Setting Goals to Achieve Our Dreams

DweezelJazz — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 07:00:00 +0000

Do you ever lose sight of where you’re going in life?… …what it is you’d like to accomplish? An excellent way of focusing your efforts is to write down your goals.If things are a little hazy, creating short-term and long-term goals can be amazingly helpful. For example: 3-month, 6-month, 1-year, 2-year, 5-year and life goals. Making a list of perhaps ten things you want to accomplish in each of those time frames can generate an enthusiasm and focus that doesn’t seem to occur when we haven’t concretely defined our goals.Keeping these lists conveniently available for viewing is tremendously important. There are so many things happening on a daily basis that it can be difficult to keep in mind what we really want to accomplish. It’s so easy to get carried away in the flow of daily tasks and whims. This is great too, but if we have goals that we really want to reach, we need a way to regularly remind ourselves of them. Putting the lists out where they can be seen on passing, or, keeping them in a notebook ready to hand, or maybe on your computer desktop.The energy created by doing this propels us forward much more quickly. This is most likely because our minds are that much more organized as a result. We become more aware of what’s important to us, and are able to choose our activities more appropriately.It’s very likely that some of the items on those lists get done sooner than their estimated time slot. Crossing them off, after the accomplishment, is extremely satisfying and this becomes an additional source of encouragement. Every time we see that we’re actually making progress, it boosts our confidence and we become even more energized.The lists don’t become stagnant because they change just as we do. As we achieve the tasks we set, new ones emerge; and as a result of our experiences and evolving ideas, the goals might need adjusting from time to time. They become an integral part of our conscious awareness, a map to help us forward.What we achieve can have such a deep effect on how we feel about ourselves. The ramifications this can have in terms of the satisfaction we derive from our lives can be more than we might at first think. Creating these lists of goals is inexpensive and easy to do and it’s a fantastic tool for moving us toward the accomplishment of whatever it is we want most.

Tackling a Difficult Task

DweezelJazz — Tue, 29 May 2007 07:00:00 +0000

Have you ever stalled when youâ€™ve had lots of things to do, knowing that one of these tasks needs to be done before the others? This can be more of a problem if that particular task is more difficult to accomplish than many of the others on the list. The temptation is to get on with all the other things that need doing, hoping that something will occur to you about how to make a start on the first one. Sometimes this is helpful, but very often it simply puts off the moment of attack to accomplish the deed.Before long it is no longer even possible to do the other things that are on the list because it is clear that something ought to be done about the first. This dilemma can feel a bit like being frozen in the headlights of some big truck, time ticking away, pressure building up, and the mind a complete void of thought about how to go about starting. Enough of this and fog builds up in the brain and soon nothing gets done.It is, of course, much easier to just get on and do the thing! But thatâ€™s often the real problem: waiting for inspiration about where to start. A good way to jump start the mind is to brainstorm. If it is a one-person task this can be done very effectively by writing down ideas. The action of actually writing something, no matter how ridiculous it might seem, triggers more ideas and starts the creative juices flowing. Once that happens, it is much more likely that a solution will present itself, and much more quickly than simply waiting for an idea to pop out of the blue, or the truck headlights.An effective way to trigger some thoughts is to ask some questions and write down the answers: What exactly needs to be done? Why? What is important about the way it gets done? What is the long-term and/or short-term goal of doing it? Why is it important to you to do it?Before long, ideas will be flowing. After the main flurry of questions and answers, it is then possible to arrange and order them according to task flow and relevance. This can be done by creating a list of activities based on the brainstorming results, or, if the task is more complicated, it can be beneficial to create a diagram showing visually the relation of items to one another.Often the hardest part of doing anything is starting it, jumping into the seemingly unknown and trying to move forward. Pushing a pen or pressing the keys on a keyboard to get those thoughts going, often clears the path and shows we really do know how. When I remember it, approaching things this way can save me a tremendous amount of time and hassle.

DweezelJazz Art Blog » short-term goals

Setting Goals to Achieve Our Dreams

Tackling a Difficult Task