HOW TO GET WHAT YOU REALLY WANT

The Steps to Your Goals

The same thing that makes Big Hairy Audacious Goals exciting also makes them scary. They’re big, they’re ambitious, and sometimes they’re overwhelming. The usual advice is to break them down into manageable steps. Good advice, but how to start? We have a way.

Our strategy combines a conventional planning process with the wealth of resources of your subconscious mind. Here’s how it works:

1.  Choose a long-range goal (it doesn’t matter if it seems more like a dream than a goal, as long as it’s possible; remote, unlikely, idealistic are all OK). For my example, I’m going to use the goal of writing a best-selling book on creativity techniques.

2.  Take twenty minutes of uninterrupted time and daydream about what it will be like when you have achieved this goal. Just close your eyes, relax, take the first minute or two to breathe deeply and turn your attention inward. Then see, hear, and feel what things will be like when you have reached your goal. Here are the kinds of things to attend to:

What are people saying to you?  What kinds of questions are they asking?  What are you saying to yourself? Where are you? What are the surroundings like? Who is there with you? How does it make you feel? Proud? Happy? Satisfied? Eager to achieve even more?

3.  Staying in that reverie, now imagine yourself being interviewed about how you reached your goal. The interviewer can be a television or radio presenter, a journalist, or just a close friend—whichever you find most interesting and comfortable. Hear his or her questions and your answers. Don’t force answers, just let them come. Imagine questions about the different stages of your progress toward your goal. Usually it’s easiest to start at the finish and work your way backward. For example, the reporter might ask, "How did the book get to be a best-seller?" and perhaps the answer is, "Well, it was featured on several national television programmes and excepts of it ran in the Sunday Times." Perhaps next she asks, "And how did you bring it to the attention of television producers?" The questions and answers proceed backward in time, until you get to the question, "And how did you originally have the idea for this book?" Some additional useful questions are: "What kind of support did you find along the way?" and "What were the main obstacles and how did you overcome them?" and "What parts of the process did you especially enjoy?" 

4.  Come back out of the daydream and jot down everything you remember. Some people prefer to have a tape recorder going while they’re daydreaming and dictate their answers as they go along, and then make their notes from the tape. Don’t judge your imagined answers at this stage, just jot them down. 

5.  Put your notes away and come back to them another day. Underline all those things that refer to the steps you saw leading up to your goal. Use a clean sheet of paper to put them in rough chronological order, from now to the achievement of your goal. If, for some, you don’t know what the order should be, guess.

6.  Pick a step that strikes you as being about halfway to your goal. In our example, it might be the point of delivering the manuscript to the publisher (assuming that writing the book is half the process, marketing it is the other half). Repeat the process: take 20 minutes to daydream in more detail about the first half of the process. Jot down your findings, pick out steps, and put them in order.

7.  Depending on how ambitious a goal you’ve chosen, you may need to repeat this another time or two, each time cutting the remaining distance in half, before you get to a series of steps that are comfortable for you to start on TODAY. Sometimes the early steps involve doing research or taking steps to prepare yourself in some way. In our example, it might be checking out all the books on creativity that are already in the marketplace, or it might be jotting down some thoughts on what could be in the book. 

Why does this technique work? First., it focuses you on a specific goal. We discussed mental filters in the last issue, and this gives you the filter that will suddenly alert you to everything that could relate to the achievement of your goal.

Secondly, it brings to bear all the knowledge of your subconscious mind; down there, you’ve absorbed a lot of information you normally don’t let yourself access because your Inner Critic won’t let you ("Who are you to think you could write a best-seller? There are already too many books out there on this topic," etc.)

Thirdly, every action begins with a thought. Once you’ve repeatedly imagined yourself as having achieved your dream, it starts to seem more tangible and possible. 

Finally, it helps you to break down into do-able steps what initially seems like an overwhelming goal. As the Chinese say, "The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." Suddenly you are looking at single steps instead of just the thousand miles.

Most important of all, of course, is actually taking that first step. Will this process always lead you to complete realization of your goals? No. Returning to our example, maybe the book will "only" be a steady seller not a best-seller. Getting even half-way to a dream is more than most people manage—and of course we may indeed go all the way. Now I wonder which of your BHAGs you’ll start with, and when you’ll schedule that first twenty minute session that will be the first step to your goal…