Celebrate Every Step
It’s great if you can focus ahead on what you’re trying to achieve. But don’t forget to look back and see how far you’ve come. Every time you reach any milepost along the way, you need to recognize the fact, rejoice, celebrate, enjoy your success, and bask in the achievement. It may only be one step towards your ultimate goal but, hey, it’s one more step toward your ultimate goal. That’s a good thing! It’s worth enjoying.
Think of it this way. If you’ve maybe broken your aim down into chunks, and then broken each chunk down into goals along the way, you want to reach those milestones. So when you do, you’ve got what you want. OK not all of it-not the end objective-but you’ve got as much as you can get at this stage, and you’re well placed to move on to the next stage.
So you’re already a person who gets what they want…even if you still want more. The power of positive thought is huge. Just by consciously acknowledging your achievements along the way, you’ll feel more successful. And that, in turn, will make your future challenges seem more achievable. So it really is important to celebrate. Some celebrations may be private and others may be very public-I don’t care how you do it so long as you realize how well you’ve done. So come on-celebrate getting that person on your side, or persuading your boss to give you a particular responsibility, or securing an interview, or reaching the halfway point in saving for a new computer or car or vacation or whatever. You’re doing great!
Write It All Down
Right. Go and get a pen and paper-hurry up-yes OK, you can write on these papers if you must, I don’t mind. OK, now you need to get a few things down on paper4 before we go much further. Ready?
Write down what you want, and then write down what you need to get it. Put down any chunks you need to break your goal down into (smaller wants), and also the more detailed steps along the way (what you need to achieve first).
You’re doing this for a couple of reasons. To begin with, you’re going to forget it if you’re not careful. Anything worth having is going to take some detailed thought and planning and preparing and groundwork-laying. If it’s not down in writing you risk leaving out something vital that slows you down or even stops you in your tracks.
And also it seems more real once you have something down in black and white. This is a plan. This is actually happening. This is progress. No longer a dream or a vague wish but a solid, clearcut plan of action.
You see? All those people you thought were getting what they wanted because they were lucky or had good karma or something. Nope. They’ve just got a pen and paper, and they’re not afraid to use them.
Analyze Your Sticking Points
Some things are going to be harder than others, right? It’s one thing to put aside a bit of money every week in the spring, but quite another to keep saving in the months before Christmas, or while you’re on vacation. It’s easy to persuade your sister to host the big family event, but persuading your divorced parents to both attend is in a whole different league. Meeting your performance targets at work should be doable, but carrying off that presentation smoothly is a far bigger challenge. When you look through the list (that you’ve now written down so you can look through it), certain things are going to jump out at you as being much harder than others. These are the ones you need to focus on. I say this because your instinct is often to do the opposite-to ignore them and hope they’ll go away. But if you’re going to get what you want, you must focus on them. They are the key things that stand between you and what you want.
Look, if you can just overcome these difficulties, you’re almost home. So put your efforts into thinking about how you can get around these obstacles more than any others. Work out where the problem is, what it will take to resolve it, and how you can master that.
Anyone can turn up if they’re invited for an interview after responding to a job posting. But suppose your dream company isn’t advertising and you have to ask for a meeting? That’s the bit that’s going to be hard. Is there any way to do it without asking directly, if that seems just too scary? Do you have a mutual contact? Can you write instead of calling? Or turn up at an event and introduce yourself? Don’t sidestep the issue because you don’t want to address it, or you’ll never get what you want.
Set Your Deadlines
Right, we’re going to make things happen. Umm…what things? When? Well, you have to put a date by all the things you’ve listed that you need to do. Otherwise it may never happen. Does this sound a bit like project management to you? Good, because it is. Getting what you want is a project, and you need to plan for it in the same way. Deadlines, that’s what you need. Something to work to. You need to decide when things will happen-or at least the latest date by which they will have happened. Suppose you want your sister to host a family party for your brother’s thirtieth birthday.
You know there’s a load that needs organizing-food, entertainment, invitations-but you need to get your sister to agree in the first place and probably your mother is the most likely person she’ll say yes to. So when will your mother next see your sister to ask in person? And when, in turn, does that mean you need to brief your mother? You see, it’s not only the obvious things that need deadlines.
Maybe you want to be given more of a marketing role at work after the planned reorganization next year. What will it take to persuade your boss to give you that responsibility? Do you need to gain any extra qualifications or experience first? When would you need to do that? When should you let your boss know what your ambitions are? If you want to produce a marketing-related report to impress your boss, when would you need to do that? Everything needs a deadline, or why would it ever bother to happen? You can probably complete it before the deadline-that’s great-but if you let everything pass it will never happen at all. And you’ll have only yourself to blame.
