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DREAMS, GOALS AND ACHIEVEMENT

CollectionDreams, Goals, and Achievement.......................................................................................27 Tips For Effective Goal Setting For the New Year..........................................................4Why Do New Year's Resolutions Not Work?.....................................................................7What You Think & Speak Can Save Your Life, Or End It - Goal Setting 101 For 2009 &For Life................................................................................................................................9Questions to Ask When Goal Setting................................................................................13Goals, Failure and Personal Development........................................................................14Is This the Secret to Success?...........................................................................................16Goal Setting - 4 Simple Steps to Set Your 2009 Intentions..............................................18Career Goals - Ways to Set Goals For a Career Change...................................................19How to Start the Year! - Goals to Create Success.............................................................21What Does Neuroscience Have to Teach Us About Attaining Our Goals?......................22What's More Powerful Than a Goal?................................................................................23The Top Ten New Years Resolutions For 2009 - Trying to Improve...............................24Some Personal Goal Setting Examples For You...............................................................263 Goal Setting Activities Tips That You Cannot Miss.....................................................273 Successful Goal Setting Strategies That Never Fail.......................................................28A Simple Way to Start Living Your New Career Today - Quotes and Coaching Questionsto Motivate You................................................................................................................29

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Dreams, Goals, and Achievement

ByDale Stuemke http://ezinearticles.com/?Dreams,-Goals,-and-Achievement&id=1056501 Pretty much everything you read about goals in human achievement tells you about theimportance of goals, how to make them, and how to use them to succeed. Unless this isthe first article you've read about goals or you're a confirmed doubter, you know thatgoals are important.Simply, most of our achievements in life start with an idea of something that we wouldlike to do, to have, or to achieve. Many people call this the dream. It's an idea, a conceptof something we want.Some people think a dream is the same thing as a goal, but it's really not. Think of a goalas a dream with a date on it. That's over-simplifying, but it's easy enough to understand.Dreams can be a bit vague but goals have to be specific. To make this easier, I'll discussit in relation to a recent diet of mine.My dream, if you will, was not to weigh a certain amount. That's really too vague. Whatis a "weight"? It's an arbitrary number that an instrument gives us to show what? If youdon't understand scales, pounds, and the relationship between height and build, it's just anumber. My dream was not something like that; my dream was an image I had in mymind. That image was my person in a slimmer body. I knew what I wanted to look like.That picture in my mind was my dream.During my life I have moved through weights from around 5-1/2 pounds to 220 pounds. Isay I've moved through them. Actually, sometimes I've moved through ranges of thoseweights more than once! But, I remember what I looked like when I was at some of thoseweights. In fact, I still have pictures of my wife and me at our wedding when I weighed between 135 and 140. That's not my dream, but I have the image. If your weight is higher than what you want it to be, I'll bet that you have an image of you with your preferred body shape in your mind too. So I had a dream, a vision. Next, I had to refine the dream into a specific goal. I had to do some analysis to find agoal that would produce an acceptable vision. So, I chose the weight that would meet thevision, and then I put a time frame on it. In my case, that was easy because I was goingon my first-ever cruise in nine months...now I had a date and motivation!Dreams and goals are important, but you won't achieve them without a plan. You need a plan that you believe you can follow, one that you are confident will produce the desiredresults, and one that you can use to measure your progress. Also, you need to be able toadjust your plan if it doesn't produce as you want it to.

Back to Content I was fortunate that I had dieted before and had a pretty good idea of what worked for me. So, I put a plan in place that reduced my daily calorie intake to a set amount andcontinued the exercise routine I had already developed. I created a goal chart to track my progress on a monthly basis. And, I set an end date for achieving the goal. I'd never started a diet this way before. I'd had the dream before, and I'd had goals before. I had just never laid them out in a reasonable, long-term, measurable manner before. This timeI decided to follow things I'd learned about goal setting, and I was going to succeed.So I started my diet, followed my plan, and tracked my progress. As time went on, Icould look at my progress and decide whether the plan was working and whether I wasreally executing the plan. How did it work? Well, I lost over half of what my goal was.What happened?Remember that thing about visualizing what you want? As it turns out my vision of myself wearing some clothes that I already owned became reality before the final goal. Ireached that point and lost another five pounds but fell off my plan at that point. I stillneed to get the vision of myself at the final goal weight, and it needs to be a vision of something I really want, something that will provide the motivation to take me the rest of the way.

Summary

What can we learn from this real-life example?1.

The dream must be something you can visualize so you really see yourself fulfilling it.2.

The goal is established by defining the dream with numbers that are measurable.3.

The plan has to be something you believe will work and that you can track yourself on.4.

Progress must be checked along the way.Did I fail? No. I haven't reached the final goal yet, but I now weigh 25 pounds less thanwhen I started, and I've maintained that for almost nine months! That's not failure, that's progress toward my goal.Want to learn more? Visithttp://www.launchyourgoals.com/cbprods/c7stepsb.htmtolearn how to stop missing your goals and start living your dreams.Stop by Launch Your Goals Blog athttp://www.launchyourgoals.com/blogto sign up for a free special report and to learn more about setting and achieving your goals.Article Source:http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Dale_Stuemke