Are you ready to carry on with your confidence goal?
Want to set a confidence goal? If you came to this page via a search engine, you can view part one by clicking here.
So, hopefully by now you’ve identified your main goal? Now, you need to build up leverage on yourself to help ensure its success. And you do that by giving yourself as many reasons to succeed as possible. Also, probably more importantly, identify all the pain you’ll feel if you fail to succeed.
It’s a fact that a person will do far more to escape pain, than they’ll ever do to get pleasure. So, make sure you cover both!
You can put all this info on the same form that you listed the major goal on (Analysing Your Goal if you’re using the downloadable worksheets).
What should I write?
It’ll be worth printing off a copy, or three of the Brainstorming Sheet and using those to list all the items. Be as specific as you can and don’t leave anything out. List all of the small reasons as well as the big ones!
These should include personal reasons as well as tangible ones. For example, some benefits may be…
- that because you’ll be doing something you love, you’ll be more ‘present’ with loved ones. or,
- you’ll have more money to spend on vacations, etc.
The pain you might feel for failure may be…
- that you have to get up every day and work at a job you hate with a boss who doesn’t appreciate you, or
- if you don’t succeed, you’ll never be able to experience the pleasure of supplying world class widgets to the people who need them, etc.
You should also put down what it would mean to you physically and mentally. eg “achieving each step along the route to my confidence goal, will boost my confidence in my abilities, allowing me to take greater calculated risks in my business.”
Also, list any barriers likely to prevent your success. These could include…
- unsupportive friends, or family
- lack of money
- lack of experience, etc.
Then list how you will deal with these barriers, so they don’t become an issue.
Any reason you can think of is a good one. The more reasons you give yourself to succeed, the better it will be.
And please remember what I said earlier. People will do a lot more to escape from pain. So make sure you write down all the pain you’ll feel and any barriers you might face along the way!
Once you have a nice long list, add them to the sheet.
Okay. So, now you have your main goal and the other things you need to achieve from last time. Plus, you now know all the reasons you have to achieve it!
Break your confidence goal into actionable steps
The next part, is to break each of those smaller steps (from last time), into actionable tasks that will achieve them.
For example: If one of your steps was to take a course in business taxation, then your actionable tasks could be,
- Contact my local business forum to ask for advice on local courses.
- Contact each of the recommendations and ask for a prospectus.
- Compare each prospectus then make a decision on which course to take.
- Book a place on the next available course.
You can break your steps down into as many tasks as you need. Do what’s right for you, just make sure that each of the tasks is specific. eg. “look on the internet for where I can do a course on business taxation” isn’t specific; “contact the top three results for business taxation courses on ‘Google'”, is.
Remember, as with the goals, every task needs to be measurable; you need a target so you know when you’ve achieved each one.
Once you’ve got all your tasks written down, assign each of them a deadline. Obviously, some of these deadlines may change. Especially if the completion of your task is reliant on waiting for information.
But, assign one anyway and change it if you need to later on.
Great! Now you’ve got all of the actions necessary to achieve your Major Goal.
Before you get too excited though, you’ve got another problem to consider now.
The final step
You’ve most likely got a ‘mish-mash’ of tasks that don’t have any structure to them. You’ve got the destination and you know everywhere you have to be on the way there. What you don’t have, is a route planned out.
The final part of this exercise will help you with that!
The final sheet will allow you to create a simple chronological list of tasks. With that you can work your way through, from top to bottom.
So, take your list of action steps and add them to the ‘Specific Tasks in Completion Order’ sheet. Put the first thing you need to do, first in the list, then work your way down until the final task is at the bottom. Use extra sheets if you need to.
The science says…
A survey in the Journal of Clinical Psychology (1-1-2014) found that a person who explicitly sets goals, is 10 times more likely to achieve them than a person who just has vague idea of what they want to achieve.
62% of Americans set at least one goal per year, only 8% of those achieve them! Of that 8%, just over half (64%), reach their goal and keep it for one month before slipping back, 46% last past 6 months.
This means that less than 4% of people who set goals, manage to maintain them once they’ve been achieved. By completing the all the steps, you’ve done what 96% of people who set goals have failed to do; you have a written, achievable plan of every step necessary.
Every task you complete builds your confidence and increases your self-belief.
Final thoughts…
The only thing left now, is take action on your first task!
Once you’ve achieved your goal, don’t fall into the trap of believing that everything will be fantastic. Once you get there, and you will, you’ll have other desires that your want to realize. Go through the same process with those goals and you’ll get them too!
Never forget that the small wins are more important for your confidence that the main goal. Take as many opportunities as possible to register a win.
Any questions? Drop them into the comments 🙂
