▲ Goals are of vital importance in our lives. 

Many of us spend our lives without any definite purpose, simply drifting from place to place. 

Setting goals help us to focus our lives and to advance confidently in a definite direction. 

Without them, I don’t think our lives can truly be complete.


▲ If you are looking for proof of the importance of goals, you need not look any farther than two pivotal studies on success and goal-setting, one completed by Yale University and the other by Dr. Lewis Terman of Stanford University.


▲ In the first study, Yale University kept track of their graduates during a 20 year period and found that the 3% who set goals were worth more financially than the entire 97% of the students who did not!


▲ In the second study, Dr. Terman of Stanford conducted a study of 1,528 students all with IQ’s above the genius level. 

His study found that intelligence had nothing to do with success and financial acumen but that goal-setting did!


▲ So now we know that goal-setting is vitally important to our success, but how do we do it? 

I first recommend that you take a day or two (longer if needed) to spend some time meditating about your passions in life. Start to make a list. 

Some wise men recommend that you try to write down 100 goals for your life. 

Lou Holtz, the tremendously successful football coach at Notre Dame and more recently at the University of South Carolina, said that while still in his teens he wrote down over 100 goals for his life (one of which was to coach a college football team to a National Championship – which he did). 

A few years ago at about the age of 60, Coach Holtz had achieved every single goal he had written down. 

So he had to write another 100 goals and I’m sure he’ll get those before long too!


▲ I recommend that you try to write 100, write them out and break them out into long-term, mid-term, and short-term goals. 

You can write your own definition of the time periods involved, but I would recommend that short-term is up to 5 years from now, mid-term is 5 to 15 years from now, and long-term is 15+ years.


▲ Now that you have goals, you need to start taking advantage of them! 

This is where most would-be goal-setters fail. 

Anyone can write a goal, but I’d wager that if you asked 10 goal-setters what their short-term goals were after a week of setting those goals, that 9 out of 10 would not be able to answer!


▲ You need goals in your life in order to achieve your dreams and have the success you desire. 

But just as important is a system for keeping your goals constantly in your mind. 

We’re back to using affirmations and mind-imagery!


▲ After you’ve written out your 100 goals, take all of them and write them in the form of 100 affirmations. 

Example, if your goal is to earn enough money to take your wife on a second honeymoon to the Caribbean, then you could write: 

“I am enjoying the company of my wife in the Caribbean sun by January 1, 2020 with the money that I gladly save and invest for my benefit!”


▲ Then, follow the advice of Rod Moore of Self Management Systems who said:

“Each morning, the first thing you should do is spend 5 – 10 minutes and invest it in programming your mind to go get the goals you have set for yourself.

By doing so, you are imprinting or programming your mind each day to focus on what you want. 

By doing this consistently your sub-conscious mind will begin to manifest your desires into your life.”


▲ What I’ve found works best for me is to review my short-term goals daily, and then once a week review the mid-term and long-term goals making adjustments as necessary to the term of specific goals.

I find that this keeps me focused on achieving the goals with the shorter term without forgetting about the goals on the horizon.


▲ I want you to be tremendously successful and I believe that you will be with the techniques and exercises that we’ve discussed. 

Be a goal-setter, but don’t just set them and walk away. 

Set them and follow them and achieve the success you deserve! Until next time!

♡  There is a difference but what constitutes a life and what constitutes a lifestyle is pretty ambiguous.

One thing that seems pretty clear to me is the lifestyle is observable while a life can have many internal aspects to it. 

A lifestyle can include people, material things, environments, how we spend our time, energy, and money. 

A life includes things like our beliefs, our values, our commitments, our soul’s dream, and our vision. 

If you choose a lifestyle first you could wind up with an empty fortress. 

If you choose the life first, you will design your lifestyle to support the life.


♡  Since most of us already have a lifestyle, and a default life, we usually have to do some redesign work. 

Choose a life and then redesign our lifestyle.

 It is possible that the lifestyle you currently have will never support the life you truly want to live. 

It is possible the lifestyle you currently have has many supporting structures and only minor renovations need to occur. 

It is possible that you are a highly intuitive person and your lifestyle is in perfect alignment. 

I know very few people who fall into that category. 

My dad does but what I notice about him, is he and my mother made a conscious decision to structure their lives around their spiritual values. 

They made that decision early in their marriage and lived true to it. 

Now it’s interesting that my parents are actually old enough to be my grandparents, (my mother is no long living) and I noticed that many earlier generations were not given to having transformational conversations so learning was a very different process then than it is now. 

The fact that we have e-courses and teleclasses and magazines and tons of books that are created to help people learn to live more meaningful and personally fulfilling lives represents a shift from how things use to be.


♡  As we evolve we begin to look at various aspects of our lives for congruence to our values and commitments. 

The disparity shows up with exclamation marks behind them and sometimes our response is discouragement and self-disappointment. 

We act as if we should have known better when the truth is how could we have known better? 

So the first thing to get over is 

“I didn’t know” and then after we get over that we come to “but I know now…now what?”

It takes a courageous person to see this and then set their intentions on bringing integrity into their life so that their lifestyle gives them a life that serves their higher self. 

You will notice some people trying to work around it, pretending it doesn’t matter that their lifestyles don’t measure up to their core values.


♡  The real problem is once you see the inconsistency, not doing anything actually makes things worse and you lose ground really fast. 

It cost you big time to keep that inconsistency in place. 

You can’t be with yourself and be at peace in your life. It wears you down like water will wear down a mountain over time. 

Your life will devolve instead of evolve. 

If that is not a price that’s too high to pay, I don’t know what is. Just think about it and choose wisely the path you will follow.