Page 291 - The Truth Landscape Format 2020 with next section introductions-compressed

Goals need to be AGREED or ACTION-ORIENTED. “If you fail to plan, you’re planning to fail” and if you don’t take action, it will never happen.

Decide what goals are REALISTIC. Realistic, does not mean something that you would ordinarily do – that is not a goal. If goals are not challenging, they
don’t stretch you, the feeling of real achievement doesn’t happen, and you get bored easily. However if they are virtually impossible, you may become
disheartened at your perceived lack of progress and fulfil your own prophecy of “I never achieve my goals.”

There is nothing to say that you cannot become a millionaire, but to set a goal to be one by next Monday when you’ve got £5 in your pocket today is not
realistic – (unless your numbers come up on the Lottery, and then that’s not a goal within your control, that’s relying on Lady Luck!)

If you’re a 45 year old man, you will never be the youngest person to run the mile in under 4 minutes, however fit you are – and someone’s already done that
anyway. You could however, set a goal to run a mile 10 seconds faster than you have before.

Goals need to be TIME-PHASED. Basically, you need to put dates next to when you want to have achieved your goal, and dates for milestones along the way.
Be careful though, that the milestones do not become millstones around your neck. These target dates also feed into what needs to be done this month, this
week, and today – and need to be written in your planner or diary.

12 elements for goal achievement

As well as the five elements already described, the following steps must also be incorporated:

1. BE PASSIONATE about your goal which must be personal. Live it, breathe it, taste it. Make it your 'Magnificent Obsession'. Thomas Edison was passionate
about finding a way to produce incandescent light with the use of electricity. He did not give up. It is reputed that he was once asked how it felt to have failed
700 times. His reply was "I haven't failed, I've discovered 700 ways how not to do it".

2. Always state your goals in the PRESENT TENSE and in the POSITIVE. "I will give up smoking" is neither. 'Giving up' suggests the loss of something -
regardless of whether it's healthy or not - and most smokers will on the whole claim categorically that they enjoy smoking. "I will" also suggests some date
sometime in the future - the subconscious mind disregards this because it only accepts present tense information and it doesn't know when to 'deliver' for you.

You can effect subconscious change only by communicating in the language it understands, the present tense. This comes from the theory of cognitive
dissonance, which states that when you hold two psychologically inconsistent thoughts, you experience dissonance, or a sense of tension and inharmonious
feelings. The subconscious, in an attempt to reduce the discomfort of the conflicting messages, does everything it can to create the most recently imposed
suggestions or self-talk.

Using present tense. You are telling to your subconscious mind to start working today. Page291