“Envision, create, and believe in your own universe, and the universe will form around you.”
~ Tony Hsieh
Deciding to set goals is one of the most important things you can do to improve your life. However, many rarely take the time to set clear goals for themselves. It’s essential to think about where you want to be, whether it’s in one month, one year, or one decade from today. Taking the time to identify where you want to be is the best way to ensure you are going in the right direction in pursuit of your goals.
Those who don’t set goals for their life may not believe that they have any control over their lives, leading them to wander through life heavily influenced by the people and circumstances surrounding them. In doing so they give their power to the environment rather than using it to create the experiences they genuinely desire. This results in them achieving far less than if they would have taken the time to set specific goals and plan their lives.
One of the main reasons many people don’t achieve their goals is because they procrastinate and put off what they should do today. Unfortunately, time passes and later rarely arrives, leaving most full of frustration and disappointment.
You have a choice, you can either try and achieve your goals the hard, slow, painful way by not utilizing a system for achieving your goals, or you can use your time wisely by incorporating planning and routine to transform your life in creative and strategic ways. Planners are a great way to help you begin to organize your thoughts, plans, and goals, but we we can chat about that in another post.
The world’s most successful people, use daily routines and habits to move them toward achieving their goals and finding success consistently. These practices and daily routines are what separate the high performers from those who achieve versus those who struggle to do so.
Peak Performance vs. High Performance
It is important to understand the difference between peak performers and high performers as you begin your journey to crushing your goals. People who focus their time and energy on peak performance are looking to win, but find that they can’t sustain this state over an extended period, as their performance declines after the desired state has been reached.
High performance, on the other hand, isn’t about working faster or harder or becoming adept at multitasking. The high-performance techniques can help you to achieve excellent results for each area of your life consistently. The methods will also help you reduce the stress in your life while enhancing your health and increasing your feelings of well-being.
Daily Planning
One of the simplest and most effective secrets of high performers is their commitment to planning their daily activities. They know that by consistently planning and making planning a part of their regular routine, they will get more consistent results while also holding themselves accountable to the things they’ve written down.
Planning your day-to-day allows you to have a clear view of where you spend your time, what’s critical in your life, as well as acts as a “score-keeper” to easily track when you’ve hit [or missed] your goals. Having a daily or regular planning routine will ensure you are always moving forward and taking the actions necessary to achieve your goals.
Block Out Time for Your Goals
If you want to achieve a lot more in your life, you need to start blocking out a certain amount of time during your day where you focus solely on your goals. This could be reviewing them, updating the status, and adding to just to name a few. Without this, your progress towards achieving your goals may be much slower.
Not having dedicated time to manage your goals and thereby leaving everything to chance, you will find that time will quickly slip by you, resulting in missed opportunities to define, track, and work on the necessary actions steps you determined for achieving your goals. Unless you purposely block out the time and make planning a part of your routine, you will haphazardly plan and likely lose sight of where you are in your goal-getting.
During your “planner-time” or dedicated time you’ve set aside to work on your goals, it’s a good idea to minimize distractions and create an environment that is conducive to planning. This could be anything from turning off your phone, logging off your social media accounts, playing background music, and/or lighting candles.
Winning Back Time
You may mistakenly believe that you don’t have the time to set aside to work on your goals. However, if you make small changes in your life, you can win back your time. For instance, by shutting off the TV an hour earlier than usual, you can use the time right before bed to dedicate to planning and goal setting. By establishing a regular routine you will become accustomed to having dedicated time for planning purposes. Remember anything we do consistently becomes a habit.
High performers are experts at time management and don’t have any qualms about eliminating activities that don’t move them toward achieving their goals. When you first begin to manage your time more efficiently, you may feel like you’re giving up your freedom. However, you’ll soon discover that it has the opposite effect. When you eliminate those activities that aren’t benefiting you, you’ll be left with what’s truly most important and more aligned with reaching your goals.
Ultimately you will find that you have more time to create and live a life you want, rather than your life being created for you. You will also be surprised by how much time you’ve now created for the activities that matter most to you and that contribute to your overall happiness.
Create a Daily Success Planner
A daily success planner will help you prioritize your day enabling you to complete high-priority activities, while ensuring you are taking consistent actions towards accomplishing your goals. You can either create your success planner at the beginning of each day or the end of the day for the following day. Either way having one and using it on a regular basis will guarantee you are taking an active role in managing and tracking your accomplishments.
Creating a daily success planner will allow you to get more done during the day and can help you quickly transform your goals into reality. Why? It has been proven that writing things down acts as a tracker because it creates a visual reminder.
To create your daily success planner, take a sheet of paper and write down the names of three of your most important goals or projects that you are working toward. These could be your short-term, medium-term, or long-term goals or a combination of the three. You can also use your favorite planner, notebook, or journal.
Under each of the projects, list up to five steps you need to accomplish that will help move you toward achieving your goal. If there are others involved in helping you to progress on the projects, make sure you write down their names. Next, you need to write down the list of people who are expecting to hear back from you. At the bottom of the page, write down your top priorities for the day. These are the items that you have to get done, no matter what. As your day progresses or at your designated planning/goal checking time, you can track your progress to completion.
It’s amazing how a simple tool like a daily success planner can be so powerful in helping you achieve your goals. It can help you create miracles in your life while enabling you to achieve the things you want.
Increasing Your Energy and Focus
How you feel has a dramatic effect on what you can achieve. When you have a clear mind, amazing things become possible. However, if you often feel sluggish, you won’t achieve as much during the day as you will pour what energy you do have to just get through the day. As you move through your day, your energy starts to become depleted, leaving you feeling tired and overly stressed by the end of the day. This is the natural rhythm of life. However, you can learn how to replenish your energy as you move through the course of your day.
High performers have found that taking short breaks throughout the day is better for overall performance than multitasking. By taking short breaks, throughout the day, by the end of the day, you’ll find that you have more energy than usual, and will have also accomplished more.
Studies show that each break only needs to be between two to three minutes long, and be taken every hour. This allows you to maintain a sustained level of high performance in all your tasks. By taking a short break every hour, your mind can recharge and refresh, allowing you to resume your work with more focus, clarity, enthusiasm, and energy.
Creating Change in Your Environment Through Action
As you being to take action toward achieving your goals, you may begin to notice coincidences starting to happen. However, you will also invoke a different response from your environment. No matter which goal you are working toward, you will encounter challenges along the way. These challenges may at first make it seem like you are heading in the wrong direction. However, with any significant goal that you set, there will always be a certain amount of inner changes that you will have to undergo to achieve it.
When you experience challenges that stretch your life, it is often the start of your life truly leveling up. Stay the course. The bigger the goal, the bigger the challenges.
The fact is, challenges force you to grow and often result in higher rewards. Focusing on the challenge versus the end result and/or the “Why” for your goal can make it virtually impossible for you to achieve your goals. It’s the challenges that bring about the changes needed for you to accomplish anything in your life.
Bottom line – you have to decide to want more for your life and yourself while committing to reaching your goals no matter what life throws your way. This is the start to dominating your life and your year.
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