How to set Affirmative Goals
Most successful people are experts at goal setting; however, they are more than likely not doing it right.
There are several ways of developing goals that have been taught over the years but if you notice you are not usually successful at completely those goals.
For instance, at the beginning of every year most people set New Years resolutions or goals. They separate their lives down into four or five different categories-financial, personal, relational, spiritual, and job. Under each of these categories they write goals for themselves and timelines by which they hope to achieve them.
Unfortunately, this leaves us with an incredible task of juggling several different action plans at once and it is not long before the entire plan is chucked and nothing is accomplished.
So the next thing you learn is that although your goals should be in categories they also must be stated in the positive.
This means that instead of stating “I want to lose 10 pounds by March 1” you would instead state, “I will lose 10 pounds by March 1.”
The difference lies in the directionality that your mind takes when you say ‘I want’ versus ‘I will’.
But even in this instance you are focusing on losing 10 pounds.
Your entire being is bent on losing 10 pounds.
Your daily mindset is on losing 10 pounds. And as you think about losing 10 pounds your shoulders hunched down in your head bows. What if you’ve never lost 10 pounds before? What if you’ve never attempted and don’t know if you can do it? What if you’ve tried and failed? What if, what if, what if?
By focusing your goal on losing 10 pounds you are continuing to focus on the negative instead of the positive. In fact let’s go beyond setting a goal in the positive and set it in the affirmative.
So what does setting an affirmative goal look like?
When a person continues to think about something in the negative, even though it appears as if they are considering an option in the positive, the mind (which is an incredibly powerful tool) will be unable to help the individual achieve their goal because it is a negative goal.
Instead, it is important to rephrase that goal in the affirmative so that the subconscious and conscious mind have a better grasp of doing something positively. For instance, instead of stating, “I will lose 10 pounds by March 1” you can state, “I have a slender and healthy body at my ideal weight of 130 pounds which is vital and full of energy.” By using these words you can harness your mind to look forward to a slender and healthy body and then not focus on “losing 10 pounds”.
This method of setting affirmative goals can be used in any part of your life.
If your desire is to get out of debt then you don’t want to focus on the debt but instead on the affirmative-becoming financially free. When we think of debt most of us think of credit card bills, mortgage payments and car payments. Think about that for just a minute-I want to get out of debt, I want to get out of debt, I want to get out of debt.
Most likely your head bowed, your shoulders hunched and you feel like is a dark cloud hanging over your head.
Instead, we want to think “I am financially free and able to accomplish what I want, when I want.”
This type of goal allows you to free your resources and open your mind to the possibilities of how you can accomplish it, instead of focusing on the incredible load of debt you carry and how you’re going to get out from under it.
Do you see the difference? Do you FEEL the difference?
The difference is in how you’re going to accomplish your goal of becoming financially free versus how you’re going to crawl out from a pile of debt that’s been crushing you for months, if not years.
Setting an affirmative goal is a process that each of us must learn in order to become successful as we can be in the life that we’ve been given.
Although we’ve all been dealt a different hand-each of us has different talents, strengths and weaknesses-each of us also has the ability to become successful when we use the power that we each have in our own minds to the best of its ability.