Chapter 5

Set good goals

Preparing to set your goals

Setting your goals should be something that gives you a bit of a tingle. I always get the same feeling of ‘lighting up’ that I got as a child when I was taken to the Pic 'n Mix sweet counter and handed the empty bag.

It’s good to make it a big deal. Put a couple of inspiring quotes on the table. Buy a bottle of wine or quality fizzy water. Only one glass of the wine though, you want to be fully present.

It’s amazing how many people don’t set goals for themselves at all or, if they do, give so little thought to it that it might be better if they hadn’t. We spend ages choosing a holiday destination because we don’t want to waste two weeks, yet waste years by setting goals and targets that mean little or nothing to us, and that aren’t going to make us happy.

Others pick totally unobtainable targets, perhaps because, in a strange way, it lets them off the hook from going all-out to achieve them. It’s never going to happen anyway, so what’s the point?

And, for many people, as we mentioned in Chapter 3, the ‘goals’ they have in their mind, shaping their destiny, are goals they selected years ago. If you are a person who has always had a single burning passion or ambition, a vocation, then perhaps the goal you set 10 or 20 years ago is still entirely relevant. It still gives you the tingle and makes you feel alive. For most people, that won’t be the case. If you have a different partner, a different house, a different job, then it is likely that you also need different goals.

Anyone who has had children knows that, suddenly, all goals are bundled up into a sack and scattered. Some land close by but others get taken off by the wind or the stream of daily life. This is not because you are ‘forgetting your dreams’ or ‘burying your hopes’, it’s simply that you have a new list of priorities. You wouldn’t change it for the world.

It’s important to identify the goals you have now and to tie them in closely with the most helpful of your beliefs and with your meaning.

Before we start, have a glance at the list of ‘wants’ you made in your notebook when you were reading Chapter 3. You made a note of how much you wanted them. How would you evaluate them now? Does the thought of achieving them make you excited? Do they have the tingle factor?

It’s likely that some will and some won’t. I mean, that’s two chapters ago and a lot can happen in that time once you start understanding your incredible brain!

It’s probably time to throw a few new goals and ambitions into the mix. To think about what you really want. What do you really want to do? Who do you really want to be? It’s also worth mentioning that not all goals that you set need to be huge or life-changing.

Many years ago, I (AB) worked in the theatre and, after several years of sporadic low-paid work, I landed a long contract with a West End show. A regular pay packet meant that I could set some longer-term goals. I discovered the pleasure of setting myself a goal of saving a small amount of money every week. To set and stick to it and see the savings balance increase modestly each week was incredibly motivating and pleasurable. It was an early lesson in how setting achievable goals can bring positive difference and improve life quality.

Perhaps, though, you are struggling to find something you truly feel would fire you up. It’s not unusual for people to lose touch with even the sense of their hopes and their dreams. There can be a myriad of reasons – cynicism has set in or perhaps you have had a long-term struggle that has drained you of all but the need to survive. Some give up their goals willingly to assist another person, without realising that this has, in itself, become a determining goal.

For whatever reasons, there are a significant number of people who we have worked with who have ‘confessed’ that they don’t know what they are passionate about. If this is you, then your first goal is to find something. To actively search, with hope and curiosity, until you find something about which you care deeply. It usually doesn’t take very long. I (BW) have a friend who, after the end of a long relationship, went looking for her ‘mojo’. She began evening classes in acting, salsa and quantum mechanics. She started volunteering at her local hospice. Almost everyone thought she was seeking a new partner, but she said she was looking for her flame. She rather wonderfully found both in that she re-met an old flame who is now a new flame, supporting her through a course in cosmology.

Setting your goals

We’re going to do a quick mindfulness-based exercise to bring you to the moment and place you in the best possible state to set your goals.

You’re now going to identify your main or overarching goal in the following exercise …’; some people refer to this as their purpose or their superobjective. It needs to be connected at the deepest possible level to your meaning. In fact, this may be the moment where you fundamentally reappraise what gives meaning to your life. It’s an old but true saying that life becomes worthwhile when you have worthwhile goals. Think about what worthwhile means to you.

In your notebook, write down your meaning and your main or overarching goal. To bring these into sharpest possible focus, you are going to employ your imagination.

Have a look at what you have written. Does it feel right? If not, simply do the exercise again. Is what you have written a main goal or is it a description of your meaning? If it is the latter, spend a few minutes thinking how it can be shaped into an achievable goal or target. What can you do to move the world towards your vision?

For example, if your vision is something colossal or universal such as human rights prevailing or the end of world poverty, it is now deciding what you can realistically do to work towards that aim. Remember that all goals must be attainable. They can be a really tough challenge, but it must be something you can achieve. It’s important that you can focus on the specific things that you can achieve rather than, in the cases above, the myriad of things that you cannot. So your main goal might be any of the following:

• Spreading the message of … getting as many people as you can to engage with the cause
• Raising as much money as you can for the cause
• Giving as much time/expertise as you can to the cause

If your meaning (what enables you to get up in the morning and drives you through times of adversity) is, say, the company you started four years ago, it’s easier to translate this into a main goal.

Write down the main goal. Again, sit with it and change it until it feels right.

When you are happy with what’s in your notebook, we’ll move on to the next exercise, looking at specific goals.

Specific Goals

Many specific goals seem mundane, to do with the day-to-day of life. It may seem to you that they don’t belong alongside the stuff of your dreams and your vision of the you that you want to be. For example, the goals might be:

• I want to get to work on time
• I want to stop shouting at my six-year-old
• I want to give up smoking

But just think of how profoundly a life can alter when small goals are achieved. The unstressful office when you have time for a tea before you begin. A calm home environment and happy six-year-old. A you that can run without getting out of breath and has enough money saved from not smoking to take a trip or two each year.

We would suggest selecting no more than three specific goals so that your energy and focus don’t become dissipated. You can always add more once these are up and running. Again, if these are closely linked to the ‘wants’ that you wrote in Chapter 3, that’s great, if not, equally fine. The main consideration is that at least some are linked as closely as possible to your main goal.

We train people in Mind Fitness in businesses, education, the performance industry and in the wider community; our teams do everything from one-off sessions to year-long projects in special schools. The number of our specific Mind Fitness goals is considerably more than three. But we always check back to the main goal and ask, ‘OK, if we take on this project, is it moving us towards the goal of helping as many people as possible to get out of their own way?’

Napoleon Hill in his wonderful book Think and Grow Rich talks about the main goal as a boat.¹ For every goal/objective, you ask yourself, ‘Is it helping the boat to go faster?’

Reconciling goals and beliefs

It’s time to think about whether your beliefs are likely to help you achieve these goals. For example, perhaps you have decided, drawing from your main goal of forwarding the issue of human rights, that you are going to write an article each week to be published in various papers, journals and the like. Do you, then, have a strong belief in your journalistic skills and persuasive abilities? If none of your five beliefs seems relevant to the goals you have chosen, this is the time to identify ones that will.

Similarly, consider if there are unhelpful beliefs not yet identified that would cause you to self-sabotage when attempting to move towards the goals. Once you have had that ‘Oh I see’ moment, try to frame it into a belief as you learned how to do in Chapter 4. If you have identified additional unhelpful beliefs, add these to the list.

For example, you might have set yourself the goal of running in the next marathon. But, if you are caring for an elderly parent and your belief is that family are better than carers at making your relative as happy and comfortable as possible, it is unlikely that you will make the time to train. In this case, you might try to reframe the belief to something along the lines of, ‘I would prefer that my mother had family to get her ready for bed but, if twice a week it is carers, that is a compromise I am willing to accept.’

Our beliefs are often at odds with the things that we want most passionately to achieve, and it is crucial that these are identified, challenged and changed if you are going to release the huge potential you possess. Commit yourself to this process of change – the reward is the glorious picture you now have in your mind of the ‘you’ that can succeed at the things that are most important in your life. Once you are confident of your meaning, goals and beliefs, you have greater control of your destiny. You are a ship that knows where it’s heading – the Master of your Fate, the Captain of your Soul. Your boat is moving.

Very soon you will notice that you are already feeling happier. There is a lovely saying that we absolutely endorse. Our state of wellbeing does not depend on our position in life, but on the direction in which we are heading. That means you always have to make sure that you are continuing to move towards the destiny you have chosen and the person you would like to be.

Small steps are good

It’s important to make sure that not only are the goals attainable, but that you feel them to be so. Sometimes a big goal that will always be a long time in the coming is a hard mast on which to fix your focus and commitment. You can finish a day feeling as though you have achieved almost nothing because your efforts, however solid, have only moved you a miniscule amount along the line. Because your feeling of achievement is key to your wellbeing and, therefore, to your continued commitment, it’s really important that slow progress or progress that at times seems to be slow doesn’t undermine your journey.

The easiest way of avoiding this is to divide each of your goals (if needed) into smaller steps, say four to six for each target, so that the next stage always remains within reach. It’s important that you hit the ‘success’ button with the things that really matter to you as often as you can. Achievements linked to main goals and meaning will deliver the kind of boost that sustains you on your quest, or sometimes even propels you up to the next level of commitment and belief. Take a few minutes to revisit your notebook and make the division of goals you think will work best.

The art of Course-Correct

The other real advantage of dividing your goals into smaller steps is that, if you go off target, you will soon have the opportunity to course-correct. Almost no one ever achieved anything by going in a straight unbroken line from A to B. The key then is realising that you have drifted and taking the necessary steps to move back on track as quickly as you can. And you need to do it without any self-recrimination. Instead, congratulate yourself for getting yourself back on track so soon and so skilfully. The people that are most admired in this world are masters of course-correction.

In order to course-correct, you’ll have to consider what it is that has taken you off course. Self-evaluation is an important and necessary tool. Don’t, however, use it as an excuse for the ANTs to invade and bog you down in past noise and negative self-talk. Keep it factual; this happened. I did this and this was the consequence. No spiralling off into blame of yourself or others, and don’t open the floodgates to previous mistakes that may or may not be similar. Successful people always reflect and evaluate. They learn from their mistakes, but they do not dwell on them. Dwell on your success, not your ‘failures’. In fact, start to reframe your perception of failure and success. Many phenomenally successful business men and women have ‘failed’ companies and business ventures behind them. These ‘failures’ gave them the opportunity to learn skills and techniques that make them, today, successful. If you say to yourself ‘This is a new undertaking or skill – I aim to achieve the target by attempt three,’ then you won’t see attempt two as a failure but as a part of the process.

Recognising obstacles

As you join up your goals, beliefs and meaning you will find that you gain access to a far bigger picture. You can use this effectively to recognise obstacles and potential troubles from a much greater distance. You are sailing on a sea of infinite potential – the rocks might be extreme issues, your own negative thoughts or unhelpful beliefs. Build keeping a look-out for obstacles into your daily routine. We have to accept that there will be set-backs. If you do get blown off course, for whatever reason, just get back on track. We can easily succumb to All or Nothing Thinking – ‘I’ve cheated on this diet and now it’s all ruined. Where did I put that chocolate?’ The best laid plans of mice and men can be rumbled by unforeseen circumstances, by the unpredictability of other people or even by nature herself. But in the new world order recognising them and accepting them keeps you in control. You can choose how best to respond. No more head in the sand, for that is the breeding ground of ANTs.

Not only will the picture be bigger, it will also be clearer. Use this clarity to look out for ‘gaps’, missing pieces of the jigsaw that you will need to complete your goal. Perhaps it is a piece of training that you need to do, a person you need to identify, a conversation that you need to have. Remember that changing a goal is OK if your obstacle is that you come to realise that it is not as powerful a motivator as you thought it would be. In fact, not revisiting goals often enough can force us, over time, to be trapped in the past, living the decisions of the person we used to be.

Changing goals is fine. Abandoning them or neglecting them is not. Too many people, as we said, have almost forgotten their hopes and dreams. These are a vital part of our wellbeing and it’s hugely debilitating if we relegate them to the back of our minds like mementos in an attic.

Visualisation

The sports industry has been using goal-based visualisation techniques for more than two decades. Golfers started to practise it wholesale as far back as the 1970s.

The advent of MRI scanners means we know that, when an athlete visualises running a race, the same parts of their brain will be engaged as if they were actually running, as will the same muscle groups. As we said before, our brain does not distinguish between real and imagined experience. The implications of this are staggering.

Many sports coaches also believe that mental training programmes are, in addition, proving key to prolonging the professional career of sportsmen and women. During the inevitable periods away from training through injury, athletes can continue to train mentally, resulting in a quicker return to form and better protection of the injured muscle or bone.

NASA astronauts use visualisation as essential training, to imagine, on earth, the manoeuvres that they will be required to perform in space.² And many businesses are building it into their working day.

This means that imagination and creative thought can be used not only to sharpen concentration, but also as a key means to practise being the person we want to be. We can use goal-based visualisation to help us to acquire and sustain a whole array of qualities and skills.

When you are vulnerable to ANTs

Not all goals have a definite end, a date when you can clap your hands together and say, ‘Well that one’s done and done well.’ Your main goal, for example, might be to be a more compassionate person. The nature of such a goal is ongoing. If this is the case, it’s even more important that you set yourself recognisable attainable markers along the way. Be sure of how you will evaluate (and reward) your success.

Conversely, be aware that, in the time immediately after a big goal is achieved, you’re immensely vulnerable. For a time, perhaps a long time, you have been working towards something of value; however much you congratulate yourself, you are likely to feel it ‘gone’. Many performers have their darkest moments after the last performance or a long run of a show. Many older people long for retirement only to find that they are quickly plunged into an empty world without the goals and purpose of their former life.

If you know that an important target is about to be achieved, make sure that you have another in place, and make sure you build in a daily time, for at least a month, to celebrate your achievement. Most people brush their successes under the carpet; as soon as each success is achieved, it is forgotten.

Finally, remember that it can be highly invigorating and motivating to be part of a collective goal. This can be anything from a local football team aiming for the community cup, to putting a man on the moon. But you have to be fully involved, committed by the heart, not by a contract or a begrudging promise. And it can also be a thrill to help others on the journey towards their goals. It’s one of the reasons why teaching and nursing are vocations into which people throw themselves wholeheartedly, no matter how hard their day-to-day lives. To help someone achieve their potential is an astonishingly rich and rewarding experience.

Conclusion

Now you’re ready to set sail towards those goals. Remember always to make sure that they are attainable. We become nervous and anxious when we are trying to do the impossible. I (BW) used to write enough things on a daily to-do list to fill a week, and then beat myself up when I hadn’t achieved them, even if I had got through a colossal amount. The Mind Fitness programme will ‘give’ you a substantial amount of extra time because you will no longer be spending huge parts of your life battling with the ANTs and following your brain down rabbit holes. It is still, however, vital to make sure that you are realistic in your expectations. You want to give yourself every chance, and to celebrate each and every success on the way – these will power you forward and just as importantly make sure that you enjoy the journey.