. Reset the timer and continue working, playing, reading, relaxing, or doing whatever it is you were doing. This exercise will clearly define the things you spend your time doing, so you can easily identify lower priority activities that are taking your time.
• Aggressively eliminate low priority activities. Before you embarked on this life of pursuing your vision and living a purpose, these low priority activities filled up the time between whatever excitement you found. But now, you have excitement built into your every day life, and you can let go of these things that filled up your time so you can devote it to the pursuit of your passion.  TV watching, video game playing, and drinking at happy hour are a few examples. You don’t, of course, have to give up your free time, however, you’ll now be prioritizing the things you most want to do in your free time, so you get the most joy possible out of the time you take to relax and unwind.
• Wake up earlier. Successful people don’t lay in bed and hit the snooze button until 15 minutes before they have to get to work. Set your alarm and get up. Early. Make a cup of coffee. Meditate. Read. Write. Pray. Exercise.
• Go to bed earlier. Back in 2004, I had a coach tell me that I needed to be in bed before 10 PM every night. “Nothing good happens after 10″ is what he told me. He’s right. We all know the obvious reasons. Late night snacks, excessive drinking and filth on television come to mind. Perhaps more importantly, when we are tired, our mental acuity decreases quickly. If you’re not going to get anything worthwhile done, go to sleep. Get well rested and you’ll be more successful for it.
• Say no. There will always be new opportunities to get involved. You need to have your purpose, your vision, and your goals firmly in your mind. When someone asks you to volunteer, help out, join a board of a non-profit, take on a leadership position in a child’s activity, or any number of other things that will be thrown in your direction, weigh them against your goals. If they aren’t moving you toward your goals, or will divert time away from something that you are now prioritizing in your life, just don’t do it!
• Drink more water. If focus has been a problem for you in the past, consider your level of hydration. Even mild dehydration can have profound effects on cognitive performance and mental function. 64 ounces of water a day is a bare minimum. A gallon is better.
• Avoid illness and injury. Nothing will stop a fitness goal faster than an injury that prevents you from exercising. An illness will slow down or stop your progress towards almost any goal. Do everything you can to stay safe and healthy.
• Meditate. Meditation can help any goal become reality more quickly. If you’ve never meditated before, click here for some tips for beginners.

It’s as if you are taking a new course in life. In the past, you’ve been driving down a nice smooth highway. Now, since you’ve made some new priorities, you’re going to be blazing a new trail for your life. This new trail happens to be a road that you have’t traveled before, and you need to clear a few things out of your way before you start. Otherwise, you’ll bump into too many things and end up turning back and driving on that easy road that you already know.

Today’s Action Step

There are, of course, many ways to make sure your goals remain a priority. The goal for today is simply to give some honest thought to the things that have kept you from success in the past, and find ways to avoid them this time around.

If you haven’t done so already, please click here to visit and like my new Facebook page for Andrew Schultz Training!

Have a joyful day!

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Once you have your weekly goals, it’s pretty clear to see what you need to accomplish in order to achieve your bigger goals, and where achieving those goals puts you in relation to your overall vision of your life.

So now, it’s time for the hard work.

Ok, it’s not really going to be that hard. In fact, it’ll be fun. This is a good time to reassess, in fact. It’s easy to write down a big goal for 2013, but when it comes time to do the daily work you’ll need to do in order to accomplish it, it shouldn’t seem like hard work. If it does, chances are, you’re still chasing a goal that isn’t really your goal at all.

Joy is the measuring stick here. If you’ve really followed all of these steps that I’ve been writing about for the past two weeks, these daily disciplines should bring about joy in your heart and your mind.

What is this talk about daily disciplines? I thought the law of attraction just meant that I think about stuff and it shows up! Of course not. You still need to do the work to get the things you want out of your life.

When I started my business selling insurance, there were weeks that I worked 70, 80, even 90 hours. And guess what? I didn’t feel tired. I didn’t get burned out. I didn’t even mind it. I loved it! I loved helping families, I loved talking to so many new people every day, I loved the people I worked with. Every bit of it was joy to me. And it still is.

Goals are about desired outcomes. They work on our subconscious mind to direct our intuition towards helping us achieve them. But in order to achieve them, there are certain activities that we’ll need to do on a daily basis.

Daily disciplines are just that. Activities. These are the things we’re going to do on a daily basis in order to achieve our weekly objectives.

Are you starting to see how this all fits together? Let’s look at an example of how this might play out..

Financial Vision: Earn enough passive income to allow me to take a year off of work to travel around the world.

Bucket List: Earn $1 Million of passive income in one year

2013 Goal: Start a business that will generate passive income and earn $25,000 from that business.

Quarterly Goals: Q1 – Identify business to start. Q2 – Set up business and begin operating. Q3-Earn first $8,000 in income. Q4 – Earn next $17,000 in income.

Weekly goals: Week 1: Interview two business owners who earn passive income. Week 2: Read about business ideas for passive income.

Daily Disciplines: Day 1: Ask Facebook friends for contacts with business owners. Day 2: Identify 5 potential contacts and reach out to ask if they’ll share some ideas with me. Day 3:

Now, if you thought about your financial vision being so large that you could make enough money without working to take a year off and travel around the world, that might sound completely unrealistic. But does reaching out to a few people to ask them for ideas on starting a small business that you want to earn $25,000 from this year sound unrealistic? I bet each of those daily steps would take 10 minutes at the most.

So what actions will you need to take for your goals?

I’ve had great success in my own life using the “First Five” system. Here’s how it works.

Each evening, as you sit down to review your day (we’ll discuss this more next week,) you’ll look at each of your goals. Then, list out five activities you can take that will move you one step closer to one of your weekly goals. Just five simple tasks. Look at your calendar and schedule times for them, so you’re sure that they remain a priority when you get busy and get tempted to skip one.

I make a habit of this every day, and it is singlehandedly responsible for much of my success. Here’s an example of what I wrote out one evening.

First Five

1. Wake up at 4:45 and go to gym.
2. Write next Tuesday’s blog post
3. Practice guitar for 30 minutes
4. Read “Brain Wars” for 30 minutes
5. Come home from work early to play games with kids.

The next day, when I woke up, guess what I already had at my fingertips? The 5 things that I needed to do to move me towards reaching my goals. I knew, that as long as I got up and went to the gym, I’ve done something to move me towards my fitness goal for the week. As long as I got the blog post written, I’ve moved my financial and career goals forward. As long as I practiced guitar, I’ve moved toward my recreation goal. As long as I read my book for 30 minutes, I’ve gotten closer to reaching my personal development goal. And as long as I get home to play a few games of Uno (which I’ve been VERY unlucky at lately) I’ve moved towards achieving my relationships goal.

Are those five tasks going to take up my entire day? Of course not. As long as I prioritize these five things above the other busy work that is sure to come my way, I’ve made real progress towards achieving my vision.

If you’ve stuck with us so far, congratulations! Next week, we’ll discuss strategies to keep your motivation up when things get challenging. We’ll also reveal a few tools to activate your highest intuition and the law of attraction in helping you follow through on the achievement of your goals. Lastly, as we wrap up this series, I’ll lay out a blueprint of a perfect goalsetter’s day, and how to piece all of this together into a single successful day that you can easily repeat!

Today’s Action Step

Take a look at each of the goals you’ve set, and the first weekly benchmark. What do you need to do in that first week to reach that benchmark? What do you need to do on Monday? Write out your “First Five” activities that you’ll take tomorrow to move you in the right direction!

If you haven’t done so already, please click here to visit and like my new Facebook page for Andrew Schultz Training!

Have a joyful day!

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At this point, things should probably be getting pretty exciting for you.

In just under 2 weeks, you’ve put your life on a path towards a level of success that very few people ever achieve. In fact, if you’ve followed these steps up until this point, you’re already in the top 3% of the population when it comes to your goal setting. The top 3%!

So far, we’ve set some longer term goals. One in each of the different parts of your life. Then, we decided how long we think it’ll take us to achieve them.

Next, it’s time to break it down. Way down.

Long term goals work on our subconscious mind like a rubber band. One end of the rubber band is around us, the other end is around the goal. When we put our thoughts toward that goal, we are pulled towards it.

But will a rubber band wrapped around two objects ever pull them all the way together? Of course not. As you get closer, the rubber band loses it’s elasticity.

Goals work the same way. You can set a long term goal and you will likely make progress towards that goal, but to actually accomplish it, you’re going to need something else.

This is where the law of attraction misses a lot of people. Ask, believe, receive. That’s what the peddlers of the law of attraction want to sell us. And we’re willing to buy it, aren’t we? Because it sounds like easy street! All I have to do to get what I want is think about it? Count me in! I’ll have a Ferrari and some Bluefin Tuna sushi.

But as any realistic person knows, there has to be more to achievement than just thinking about what we want to achieve. There’s that little thing called work that gets in the way of that “easy street” theory.

So, what steps are you going to have to take to achieve each of the goals you set? Here’s a little formula that I like to use.

1. Set a target end date. How long do you plan for it to take to achieve this goal?
2. Set benchmarks. Unless your goal involves doing one thing and one thing only, there are going to be some steps to take. If your goal is going to take you 6 months to achieve, what is the halfway point? Is it a straightline type of goal, where you’ll be halfway to achieving it in 3 months? Break your goal down by halves until you get to 1-2 week benchmarks. That way, you’ll know if you’re on track or not on track.
3. Chart it out. There is something very powerful about a graph. If your goal is something you are tracking in numbers, like sales goals, cholesterol readings, or the number of dates you go on with your spouse, make a graph and mark your benchmarks from step 2. Each week, you can chart your progress. Special goal charting tip: if success in a goal is the decrease of a number, such as your weight, your golf score, or your blood pressure, have your line that marks your results going up. Our subconscious mind assigns a negative connotation to a line that trends downwards, even if it’s supposed to trend downwards. Success is always “up”.
4. Schedule Progress Reviews. Once per week tends to work well. It helps to have a friend that you report in to, share your successes and challenges, review each other’s progress charts, and give each other encouragement and support. If you don’t have someone to do this with, schedule the time with yourself to take inventory, and hold this time as sacred. You always get more of the things you keep track of. If you lose track of your goals, they become too easy to forget. That’s when old habits creep back in before new ones are fully formed.

Now, you have some real steps you can take to move forward on these big goals. With weekly benchmarks, you are taking small manageable bites out of your life’s vision.

These broken down steps are the missing piece. The “pull” that can bring us all the way to our goals when the attraction of the goal itself doesn’t quite get us all the way from desire to achievement.

These steps might start to look a lot like work. And that’s because they are! However, the work involved in accomplishing these goals that you’ve set shouldn’t feel like drudgery. It shouldn’t seem like hard work. This is the incredible, exhilarating, passion-filled work that you will undertake tirelessly, because the small steps are moving you towards something that is meaningful to you.

Today’s Action Step

Break down the goals you wrote down yesterday. Start with deciding where halfway is. Then break it down further, until you have small benchmarks along the way, so you’ll be able to easily do the work required to achieve that benchmark!

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Have a joyful day!

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The short answer to that question is: as many as you can visualize yourself completing at the same time. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I can’t think of a single mentee or coaching client that hasn’t asked me this very question at some point. How many things should I try to do at once?

If you’ve only recently come to understand your purpose, you will be very tempted to try to do lots of things all at the same time in that area of your life, but I will caution you against it.

If you’re looking for ultimate success, I recommend one goal at a time from each area of your vision.

One faith goal. One financial goal. One career goal. One charity goal. One relationships goal. One personal development goal. One recreation goal, and one health goal.

I’m sure that this has some of you thinking, “but I have SO many career goals, I can’t just work on one.” And others are probably thinking “that seems like an awful lot of things to work on at the same time”.

The answer to both of those statements is actually very similar. It all depends on your priorities.

Up until now, if you’ve been living a life not driven by purpose, you’ve likely spent lots of time doing things like hanging out in bars, watching television, playing video games, reading/watching the news, browsing social media sites, or other similar time wasters.

Living a purpose-based life is different. Now that you have allowed yourself to admit your purpose and you’ve defined your vision, you’re naturally going to have some new priorities. We created a vision of an entire life, not just a career or a financial life, and progress can be made in all of these areas at the same time, as long as you remain committed to your vision.

Now, you may have some goals that are bigger than others at times, but that doesn’t mean you totally ignore the other parts of your life!

Now it’s finally time to plan for 2013. Where do you want to be at the end of the year?

Take a look at your vision statement for each area, then look at your bucket list for that same area. Is there something on your bucket list you can accomplish? Or something that you can move towards? Let’s look at an example.

If your vision in the financial realm is to have a $1 Billion net worth, that might be a bit of a big thing to bite off in one year. Your financial bucket list might contain something like “save 25% of the money I earn”.

Maybe you aren’t currently saving money at all, so jumping straight to 25% might not be possible for you immediately. But, could you set a goal of putting away 5% of each paycheck by July, then 8% by the end of the year? I bet you could do that!

If you set that goal and achieve it, did you fail just because you don’t have $1 Billion yet, or because you’re not saving 25% yet? Of course not. You have taken a step in the right direction. You’ve moved towards achieving one of your life’s goals, and you’ve moved towards your ultimate vision.

You might have set financial goals in the past, to start saving, or to increase your income, or maybe to reduce debt (in which case, you need to re-read yesterday’s post.) But without a vision, you might have convinced yourself that you failed by only putting 8% into savings, but not anymore! Without a vision, if you only got to 5%, you might think that not getting to 8% or 25% was a failure, but not anymore!

Now, all of your goals are moving you in the direction of your vision. Your actions are powered by your purpose, and your achievements aren’t just a fulfillment of a resolution. They are a fulfillment of your highest self.

Have you ever seen someone who was able to persist through great struggle? Someone who just kept going when the going got really, really tough? Did they just have exceptionally thick skin? I doubt it. I think that they were driven by purpose. Happy to have taken whatever ground they did in pursuit of their vision, and happy to get up after falling down to take more steps in that direction.

So what goals should you pick for 2013? Only you can decide. Just let them be goals that you will be happy to pursue, regardless of the progress you make.

Today’s Action Step

Look at your vision and your bucket list, what calls to you? What sounds exciting? Pick out one thing in each area that you’ll accomplish or move toward starting January 1st.. Maybe it’s something that will take you all year. Maybe it will only take 90 days. Either way, write it down. If you finish before the end of the year, you can always pick another one.

It’s not your job to fix everything in the first few weeks, months, or quarters of 2013. You don’t need to accomplish our entire vision. Just pick one thing in each area that you’re going to do and decide by when you’re going to do it.

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Have a joyful day!

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Now that you’ve written out a bucket list, you should be starting to feel some excitement about moving towards your passions and dreams. Isn’t it exciting to look at the list of things you want to do in your life?

Now, I’d like you to go back through this list to see if you’ve stated all of your goals in positive terms.

The words in your goals are almost as important as the goals themselves. As we discussed earlier, your subconscious mind is activated by the words that you use.

Any goal can be written in the positive, but it can take some creativity to do so! Here are a couple of examples.

Negative Goal: Quit eating junk food.

Positive Restatement: Plan healthy meals and carry healthy snacks with me at all times.

Negative Goal: Stop smoking so I don’t get cancer.

Positive Restatement: Breathe only clean air into my lungs.

When our subconscious hears “smoking” or “junk food” guess what it starts to turn your thoughts toward? Smoking and junk food! Successful changes in habits don’t come from quitting, avoiding or losing. They come from replacing a bad behavior with a good one.

This simple little change in your thought patterns can help you achieve goals that you’ve failed at over, and over, and over. In fact, when you look through the list of your goals, I bet you’ll find that the areas you’ve struggled with in the past are areas that you have been focusing your thoughts on what you want to stop, rather than what you want to achieve.

You can’t lose weight when you’re focused on what you weigh. You can’t stop smoking when you’re focused on smoking. You can’t stop looking at your phone in social situations when you’re focused on your phone!

We don’t stop things, we start things. We don’t lose things, we gain things. The human mind is one of accomplishment and achievement, so let’s make sure we give it lots to achieve!

Today’s Action Step

As we move forward, we’ll be It’s absolutely critical that all of your goals be worded positively. So today, go back through that bucket list of yours and find any goals that need to be rewritten in positive terms.

If you haven’t done so already, please click here to visit and like my new Facebook page for Andrew Schultz Training!

Have a joyful day!

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