Fortune Watch

You might not see how the past affects your ability to reach goals in the future. How can your past life affect what’s going to happen in years ahead? It is really quite important to understand that your past experiences affect you strongly in all you do.

Some of these past experiences may hinder you directly in working towards a goal and some might just be slight hurdles. In all cases these memories can affect you as to how well you do when heading towards a new goal.

Some of you go through life dragging an imaginary anchor around with you. It slows you down, it makes you unable to react to the changes in your life and it certainly weighs you down when trying to work towards new goals.

Releasing that weight would enable you to move quicker and succeed more easily. Perhaps that’s you holding on to past hurts, past incompletes, past resentments, anger or fear. Yet letting go of those anchors could be what you need so that you can fly into the future.

Have you allowed past failures to slow you down in achieving new successes? Have you remembered a friend telling you that you will never achieve anything? Do you remember the teacher at school who told you, you were an idiot and couldn’t do anything anyway?

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Make space for those goals in your life. That seems an obvious statement doesn’t it. But what if you want to study a course that will help you to further your career. Take a look at your life and see how much time do you actually have available.

Will a new goal fit into your life if you are already rushing every day to complete the tasks you have to do in terms of your commitments to work, your relationship with your partner, the time with your elderly parents, the hobby you have, the musical instrument you are trying to learn, the marathon you want to run for the first time and never mind keeping in touch with your friends?

Where in the busy schedule would a course fit? Not very likely. But you sign up for it anyway. Within the first month you find yourself not attending the evening classes and not handing in assignments. You just don’t have time.

You need to make way for that goal if you are serious about achieving it. University Business Schools know all about the falls off rate of students who sign up for MBA’s or Management Advancement Programs.

The drop out rate is something like 40% within the first term of the course and only about 70% or so finish. And yet at sign up time every student is informed as to how much time they will need to free up for this course.

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Achieving ones goals will depend on celebrating the successes you have on your journey. Nobody likes to continue working on something when there are only defeats. It’s the successes that spur us on to achieve greater heights.

It’s therefore really important when working towards a goal to keep track of your successes. The best way to do this is to write them down, or journal those in a file on your computer or even better write about them on a blog.

There is also great project management software available online that allows you to keep accurate track of what’s happening on your journey towards your goals. Many of these are free if you use the basic entry level option.

Keeping such an accurate track of your successes makes you appreciate your achievements. It allows you to pat yourself on the back and to encourage yourself to achieve even more. It also provides you with a history of your activities which will allow you to reflect in future years on the steps that you took to reach your goals.

Set up your journal to show the day and date and then compile a list of activities that you completed during the day. If your goal is to lose weight you might want to fill in the first block of your journal with the point that your scale showed you had lost some weight.

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You’ve written your goals down for the year. You’ve identified the little steps you want to take to achieve the goals and you feel positive that this time you will be able to attain your goals. It’s time that you finally you get around achieving those goals.

None of the above steps are going to ensure you have success in reaching your goals. They are great ones to work towards a goal, but there are many further processes that will need to be completed as well to ensure that you reach your dreams.

One critical process that will help you with achieving your aims is to evaluate and check your progress every day. The best time for this is in the evenings just before going to bed. Consider this preparation time spent to help you with the next day’s tasks.

This is the time when you acknowledge your successes, review your goals, focus on what you wish to happen in your future and make plans to accomplish them. Specifically you want to know what you will be doing the following day to work towards your goals.

If one of your main goals is to lose weight then you will reflect on how much exercise you managed to fit into your busy day, how well you stuck to that healthy eating plan you had set up for the day and how you felt about yourself all round.

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What has happened to those New Year’s resolutions you ask yourself very soon after you have set them down. It’s only a matter of weeks before those grand ideas have wafted away in the morning mist not to be seen again for another year.

When you made them they seemed so easy to adhere to. You were going to go to the gym three times a week. That was an easy goal to set. You were going to drink and smoke less, maybe even give up smoking. Seemed reasonable at the time.

Arriving at work on time every day was definitely possible until they started those road works of course and all traffic ground to a halt in the morning. After all that couldn’t be your fault then could it. Phoning your parents once a week was on that list, so was signing up for a new course to help your career along.

By February those New Year’s resolutions had evaporated and you felt guilty that they didn’t at least last until mid-year. It seemed that every year those goals set at the beginning of January have a shorter shelf-life.

What stops you from keeping those promises you make to yourself? What stops you from making those changes that could enrich your life? Why do you hang onto those old habits for dear life, never wanting to let go?

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This article explains a few things about motivating your way to SELF IMPROVEMENT, and if you’re interested, then this is worth reading, because you can never tell what you can never tell what you dont know.

When you think about Self Improvement, what do you think of first? Which aspects of Self Improvement are important, which are essential, and which ones can you take or leave? You be the judge.

Pain may sometimes be the reason why people change. Getting flunked grades make us realize that we need to study. Debts remind us of our inability to look for a source of income. Being humiliated gives us the ‘push’ to speak up and fight for ourselves to save our face from the next embarrassments. It may be a bitter experience, a friend’s tragic story, a great movie, or an inspiring book that will help us get up and get just the right amount of motivation we need in order to improve ourselves.

With the countless negativities the world brings about, how do we keep motivated? Try on the tips I prepared from A to Z…

A – Achieve your dreams. Avoid negative people, things and places. Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “the future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.”

B – Believe in your self, and in what you can do.

C – Consider things on every angle and aspect. Motivation comes from determination. To be able to understand life, you should feel the sun from both sides.

D – Don’t give up and don’t give in. Thomas Edison failed once, twice, more than thrice before he came up with his invention and perfected the incandescent light bulb. Make motivation as your steering wheel.

E – Enjoy. Work as if you don’t need money. Dance as if nobody’s watching. Love as if you never cried. Learn as if you’ll live forever. Motivation takes place when people are happy.

F – Family and Friends – are life’s greatest ‘F’ treasures. Don’t loose sight of them.

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