#5 Review Goal Chart

February 26, 2011

Last but not least is the goal chart. This action is absolutely crucial. this action has completely empowered me. Goals are our life's map to wherever we want to end up. If we don't have clear goal that we are reviewing every single day, we forget and lose focus.

It's like deciding you wanted to go on a cross-country road trip from Los Angeles to New York. It seems like a good idea and you get very excited about how amazing it would be to get to New York. You imagine the sights and sounds. You hop in your car and take off! Unfortunately, you don't have a map to New York in the car. You know vaguely where it is - you've seen a map. You know it's on the east coast, so you head off, going east.

Now, though trial and error, it IS possible that you will eventually wind up in New York. who knows how many wrong turns you would have taken on the highway. How much time was lost wandering around the countryside, searching for "the city that never sleeps"? More than likely, you would have given up and declared the trip pointless, after the first couple of times that you found yourself on the wrong road, in the wrong place.

Going through life without goals is just like driving across country without a map. You are always going somewhere; you just don't exactly where or how long it is going to take. Most people say, "I have goals!" When in actuality, only 10% of people have written goals. Until a goal is written down, it is just a dream. It is also critical that we are constantly thinking about our goals, to ensure that we are consistently working TOWARDS them.

I knew that by setting this action into a HABIT it would guarantee my goals would eventually become a reality. Every day I review them. I didn't want to be overwhelmed at first, so I only did a one month goal chart. Keeping it simple in the beginning was very important to me. It is easy to get overwhelmed when you are working against old habits, trying to create new ones.

Around the second week, I added a daily check list to this action. I noticed that my one month goal chart was less than half way finished. Just looking at the goal wasn't enough to get me into action.

The checklist enabled me to put a better time line on my monthly goals. At first I got a little overwhelmed because I felt too pressured to complete everything on my check list. I ALWAYS put way too many things on a daily to-do list. The nice thing is that the action states SPECIFICALLY "review" goal chart/checklist. This is a life saver because if i start to feel stressed out, I remind myself that even if I don't accomplish anything on my checklist, it's okay. The only thing I have to do is review them! So I get to take a deep breath and remind myself of the timeline involved with change and all the progress I have had so far.