If you’ve ever tried setting goals before, this is probably the point where you ground to a halt.

You had a list of desires, a whole lot of excitement and motivation...

...but not the first clue as to what to do next!

Don’t worry, I won’t leave you hanging here. 

What’s the next step after figuring out where you are going? 

Why figuring out how to get there of course! 

In the last step you identified the three goals that are the most important to you. 

For each one of these, now you need to brainstorm actions that can take you closer to that particular goal. 

They don’t have to form a complete plan yet, just any activity that could take you closer in some way towards that goal outcome. 

Don’t second guess yourself or evaluate the merit of each idea, just write it down and keep going. Every time you catch yourself judging an idea that you’ve come up with or written down, stop and redirect yourself to just churning out new ideas. 

Keep writing until you feel completely drained of ideas, then go on to the next goal of the three. After you finish, read further down and you will find suggestions for even more ideas, but go ahead and get all your initial stuff down. 

Have you finished yet? 

Please don’t continue reading until you have those three lists in hand. 

Done? 

I’ll trust your honor when you say yes, and we’ll go on. 

Now you need to identify the type of goal for each of those three. This will give you a lot of information about how best to go about accomplishing them. 

Job / Career Goals: Before you go sign up for classes or special training, do some research. Identify your boss. Who would you need to make happy in order to achieve and keep that job (No matter what business or what level, there is somebody who you need to keep happy)? What problems and needs do they have? How can you best solve them? You are not a “worker”, an “employee”, or even a “business person”. You are a problem solver. Any job you ever have had was because whoever you were working for had a problem and needed you to solve it. It might have been a widget they needed produced, a program they needed written, or even just a lawn they needed mown. It doesn’t matter if your boss is an employer, a client, or a customer, whoever you are working for has a problem that you are there to solve. If you can more clearly identify what those problems are, you better you can solve them, and the more successful you will be. No matter what your title is, just think of yourself as a professional problem solver. 

An extra tip: When you have a hard time trying to figure out how to approach a career goal, try focusing on knowledge and experience. There are a lot of different ways to get both. Plus, a deficiency in one might be balanced by an abundance of the other. Lots of people have gotten jobs because they were connected with the right people. How can you make connections? What body of knowledge can you acquire that would make you uniquely valuable? Just because others have a certain qualification doesn’t mean you have to have it, you just need to find a way to offer something of greater value. Remember also that your creativity and exceptional people skills can get you pretty much anything you want in life. They can get you things that even money could not.

Personality goals: For goals where you change your nature, essentially you just pretend you are the person you want to be until it becomes natural. Treat it like a game. If you want to act more confidant, be more loving with your family, be a better parent/friend/whatever, you simply ask yourself what you would do if you already possessed the trait that you aspire to. Then it’s just a matter of pretending. You treat it like a role in a play. Act long enough and you’ll find that it stops being a role and is genuine. Act until it ain’t acting. 

Skill / Ability goals: Skill goals are perhaps the simplest to achieve but often the most neglected. Don’t put off whatever you want to learn until the day you magically have the money for lessons. Focus on what you can do. Just about any skill you ever would want to possess can be learned by first walking through the doors of your local library or logging onto the internet. Knowledge is cheap nowadays, so use that. Go to your library and get instructional materials (if they don’t have it, they can order it for you from another library). You can get books, audio programs, videos, whatever you need. Skills that are entirely about knowledge (such as a foreign language), are easy for you to learn from CDs in your car while you commute, or while you wash dishes each day. You can get instructional videos to teach you a lot of physical skills. Even things that would seem impossible to learn without expensive lessons (like learning to fly a plane), can be worked on at home cheaply. You can learn the information that pilots need to know. You can get a good flight simulator program (even pilots keep in practice using those), and get good with it. 

The key is to take your focus off the obstacles and ask yourself what you CAN do. Exhaust all your options before you worry about those obstacles. Fortune favors the prepared. You might find that those insurmountable barriers have melted while you were off preparing. 

Opportunity goals: These are the ones that seem the most unattainable. You can’t do them unless you get some once in a lifetime chance. Since you haven’t gotten that particular chance yet, it’s hard to believe you ever will. But there are steps to this type of goal too. First figure out who gets to do the kind of thing that you want to do. Then find a way to connect yourself to them. If you can’t hang out with them, correspond with them. Secondly, ask yourself where those opportunities are likely to occur and spend time there. If you want to play with a tiger cub, Wal-Mart isn’t the place to be. Try making friends at the zoo. If you’ve always dreamed of firing a cannon, taking the controls of an ocean liner, or shaking hands with the President, you probably shouldn’t spend your time reading email forwards. Fortune favors the prepared, so be prepared. When Lady Luck starts handing out opportunity goals, you don’t want to be at home in front of your television set. If you put yourself in the path of opportunities, you’ll be one of the first in line to receive them. \

Breaking habits: Probably the two best ways to break a bad habit is to either set up a system of rewards for increasingly longer periods of abstaining from that action, or replacing the negative action with a positive one. Either way you are focusing on the positive (the reward or the replacement action). Also you might want to avoid the situations where you will be tempted to go back to your bad habit. You are a creature of habit, so if you do everything in the same order that you did before, when you reach the point where you would have done that negative action, momentum will carry you right on into it. If you can disrupt the process ahead of time, you are much more likely to succeed in choosing a different action. 

Relationship and Social goals: There are too many points of social interactions for me to list right here, but you can find just about everything you need, by just picking up a copy of How To Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie. It is one of the greatest books every written. In fact, even for goals that don’t seem to be relationship or socially focused, you probably should read it anyway. The more you improve your people skills, the more other people will help you along in life. 

I’m sure there are other types of goals that I haven't listed here. If your goal doesn’t fit into any of these categories, feel free to email me and I will work on adding it in. 

Using the information about how to pursue each type of goal, add more ideas to your lists of steps that would take you closer to each of your three main goals. 

Keep brainstorming on each one until you are totally empty of ideas again. You can always add more later as you think of them. 

Now with each of those three lists, go back through and determine which three steps you think would give you the most benefit and help you make the most progress. 

Mark these three. 

Now finally, pick the one step out of those three that would be easiest for you to do. 

There you go, now you have a first step. 

Every time you finish a step or get sidetracked for a while, or even just get bogged down, just go back and glance through the list, pick the most effective steps, and then work on the easiest from that short list. 

There are of course many steps on your list that would be easier and perhaps more pleasant to do, but the first consideration must be how efficient they are at taking you towards the goal. 

Lots of people spin their wheels taking classes or reading books that aren’t vital to getting to their goals. 

There are a million ways to procrastinate while looking like you are really working. 

If that class or that book is really so important, it’ll make it into the short list of most efficient actions. 

Anything not on that list is just a waste of your time. 

Stay focused, forget your comfort zone, and enjoy the adventure of doing something new and challenging. 

The payoff is amazing. 

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