I talk a lot about goal setting and how important, and I have mentioned on many occasions.  It is the single greatest personal improvement opportunity.  Goal setting by itself doesn’t give us the best chance to succeed just like goal setting in business is good, but not the best if done independent of other goals.  When setting goals, we should break them into categories.  For example, set goals in the areas of personal, fun, financial as well as business.

I work with my clients through three pre goal setting exercises that I believe are instrumental in helping my clients create solid SMART goals.  The first exercise is looking at the life wheel and examining where you are today.  As we create goals and an action plan for the future we need to know where we are starting from.  The Life Wheel asks you to rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 10 by coloring in the pie charts for each respective area in terms of your personal satisfaction.   Looking at a Life Wheel and acknowledging where you are allows you to open up about where you want to go, and then you can create the steps that you need to take to get you there.

The second exercise is the value of a Dream exercise.  This allows you to think about the value of your dreams.  The intent of the exercise is to allow you to imagine for yourself anything that your mind can conceive.  I break this down into a few steps.  First, I have clients write the value of their plain piece of paper, then I take them through a series of questions about a person’s dream car, house, job, vacation or the 5 living people they dream about meeting.  If time permits, we do each of the areas, if not I have the person pick one.  After they pick one, let’s say the dream vacation.  I have them write it out in detail using the five senses (feel, smell, see, hear and taste) to visualize that dream in detail.  After we finish with one or all of the dream categories, I ask the client what would now be the value of that paper if we could price out that dream.  For most folks the answer is priceless.

The last pre goal setting exercise is simply called the formula.  It in a nutshell, it asked people to examine their attitude, behavior and habits to see if they are doing things that get in the way of them achieving their goals.  By looking at our attitudes, behavior and habits we examine those things that we have been told our entire life.  We have input from love ones that has stuck with us our entire lives and for some it affects us a greater degree than others.  What studies have shown is input is powerful and because we still can remember the input from our childhood, we can put new input in our minds that can help us achieve our dreams and goals. With the formula we have a better chance of getting things done, getting improved results if our goals are directed toward that thing that holds us back.  Sometimes having skills and knowledge isn’t enough because our attitudes, the behavior’s and habits may be getting in our way.