Tips to help you reach your goals

Write Your Goals Down: Don't depend on your memory to remind you what you need to achieve. You have to write them. By writing goals down you are telling your mind that you are very serious about achieving them. Personally, I'm a big advocate of writing my goals down on paper by hand rather than with a computer because my own unique handwriting personalizes my goal and brands it as my own.

Have A Deadline: Goals without a deadline are really not of much help. You have to set a deadline. The deadline can either be a year from the today or ten years from today. This depends on your current state and the goal you want to achieve. Goals without deadlines are just dreams.

Have Realistic Goals: The goals have to be realistic. Some people may disagree with me on this. But I personally think that if goals have no relevance to your life than the chances of you achieving them are zero. Don't say your going win American Idol next year when you can't even hold a tune/sing. Most likely not going to happen.

Write goals in future tense: When crafting your goal statement, always use the word "I" in the sentence because it brands it as your own. Branding a goal as your own adds to the emotional fuel that drives you to achieve your goal.

Make Them Specific: Make your goals very specific. Don't have a goal like ‘I want to drive a good car in 2 years'. Write down exactly what car you want to drive in 2 years. This will put a monetary value to your good car goal as well. So you will know how much you need to save to reach your goal. I found that even posting pictures of the new car I want up at my desk to remind me and to keep me focused on it.

Make Them Detailed: Write down the steps you need to take to reach your goal. Without the path how will you get to the destination? You have to write down a detailed goal plan and the way you want to get there. I like to break my goals down into small steps.

Finally Monitor and review your progress periodically. This is very important. If you just set a goal and forget about it then there is no point. You have to go back and see where you are regularly.

SMART Goals: A useful way of making goals more powerful is to use the abbreviation S.M.A.R.T. While there are plenty of variants, SMART usually stands for:

S=Specific

M=Measurable

A=Attainable

R=Relavant

T=Time-Bound

I know I'm excited when I reach a goal and even more excited when I help someone else reach their goal.