You know, I talked briefly about my goals in My First Post here, but the concept of setting goals has been pretty heavy on my mind for the last few days.
As most of you know, I have an excellent mentor – Dean Holland. In his first session with his students, he asked these questions: “If you don’t have goals to work towards, how do you know what you’re actually working for in the first place? How do you know what you’re aiming to achieve if you don’t have goals in front of you?”
When I first started this blog, I told you I had two main goals: finish setting up the blog, and bring in at least $1.
Well, I have completed those two goals!
This website is set up, functional, and getting traffic. I’m pretty happy with my theme (although I may change that header later on), I’ve got some content that’s actually worth reading, I have people showing up to read the content, and I think I’m pretty much done with plugins (for now).
Plus, I have actually made money online! It’s not much money, admittedly, but since my goal was so low – $1 – even a few dollars meets my goal!
So what do I do from here?
From here, I am going through a new goal setting process. It’s new to me, at least!
I started reading online, just searching for ‘goal setting’, ‘long term goals’, ‘how to set goals’, and things like that. What I found (other than a whole lot of Tony Robbins and Zig Ziglar) was interesting. The best information on setting goals was also the simplest. Little things like stating what you WILL do instead of what you WON’T do – saying “I will post a new blog post today” instead of “I won’t put off posting on my blog today” – or the simple act of WRITING IT DOWN to reinforce the goal in your head.
Today I’m setting up my new goals. Here is the path I’m following: Decide what I want (big picture), break the big goals down into smaller goals, break those down into tasks, take all of that and create a mindmap (quite possibly the best use for a flowchart EVER!), then print that mindmap off and hang it up by my desk!
I’ll go more into mindmaps in a later post, but for now I’ll just ask this question…
What are your goals? Where do you want to end up? WHY do you have the goals you do? What’s your motivation?
This post is relevant since it is the start of the New Year!!!! Gotta have those goals to succeed.