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Have you ever had a goal to work towards, busted your butt, only to fall and go ‘splat’ on your face?

Yep me too.

I learnt early in my career as an investigator and auditor that big goals are great, but frankly they are bastards of things to achieve. The bigger they are, often infers the harder you fall. That is unless you plan to succeed by breaking the goal into a whole bunch of small implementable actions.

As an auditor, and now a coach, I teach how it’s vital to have short, medium and some long term goals which force you to do two things. Firstly, you should create stable and harmonious processes with automated systems so that your successful daily routine can be consistently repeated. Secondly, you also need to stretch outside of your comfort zone to ensure growth and eliminate boredom.

So let’s ‘cut to the chase’.

The key lesson today is to embrace any failure you’ve experienced so far this year. These perceived failures are merely experiences which are vital lessons. It’s a mindset thing. When you choose a positive mindset, on how you look at the work you are undertaking to work towards your goals, your brain will remain in ‘creative’ mode. Solutions to once perceived problems jump out at you.

The negative mindset however runs an evil subliminal pattern. The negative instigates self doubt, fears which causes a negative outlook on life. It can even turn on your ‘flight / fight’ response and cause a physiological reaction in your brain and body. It’s called stress!

We don’t want that!

One of the big things that bites us in the butt is when it comes to reviewing our success and progress. It’s so easy to come up with perceived failure outcomes. This is often due to our expectations not being realistic, and our goals were far too great to achieve in one bite. It’s ok. We aren’t designed to learn lessons in one hit, we’re designed to learn stuff as we trek through life.

Expectations, by nature, set us up for failure and close off our creative minds to be open to opportunities and solutions. When we expect a certain outcome, we trigger our need for control, or fear to be out of control, and literally turn on our sympathetic nervous system – our bodies go into ‘defence’ mode and we’re no longer accessing our planning resources in the front of our brains.

When we are in a negative state, we’re only accessing old, deeply rooted survival mechanisms from our reptilian brain. When we’re in this part of the brain we are only surviving. The logic is often turned off and the panic can start to set in.

So here’s my tips for migrating towards achieving your goals and embracing the lessons along the way.

Number One. Have a positive mindset about how you look at all of your experiences. All experience can be positive when you choose it to be so. If there is a perceived failure, it is merely a lesson that what you tried didn’t work, and it’s time to try something new.

Number Two. Seek Support. If you exhaust the realm of your creativity and resilience resources, and still feel negative, then reach out to your peers or mentor. Ask for help!

Number Three. Create & Implement Small Actions. I so get it when we have a dream and smash ourselves to achieve it and then fall into a mess.  With my investigation and audit background, I feel so very comfortable having both a dream (the goal) and realistic targets (small actions) of how I will chip away at various milestones in order to achieve the bigger picture over time. Rome wasn’t built in a day! Start small and build as you achieve success.

Number Four. Embrace Your Race At Your Pace. As a coach, I often remind both myself and my clients of this golden rule  – embrace your race at your pace. This can apply to everyone who has tried to achieve a specific outcome and then perceives they have failed at their first attempt. Achieving success isn’t meant to be a race, it’s a journey.

Number Five. Create Clear Goals. I find the trick is to success is to clearly identify your goal. Be very clear on what it is you want to achieve. Furthermore, create a goal that you can emotionally connect to.

Be sure to use the Law of Attraction techniques and connect with how good it feels to be living this dream life you want. The reason to connect with the feelings is so your internal barometer will be able to focus on when you’re on the money and working exactly where you need to be.

Number Six. Plan For Success. So often we jump into projects without good planning and very quickly become unstuck and disillusioned. The age old saying Winston Churchill “failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail” is so true.

So dream your goal and connect to the good juju it will give you. Plan the tasks required. Plan how much time these tasks will take. Schedule those tasks into your calendar.

Do the planning which incorporates detailed ‘to do list’s. Assess the risks to you, achieving the goal, assess time frames, and assess your balance for work and life. I find writing it down so you’ve got something to bring your focus back to is imperative.

Number Seven. Break Goal Into Small Actions. The next key step is to achieving your goals, is to break them down into small actions. By implementing these small actions, you create new positive behavioural habits in order to achieve the dream life you want. The reason you need new habits is this – if you already had the positive reinstated in your actions, you would be living the dream life already.

Number Eight. Implement One Action At A Time. It’s critical when creating new habits, to implement one new action at a time. This way your evolving behaviour becomes more and more positive and part of your sub-consicous patterning. Once you’ve nailed one action as part of your routine, then and only then introduce a second new action. This process builds your new habits over time.

Implement ONE priority action first. Don’t go introducing anything else until this one thing becomes a natural and instinctive habit. Then repeat the process.

Number Nine. Honestly Review Your Performance. Reviewing your performance is a vital component of success. Regular review of actions being implemented means if you’re migrating in the wrong direction, or not perfecting the task, you’ll detect this quickly. Rapid detection means you’ll be able to redirection your momentum back towards the goal quickly. Make it the priority for implementation.

Number Ten. Never Stop Dreaming! One of the best things you can do when you achieve a goal is to celebrate and then immediately dream bigger, and continue the journey. So light it up, and go for it. Just be sure to shine brightly!

You really can choose to change and bloom from within xxx