How to transform impotent goals into powerful, compelling goals
I’m sure you’re familiar with goal setting.
Maybe you want to lose weight, so you sit down and decide how much you want to lose by when.
Or, you want to save for a new car, so you set a goal to set aside X number of dollars each month for a specified period of time until you have enough to purchase the vehicle.
In the world of business, goal setting is an integral part of how things are done in order to move to the next level of productivity and profitability, measured in any number of ways.
We tend to set goals at the beginning of something, like the first day of the week or month, on a particular anniversary or significant date, or at the beginning of the New Year, for example.
Trouble is, many people set out with noble intentions, but the goals never seem to go any further than the sheet of paper — if, they bother to write them down at all. Unfortunately, it isn’t possible to ever reach a goal if along the way there isn’t any action that progressive approximates what you desire to achieve.
Goals like these are impotent; they have no power behind and within them to affect your life right now, in the present moment.
I came across some notes the other day that I must have taken while listening in on a teleconference interview some time ago (How embarrassing that nowhere did I note the date or the person being interviewed or even the name of the person conducting the interview!) on how to affect our present behavior by putting into practice proactive goal setting.
Proactive goal setting. I like the way that sounds, don’t you?
This is not wishing things were better or simply writing the goal down and hoping for the best. Nor (as many entrepreneurs and salespeople seem to want to do) is this technology about manipulating people or things in an effort to force your way.
The premise is that our future creates our present, or that the future is almost irrelevant, except as far as it affects behavior right now. We can never be literally in the future anyhow; we’re always in the present moment.
My suspicion tells me that this is where the transformative power begins to work its magic.
My notes offer at first glance what you might expect: deliberate, conscious envisioning of the goal, the ideal outcome. Actually seeing the future in the mind.
What does it look like? What does it smell like? What does it taste like? How does it sound? How does it feeeeeeeel?
It goes a step further. The goal must be aligned with “the future that makes your heart sing.”
Just thinking of your heart singing has energy and momentum behind it.
The trick with proactive goal setting (or “remembering the future”) is that when you are seeing the future in your mind and really feeling what it would be like to have it is to hold the feeling, hold the imagery, the sounds, the tastes long enough to write it down.
Then, what your next inspired action toward that goal will be automatic. It will just come to you, and you’ll know it.
The vision you have created will literally affect and even transform how you are operating right now. This is what is meant by acting “as if” you already have it, because you have created it in all it’s vivid detail already in your mind’s eye.
You cannot help but act in harmony with your compelling, powerful vision.
It’s because you have engineered your present actions by imagineering your future.
Imagineering. Isn’t that another great word?!
It comes from an older audio recording of Joe Vitale speaking that I’ve listened to over and over again, entitled “Think Like God.” That title itself is compelling, as it speaks to this idea of proactive goal setting.
A friend of Dr. Vitale’s, Mike Vance, a creativity expert, did a seminar with Joe Vitale. He talked about the future and said, “If you want to be creative, think like God.”
Well, doesn’t that change everything?
“Think like God.”
If we played with the possibilities, what could we not do?
(If you have trouble with the traditional Judeo-Christian concept of a monotheistic god or any other idea of god, remember that reality is just a subjective illusion anyway. The point is using the awesome power of imagination. Dov Baron makes the comment that “imagination is the faculty of the soul, not of the mind.” So whether you believe in God or a god at all is beside the point. Imagine what it would be like if there was a god. What would it be like, then, to think like God?)
If you think like God, there are no limits. It would be a no-brainer to see the future, look out at the figurative darkness over the surface of the deep, and say “Let there be light.”
If you were God, what would you do? What would you create? What goals would you set?
Joe Vitale goes on to talk about a book called Imagineering (The only reference I could find to “imagineering” on the Web was Walt Disney Imagineering
It’s a great word because it brings even greater depth and meaning to the idea of proactively understanding and setting goals. Imagineering means going into the future to see what’s needed and designing it now. It means visualizing and feeling every last detail of what you might do, have or be in the future and coming back here to engineer it right now.
If your vision is clear and compelling enough, everything you do now will propel you toward your goal. Because you imagineered it, your now-certain future gives fuel to how you are operating in this moment.
You begin to make your future happen now, effortlessly.
The idea of “vision” also takes on a new meaning. It’s traditionally thought of as future-oriented; Deepak Chopra illustrates in his book Peace is the Way
“A vision isn’t about the future. It’s about taking on what is truly yours, right here and now. If transformation doesn’t take place every day, it is little more than an ideal that always lies just over the horizon.”
Which explains why so often traditional goal setting produces mediocre results, at best.
The compelling vision we create in three-dimensional, vibrant technocolor with full, all-out feeling, tasting, smelling, savoring — as we get into the energy of that, all of that feeling is happening with us and in us right here and now in this moment, not in the future.
What do you think of all this?
How might you use proactive goal setting and imagineering to consistently move positively in the direction of your goals?
