How to Energize Your Vision and Goals!

Welcome back to this second week in 2018! We're going to talk one more week about Creating Clarity of Vision because there's a few more things we need to cover. Four blog posts ago we talked about How to Create a Compelling Vision, and then three blog posts ago we talked about How to Translate Your Vision into Goals, and last week we talked about How to Become a Goal Setting Master. This week I would call it Goal Setting Mastery Level Two. Let's dive into it.

Thoughts are Things

What am I talking about this week? At one time it was considered the secret of the successful. What is that secret? The secret is that thoughts are things that transcend space and time. Several blog posts ago, I asked you to take a look at your life seriously over the last 10 years. You can go to 20 years or whatever you want, and take a look at what you are thinking 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago and where are you at now. If you're completely honest with yourself, you have created everything that you've been thinking about. So, if you don't like where you're at, and you don't like what's going on in your life, start by taking a look at your thinking. Of course, there are some things beyond thinking that you need to do, but start there, because thoughts are things and thoughts are the things that go out into the universe and start things in motion to come your direction.

There's are several books over the last 100 years or so that I'm going to talk about today on this theme of Thoughts Are Things. They're available in paper and audible form, so that you can get a little more information on the theme of thoughts are things.

Think and Grow Rich

So, let's dive into the first one and probably the most well known book on this topic which is Think And Grow Rich. It was published during the 1930's depression initially but by 2015 had sold over 100 million copies. If you haven't read it yet, I would suggest you get hold of it. It's obviously a very popular book and for a reason. Napoleon Hill was asked to go out and meet with a bunch of successful people back in the early part of the 20th century and take a look at what they were doing that created their success. He came up with 17 success principles, and I want to walk through them briefly here to give you an idea of what I'm talking about, but definitely go read the book for more detail.

1. Develop Definiteness of Purpose - several blog posts ago, we talked about Creating Your Vision. To achieve your vision you must have definiteness of a purpose.
2. Create a Mastermind Alliance - I am actually in three different masterminds for different reasons for goals that I want to work on. So, you don't have to limit yourself to one mastermind. There are things that you can work on in different areas of your life with different masterminds that have different focuses. What is a mastermind? A mastermind is a collection or a collaboration of two or more people working together towards the attainment of a common goal. So, I would encourage you if you're not operating in a mastermind to find people with like-minded goals and team up with them because there's power in numbers.
3. Use Applied Faith - or as my coach likes to say, "Faith Over Facts." Because faith is a state of mind, it's the awareness that our goals, desires, plans and purposes will materialize through our actions in the physical realm. So, start with your thoughts, followed by faith and you will start to produce results you're looking for.
4. Go the Extra Mile - what is meant by that is giving more than you receive with a positive mental attitude of gratitude.
5. Embodying a Pleasing Personality - if you're not fun to be around, you're not going to attract people to you. So, be fun to be around and have a positive mental attitude.
6. Take Personal Initiative - This reminds me the story where a man was in church praying to win the lottery, and he didn't understand why he hadn't won the lottery yet. Then he heard a voice from heaven say, "It would help if you bought a ticket." So, you have to take initiative and get things started. If you're a procrastinator, you're never going to be successful and achieve all the things that you want. So, start by taking action.
7. Cultivate a Positive Mental Attitude - your mindset is the only thing you have complete control over. A positive mental attitude attracts opportunities to you. Take a look again at what you're thinking. 
8. Act with Enthusiasm - Enthusiasm comes from Greek and it means filled with God or filled with the God energy. If you're not filled up with a burning desire that comes from your faith, then you're not going to have the energy to succeed.
9. Practice Self Discipline - you need to have self discipline and habits. We'll talk about ways that you can develop self-discipline and habits to do the same things over and over and over again every day to take you to where you want to go.
10. Accurate Thinking - You have a great deal of thoughts, but you need to separate fact from information and actively categorize and prioritize the facts so that you can think accurately.
11. Control Your Attention - Controlled attention is the principle that commands us to focus actively and exclusively on those things we desire to achieve. I like to think of it is being present.
12. Building Teamwork - This goes back to the mastermind. It is difficult to achieve your goals alone. You should build a team of people that can help you shore up your weaknesses on the way to achieving your goals. So think about building a team to take you to where you want to go. Don't be a lone wolf.
13. Learn from Adversity and Defeat - You have a choice if things don't go your way of how to interpret those experiences. Your thoughts can either be that you're a loser and you're never going to be successful, or they can be that you are failing forward. In other words, you're learning from your failures of how not to do things. So take on that attitude as you're approaching your goals this year.
14. Attaining Creative Vision - Learn to use your imagination beyond the fear and imposed limitations that you might have from experiences in your life to create the vision that you want. We're going to talk more about how to remove fear and anxiety from your thinking in the future. 
15. Maintain Sound Health - You know, if you don't have good health you really don't, it's just going to be a distraction from achieving greatness. So, you have to have good health. If you are not in good health at this point and you're dealing with a lot of health issues just start there this year. Build a foundation of health this year and have that be your theme so that next year you can really have the physical abilities to go out and create great things.
16. Budgeting of Your Time and Money - Time is the other thing next to health that is something we all have. We all have the same 24 hours in a day. One exercise you can do is to lay out what your perfect day looks like. If you're working Monday through Friday, look at what does your perfect Monday through Friday look like? What does your perfect Saturday and Sunday look like? After that exercise, you have an idea every day how you're going to approach it. So, you don't have to make a lot of decisions. You just run the game plan every day. Then take a look at your money and how you can save and channel the money towards achievement of your goals.
17. Establish Positive Habits - In the future, we will talk more about building positive habits that result in a happy, healthful, successful you. When you develop a positive habit, the habit develops you, and your life is the result of the habits that you have formed. So building habits is extremely important.

All right, that's Napoleon Hill. 

The Science of Getting Rich

Let's move on to another book that many people haven't heard of but it's one of my all-time favorites, The Science Of Getting Rich, by Wallace Wattles. Some people are put off by the title, but I say, look past the title and give this book a chance. It's one of the most succinct books that you'll find on this concept of thoughts are things. If you don't have a lot of time, I'd encourage you to read chapter 4, 7, 11 and 14.

1. Chapter 4 talks about the fact that thoughts are things. Wallace is very eloquent in how he talks about that.
2. Chapter 7 talks about gratitude. If you go back, you'll remember, the second blog post on this site is on Building a Gratitude Foundation, and that's part of the model here for manifesting. Gratitude's extremely important. So, if you're not grateful for what you have, go read chapter 7.
3. Chapter 11 is about taking action. Remember with The Science Of Getting Rich we talked about principle number 8 - acting with enthusiasm. You've got to build from taking personal initiative, principle number 6. So action's very important. If you're not taking action, you're never going to get there.
4. Chapter 14's one of my favorite chapters. It talks about the fact that growth and expansion is the nature of the universe, that everything is set up for growth and expansion. I know that might rub some the wrong way because they say, "Well, we don't have enough resources for things to grow infinitely." I don't necessarily buy into that thinking. I think that we can continue to grow if we do it smartly and expand. I think the goal of humanity is to grow on Maslow's hierarchy from the lowest needs level to the highest needs level, and we all are headed in that direction. So, if you think about it that way, I'm not talking about growth that requires a lot of physical resources. I'm talking about moving from having our basic needs satisfied to a place of self-actualization.

In summary, I love The Science Of Getting Rich - check it out.

Prayer Energy

A book I found recently, Prayer Energy written in 2009, is a very interesting book that I'm still absorbing, but I like the concept of that prayer is really thought. When you pray it's sending out thoughts to source / higher power and asking for, in many cases, things to be manifested in your life. In some cases, prayers are prayers of gratitude, which is also important. The subtitle of Prayer Energy is Rediscover The Power Of Prayer To Bring About Change. What we're talking about here in this blog is a manifestation model. Manifestation is just change and moving  towards where you want to be in your life. Again, it's a newer book. So as I learn more and observe more about this book, I'll probably share more in the future. Check it out.

Goal Review Process and Cadence

Finally, for this week, you need to have a process for reviewing your goals and looking for the most optimal actions to take. Remember we said action is important. So, look for the most optimal actions to take every day to move towards your goals. I'm going to recommend a cadence here, and that's why I have a picture of a metronome.  A metronome's all about cadence and beat. You'll need to have a regular beat in your life of how you look at and update your goals. There's a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual process that I'll outline in a future blog post. In summary:

1. Every morning, in addition to writing down what you're grateful for, take a few minutes to pull out your goals, review them for the day, and ask, "What is the one thing that I can do today to move myself forward?"
2. Weekly, I like to do it on Sundays - the day of rest, look back at the week, look at what worked, what didn't work, and make decisions on the upcoming week.
3. Monthly, take a look at how did the month go? What do you need to shift or adjust to move you towards your goals.
4. Quarterly, we talked last week about the 12 Week Year and laying your actions out on a quarterly basis and having quarterly level goals. I love that book. So think about setting up quarterly 12 week plans and using the 13th week of the quarter to look at what happened and plan for the next quarter.
5. Annually, which is the way most people think about goals, is good. But if you're only looking at your goals once a year, that's not good. So daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually. The best thing to do annually, and I might drive this down to a quarterly level, is, what is your theme? What is your theme for the year? I was talking to my wife about this a couple of days ago. She said, "I don't know what my theme is for the year, and I'm not sure I need one." I said, "Well, you need a theme, because a theme is going to help guide the actions and decisions that you make throughout the year." So if you haven't created a theme yet for 2018, we're only in the second week.  Think about that and get your theme laid out, post it on your mirror, put it on your desk, and have it right in front of you always. What is it that in 2018 you're going to create?

I'll end with that today, and I'm looking forward to next week for moving beyond Creating Clarity of Vision to the next step in the Manifesting Model. Have a great week!