***Motivation, goals and all that other stuff you've heard about a million times before.

It really is amazing how often people continue to look for the answer to their problems when they already have the answer in their bookshelf or CD collection.

I am sure you will have heard the old saying "be careful what you wish for you just might get it" and a huge amount of cases this is very true. You might be thinking what has this got to do with goal setting. It is my experience that the majority of people focus on what they don't want rather than what they do want. Even know they think they know what they want they invest the majority of their thoughts time energy and effort focused on what they don't want.
I often have people telling me that they know what to do that they just can't raise the motivation to do it. "When I get home, I'm just too tired to do anything" have you ever said or thought that before?

The simple truth regarding motivation and goal setting is that they pretty much go hand in hand. If you take the time to put pen to paper and work out exactly what you want and when you want it, and what are all of the specific actions that will need to be taken, you will find that this clarity create certainty and eliminates procrastination. The simple idea here is you are filling your head with what you want. Whilst ever you continue to fill your thoughts with the things that you don't want it creates negative emotions and heaps of recent continue to put off doing what you know you should be doing.

The original company name for uncoverhiddenprofits.com was mylyfe. As you can see spelt with a Y rather than an I. The whole philosophical reason for that was that over the last two decades of involvement in performance coaching with individuals, athletes and small business the absence of a genuine "Y", goal, target or objective, what ever you want to call it, was almost always the major reason as to why people weren't achieving what they wanted to, and were living with unnecessary levels of frustration, anxiety, stress and overwhelm, just to name a few. Having the "Y" or reason for doing the things that we know we should clearly understood is often all it takes to get someone focused and motivated to take the right actions.

So why don't people at the time and the effort into writing down what they want. Will I guess there are almost limitless reasons as to why that is the case, and I'm sure that is about another hundred articles that could be written just on that one subject, but what I would suggest is just take notice of the Nike catch cry and "just do it". If we put just one 10th of the time and effort into writing goals down that most people put into coming up with excuses and reasons as to why goal setting doesn't work for them, we would be off and racing.

Back in the days when our only presentation was "coach any dummy to succeed, even yourself" it was amazing hearing the feedback from people who regularly attended the workshop. It was just so incredibly common hearing stories of people that had set goals that they thought would take months but once they had been written down and put through a basic goal setting process actually only took weeks to accomplish. Goals that were thought to take a year to accomplish were commonly knocked off in a matter of months. I remember one lady passionately explaining how wonderful it would be to set her business in such a manner that would allow her to have Fridays off, once having written all of the actions to be taken down and thinking it would be at least a full year before she could enjoy her freedom, was only working four days a week within five weeks of setting out the objective.

It seems that most people are that busy doing "stuff" that they just don't seem to have the time to work out what they really want, and it isn't until sometimes it is too late that they find out what that is. A long time ago when I was working as a life insurance agent I returned to the office after attending my first time management seminar, where I learnt all about goal setting and high-quality planning. As I walked past one of the managing partners office he asked me how come I was in the office so late, I replied by telling him that I was really excited and motivated about what I had learned that day and that I wanted to come back into the office and begin implementing what I've learnt immediately. In fact I was that excited about the information I been exposed to a suggested that he may want a book himself into the next workshop and there was so much that could be gained from this information. Now just so you get the picture as to what was going on here, here I was literally only been in the business for six months, suggesting one of the top performing life agents in the country that he could do better. He politely declined my suggestion that he could get any benefit from the workshop and learning about goal setting and time management, by telling me that he was enjoying a very happy family life with his wife and four boys and he went on to give me details about the wonderful house who lived in the marvellous cars that they drove, and when they went on holiday to choose to go anywhere in the world that they wanted, because money was on an issue.

Almost one year to the day of having that conversation I learned that this man had gone home the previous night to find a house empty. His wife and boys had left him. He never returned to work again he was a shattered man.

My reason for telling the story is to hopefully emphasise the importance of taking the time to set some objectives for every part of your life. Not just money or work but the whole deal. Write what you want down and look at it and work on every day because the chances are high you will get what you wish for!