Chapter IV.
Achieving your goals. How?
According to the English goal management system SMART for a goal to be defined correctly, it should respond to 5 criteria all starting with first letters of the word SMART:
1. Specific. The goal should be concrete and clear. Verbalisation and visualisation described above help to sharpen the vague ideas into a specific goal.
2. Measurable. You would need to be able to track your progress. Assessing your progress will help you to stay focused, be on track by meeting your deadlines, and feeling motivated – all necessary conditions for its successful achievement.
3. Achievable. Your goal needs to be realistic if you want it to be achievable in the foreseeable future. If your dream is unrealistic, it might be unclear even to you how it can be achieved. It is indeed admirable to have ambitious goals, but in the end, it would have to be you who would need to manifest it. The thing is, the higher you raise your ambitions, the more painful would be the gap between your current cosy world and where you would have to jump in order to achieve your goal. This gap always starts with a fall, which could be painful since you deliberately leave your comfort zone with existing supportive safety nets to step out into the unknown to reach your goal/dream. That is why it is wiser to split your most ambitious dream into smaller set of realistic and achievable sub goals that would help the brain to see whether the top goal is worth and realistic of your efforts and the drastic changes you would have to make.
Make sure it is in your power to achieve it and would not depend too much on other people, uncontrollable factors and unpredictable circumstances. For example, having a Ferrari or living in a beautiful home, or building new business in the field where you are an expert is an achievable goal; however, getting promoted might not be a good goal because that decision depends on the choice and preferences of your bosses and employees competing for that same position with you – factors that are outside your power and control. Meeting a person you would fall in love with and having a harmonious relationship is a good realistic goal. People do not achieve their goals because they are too often overwhelmed with how difficult and confusing the task is. The brain is not going to release dopamine – a neurotransmitter that provides body resources to achieve a goal, when you tell yourself you have to do something. You would have to do it on a willpower alone. Elementary fear of the unknown and the uncertainty of achieving a goal in time or resource deficit can sabotage your brain and it will not allocate the necessary amount of dopamine to achieve that goal.
Think of the dopamine system as a bank and your prefrontal cortex as an entrepreneur. To obtain a loan, it is important to have a good business plan and an excellent idea with a high chance of achieving results. The better your planning, the clearer you are about how exactly you are going to achieve your goals, how you will cope with emerging difficulties, the more likely the brain will offer you the loan – necessary dopamine for long-term motivation. (Lada_bio).
4. Relevant. Our desires constantly influenced by the desires of our friends and society. However, for the dream to manifest and for you to have necessary drive to go all the way and change in order to achieve it, that dream must be your own and not of the influence from other people. Ask your heart what is it that would make you really happy and joyous and if it tells you must follow your dream whatever effort and time it takes, then it is of your own. Our goals are only charged with our energy and the unconscious starts to manifest them only if they are conceived from our own dream and come from our heart. Usually, we do not stand for the desires that came to us from others.
5. Time-bounded – set a deadline for yourself to achieve it. This will help the unconscious to calculate the necessary steps and allocate your body’s recourses for you to achieve it. Once you set a goal and the time-scale for it, you will no longer waste your time and energy on stuff that does not help you on the way to your goals.
According to psychologist Ray Williams, the key to achieving your goals is flexibility because achieving new goals requires development of new skills. That is why regular analysis and making adjusted new decisions on a regular basis to constantly changing circumstances and new opportunities will help you to remain on top. Set a rule to revise your strategy on a regular basis to ensure you are walking the shortest and best route towards your goal. It may happen that at some point all the planned strategy fails and no longer applicable. This might be because there is a better or shorter way to achieve it, you just don’t see it yet and need to find it.
It is important to be open minded because circumstances around us change regularly and what seems to be a failure at first stage is only a signal to change the instrument or the route towards your goal. Otto von Bismarck’s ambitious goal was to increase Prussia’s dominance in northern Germany. It took him a great deal of patience, tenacity, using favourable circumstances and decades before his ultimate goal was achieved. Everything is possible if you are open minded and willing to consider different strategies, instruments and routes towards your desired goal.
Sitnikov’s technique: Look from the future
‘Very important to treat your dream as something real that is meant to happen’,- Sitnikov.
Technique:
1. Imagine yourself 5 years from now on. Your dream came true and you live in it already. Imagine how it would feel living in that dream and the experience you would have had by then, how much you would be enjoying your achievement. You will see the slides of your future from 3 to 5 years from now on. Remember those slides in your memory and replay them regularly.
2. Now ask that future you to give you advice on how to get there: what do you currently need to do and what steps should you take to achieve that goal?
Talking and thinking about a dream like of an event that has happened, imagining yourself living in it, asking advice from future you, our mind unconsciously takes off the label of novelty from it and begins to look for the necessary instruments and methods available in your potential to implement it.