MENTAL DIET: How To Develop The Winning Strategy (PART 5)
“I am only one, but I am still one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something. I will not refuse to do something I can do.”
- HELLEN KELLER.
To work out success you must Get SMART.
THE SMART MODEL:
S – Specific
M- Measurable
A – Appealing
R – Realistic
T – Timed.
Goals Must Be Specific:
Focus is the key to the successful accomplishment of an aim or purpose. To be focused, you must be specific in what you want. Be clear about what you want. Have a clear and detailed picture of your future.
Take time off at least one hour every week to envision your future with clarity. Dwell upon what you want and what you don’t want will fade out from your life.
To be specific you must be clear about your plan of action; work with days and with numbers within a time frame.
For instance, if you want to lose weight, you must:
- Decide on the exact number you want to weigh.
- Decide on the number of days you want to exercise each week and the actual days.
- Decide on the time in terms of the hours you will engage in the exercise.
If you have a personal goal of becoming a better person, it is vague. However, if you set a self-improvement goal of becoming loving and a person of integrity, you are specific. You can be detailed:
- To treat people big and small; high and low with kindness and respect.
- To be sensitive to the needs of others and meet their needs in whatever way you can.
- To think truly.
- To speak truly.
- To deal truly with everyone.
Therefore, your goals must embody specifics and details, and if need be, like financial goals should entail specific figures or numbers; monthly budget; savings plan; investment plan etc.
Goals Must Be Measurable:
This implies that goals must be quantified and qualified. In other words, you should be able to measure it numerically as in the case of tangible goals such as financial goals and also in terms of quality as it applies to intangible goals such as family goals.
Goals must be measurable to keep track of your daily progress toward hitting the target.
To measure your progress effectively enroute to accomplishing your goals, two things are required:
- Goals must be long-range.
- Goals must be daily.
- Goals Must Be Long Range:
Reality is usually hard on vision. What may seem discouraging and impossible to accomplish in the short term may be absolutely possible in the long term. People and circumstances may try to stop you temporarily but it is only you that can stop yourself permanently by giving up. You may re-strategize and change direction but never change your decision to hit your target.
- Goals Must Be Daily:
Daily dedication, discipline, and determination must be employed in engaging in actions that move you closer to accomplishing your goals. Until goal is daily pursued you won’t be able to keep track of your progress and it will be unattainable.
Goals Must Be Appealing:
“Take a bar of iron and use it for a door stop and it’s worth a dollar. Manufacture horse shoes from that iron and they’re worth about fifty dollars. Take the same bar of iron, remove the impurities, refine it into steel, manufacture it into mainsprings for precision watches and it’s worth a quarter of a million dollars”
- ZIG ZIGLAR
How you see yourself and your potential will determine how you see your future and what you make of your potential.
When you keep enlarging your vision you will stretch to reach your maximum potential; and you expand your capacity for success, creating greater value with what you have and where you are.
Appealing or inspiring goals is the product of enlarged vision as the result of the use of your imagination. You are the only one responsible for the use of your imagination – the imagination has no limits except the limits you place on it. Break the limits and keep pushing boundaries with inspiring goals.
The “big shots” are the people who think big thoughts and set and accomplish big goals.
Goals Must Be Realistic:
Goals must be big enough to challenge you to stretch your potential and inspiring to reach for but not overwhelming. It must not be overwhelmingly big within a short time frame.
Set big realistic goals. Plot your plan on how to daily move towards accomplishing it. When you accomplish the big realistic goal, you can see further to set a yet bigger and realistic goal and you keep progressing.
To be realistic does not suggest limitation but a reality check to ascertain that the goal is big enough to challenge you to leave your comfort zone and stretch your potentials and realistic to reach for and attain.
Goals Must Be Timed:
Goals must have a deadline to work with. Yearly goals could be set and further divided into quarterly, monthly, weekly and daily goals. You could also project and plan your 5 year, 10 year and even 20 year goals.
Therefore, the SMART way is the success way.
