DAY #128 DO GOALS

THE LIFE COACH SCHOOL PODCAST – Episode 86

If I really think about it, there are very few things I would use a genie’s lamp for, even if it were an easy option. Really. I like the process that leads me to what I want, a lot of times, as much as I like what it is that I want. For example, I want to take my children to Africa. I would not want to rub a genie’s lamp and just land us in Africa, though. I love the process! I love the planning and the hoping and the dreaming. I even love saving my money for the anticipated vacation – the sacrifice makes the upcoming trip that much more exciting, right?

While I do want to go back to Africa, with my husband and children, that’s not going to be my first impossible goal to tackle. I want to start somewhere else. I want to use this strategy, DO GOALS, to accomplish one of my impossible goals this year. I have ten months.

How do I get started? What if you don’t know where to start? What if you don’t know what your impossible dreams are? This comes directly from Brooke’s podcast today – word for word, in most cases:

Sit down with a piece of paper: “What is it that I want to do in my life?” Just start writing. Give yourself a full ten minutes. If there are accomplishments you want, things you want to do, results you want to get, anything that you want to do and create and accomplish in your life, just write it down. It’s okay if little random to-dos come in there. Anything that comes to your mind, just write for ten minutes. Even if you have things that mean the same thing, it doesn’t really matter. Just give yourself the space to write down what you really want.
Once you have that list, go through the list and prioritize it. What I like to do is go through and get the big priorities out of there – what are the top THREE priorities? What I’ve noticed when I do this is sometimes I’ll get one of the priorities and then there will be a bunch of other things that I want to do, but they’re all underneath this one priority. I write down the top three priorities, and then anything else on the list that can be categorized underneath it goes underneath that priority.
Then once you go in and you have your top three priorities and you have everything on that list categorized under one of those three priorities, you want to pick ONE of those to focus on, to get started on – one you want to start taking action on.

Bryant and I started this process. We were afraid that if we just did it in one evening – if we just made our lists and made our priorities in one evening – our impossible goals would be influenced by what happened specifically that day. So we decided to do the same exercise, four weeks in a row, without discussing our lists or even referring back to our lists, until all four lists from all four weeks were completed. Does that make sense? It was a fun exercise. I am really looking forward to our final lists this weekend, and the discussion we will have looking over our four weeks’ worth of lists.

This is a lot of work – a lot – and it is fun work, and it is worthy of the effort. But it is a lot of work.

Tomorrow we will look at where we go, once our priority is set, in this DO GOALS strategy.

“I want to make sure that you know how to utilize those “Do Goals” to achieve success. ‘Do Goals’ are not simply the concepts that we have in our minds that we would like to accomplish. They are the actual actions that we need to take. In other words, they are the structured way of taking massive action.”

That is tomorrow.

“I will say, this (strategy) is the closest I’ve ever come to rubbing that genie bottle and making a wish… If you make a wish and then you make a plan, and then you execute the plan, you can have it. You can have what it is you want. You can create that for yourself.”