Achieve Your Goals

In late December, I was talking to my family about New Year's resolutions. I asked them what resolutions they had, and their responses surprised me. Apparently, they do not make resolutions anymore. They were so convinced that resolutions were useless, that they have stopped making them. Although in one way, I admired the honesty of this approach, in another way I was somewhat shocked. Achieving your goals is one of the most important things in life, and just because you meet with some failures does not mean you should stop setting concrete goals. After all, you have no chance of learning how to achieve your goals if you never set them!

There are many different ways of setting goals. A lot of people have one method by which they claim you can achieve your goal, but in my experience different methods work for different people. Some people, for example, rely heavily on religious faith to achieve their goals. They will tell you that to achieve your goals, you need Christ, or some other commonly known religious figure at the centre of your life.
This may work for them, but it is not the only way to achieve your goals.

Other people have a much more concrete approach to setting and achieving goals. They say that, to achieve your goals, you have to think and act like a highly successful person. They use psychological tricks and personal affirmations to help achieve your goal. In many ways, these affirmations work much like religious faith does for those who are more interested in it. Rather than using faith in God to achieve your goals, these people advocate using faith in yourself.

Still other people say that the best way to achieve your goals is through therapy and counselling. They say that the reason people are dysfunctional is because they have certain deep conflicts holding them back from achieving goals in their lives. They advocate all kinds of different therapies to achieve your goals, from solution focused therapy, to psychotherapy, to life coaching.

In my personal life, I believe that the best way to achieve your goals is to combine elements from all of these approaches. If I feel alienated from myself and my goals, sometimes I will make a list and figure out what I have to do, and other times I will pray to God for guidance, or seek out a therapist. The best way to achieve your goals is to figure out what works for you, and for me it depends on the goals, and on what is holding me back.

A top tip to help you achieve your goals is to write them down. When something is in black and white it is somehow more tangible. Keep reading your written goals and eventually they will become so much a part of your normal life that you will subconsciously be working towards them naturally. "What the mind can conceive and believe, the mind will achieve". This is a quote from the book Think and grow rich by Napoleon Hill and he truly believed that it is a state of mind that will always help you to achieve your goals.

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Unleash The Power of Positive Thinking

You will always hear new ideas on how to live a better life. Some of the things you are going to hear are just not going to work, and there are some that work with amazing efficiency. It can be very confusing though, because there are so many ideas out there, and so many different people who think that they have the answer. The problem is that what works for one person will not work for everyone, and quite often you won’t know what you should choose. One idea is to live by the power of positive thinking.

Though I can not vouch for everyone, I can say that the power of positive thinking is something that I try to use in my life. Years ago I had no idea there were books and specials on television about it. It was just something I decided to do about ten years ago. I was depressed, and felt like I was stuck in a horrible place in life. I felt trapped like I could not escape. I was sitting in my doctor’s office crying my eyes out, and my doctor calmly told me that there is always a way out, but I would have to believe it. This was the first I had heard about the power of positive thinking, and I wish it was something I had known long ago.

Though he didn’t put it into those exact words, he did say that you have to remain positive that things will work out, and you will find that they do. He said the power of positive thinking would force me to change how I viewed problems, and would help me see what I wanted for my life. Up until that point, I thought life was a series of accidents, and I did feel sorry for myself. In that moment, I realized how pitiful that was, and how I was defeating myself with all of my negative thoughts.

Within a matter of months, the power of positive thinking had changed my life. I was back in college and working towards a new career. Many of the other problems I had cleared up, though they did not magically go away. I did have to work on them. When I began to use the power of positive thinking, the answers seemed to come to me much more clearly, and I felt energized. For the first time in my life, I thought that I was finally in control of my own destiny. If you really believe, you can do this for yourself as well.

Now whenever you mention the words "the power of positive thinking" the sceptic may say that it is a load of old mumbo jumbo. I say see for yourself and live by your own experiences, and only trust the opinions of people who have tried this technique. Step out of your comfort zone, break away from the ninety five percent sheep mentality and join the five percent achievers!

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