Have you ever felt like you were drifting along and not going anywhere?

Have you ever resented someone else trying to make you over the way they want?

Parents, friends, spouses, and even sometimes your kids, have their own set ideas about how you should live your life. 

If you have no direction of your own, you will probably follow where you are led, or resist everyone else’s ideas to preserve your self-respect. Neither of these will move you towards what you want. 

You must set your own goals if you want to control your own life. 

I know it sounds a little daunting (or boring) to set goals. Maybe you've been meaning to, but never got around to it. Maybe you have set goals before but then forgot about them and went on with your normal life. 

What’s different this time?

I don’t want you to set goals because I told you to. 

If you were getting out your paper and pencil because you think this is something you “aught” to do, then put them away and go do something else instead. Any goals that you write down you'll either forget or make you rebel, because you will associate them with being told (yet again) what to do. 

Don’t give up control of your life! 

If you are going to set goals for yourself, they have to be YOUR goals, set because that’s where YOU want to go. 

(Oh yeah, and there’s the whole feeling empowered thing. That’s great too.)

Anyway, so how do you do it? 

Well, at risk of making you feel really morbid and depressed…I want you to imagine you are going to die. 

You have 1 year of great health left and then at the end of that year, you are going to keel over and drop dead. 

So what do you want to do in the next year? 

Well obviously you want to arrange things in preparation of your imminent demise, but outside of that, you have 1 year to live however you would like to live. 1 year to enjoy the sweetness of life. So what do you want to do? 

Write out all the actions that would be the most important to you. What would you do, that would ensure that when that year was up, you’d go out with a smile on your face and a satisfied heart? 

Okay, go ahead and do that right now. 

Now (I’m assuming you’re done), imagine that you’ve been given a bit of an extension. Now instead of keeling over in one year, you have five years! 

Hey, that’s great! 

Five guaranteed years of life to live however you think best. 

Add to your list the additional things that you would want to accomplish in that extra time. You now have the chance to do bigger things that take more set up time. 

How would you use those years to most benefit from them? 

Yes, yes, go ahead and write them down… 

Okay. Now by the marvels of modern medicine, the day you kick the bucket has been pushed back to TEN years from today. 

I promise that this is the last one, so if you want to get it done, you better do it in those ten years. 

You don’t get any more extensions. 

So add to your list the things that you would want to do if you had only ten precious years left. 

Done? 

Well there you go, you have a goals list! 

Since there are probably a number of things on that list, trying to work on all those at once would totally overwhelm you. You need to prioritize. 

Look through that list and pick out the 3 items that are most important to you. 

Highlight those three things, because those are the only ones that you are going to focus on right now. You might be tempted to mark more than three, but if you do, you might not accomplish any at all. You can always come back and change your choices as your priorities change.

Finally, you have a way to judge whether to comply or resist the influences of the people around you! You have a way to make decisions on everything from how to spend your evening to whether to look for a new job. 

You've already figured out in the last step what you are good at and enjoy. You know what you want to avoid. And you know the goals you want to move towards.

By doing these first two steps, you finally now have the steering wheel in your hands and a clear idea of where you are going!