How to turn goal setting into goal achieving

2013 is fast approaching, are you willing to unleash the creative power of your dreams and allow them to project the kind of business you want to have and the quality of life you want to lead. Now is the time to create a positive mind-set, where you orient yourself to constantly be on the lookout for fortuitous situations or circumstances. It is extremely difficult to identify opportunities, when you are not looking for them and impossible, if you do not believe in yourself, your abilities and the potential that any opportunity offers.

Stop making any more excuses about delaying taking the action you know you need to take to live your dreams? Become enthusiastic about your potential today and create a crystal clear picture of exactly what you want to achieve in your life and business in the future. This vision will serve as the starting point to begin setting meaningful goals and creating an action plan to make just that possible for you, during next year and beyond.

Everything starts out as only a Dream

Anything outstanding that has ever been achieved started out as only a dream, an idea in someone’s head. You too can create wonders with your dreams and hopes, if you commit to nourish them, by investing in your personal growth and that of your key team members. You protect them by creating a set of realistic goals for your business and you commit to nurse these goals to fruition, by building meaningful action lists, which are consistently acted upon daily.

What is Possible for you?

The size and scope of your dreams determines what you can achieve and permits you to preview what could be. Clarity of purpose coupled with consistent, planned and focused action by all team members in your business, allows you to convert this probability, into possibility and finally your new business reality. Dare to dream, create a vision and goals to deliver on your dreams and you will get to create the business of your dreams.

Vision

All the super achievers and extraordinary businesses, which I have followed and researched, do not possess any special super powers, or unique talents. The one thing that I have noticed they do have in common is a very clear vision about what they want to achieve in the future. This vision is written down and converted into an easy to understand and apply mission, which they and their team can act upon daily.

Action Idea: Explore your vision and mission for your business. Once you have clarity on exactly what you want to create in your business, ensure that everyone in your organisation understands your vision and their role required to deliver on your vision.

Clearly Understand and Communicate your Businesses Picture of Possibility

Vision is a picture of possibility for the future, a direction the organisation is going to travel in. So it is of little value to write out a difficult to understand vision statement, which is plastered on the wall of the reception area of your business, which looks really pretty, but no-one in the organisation understands or feels passionate about. Vision is something people must be able to easily see and connect with.

I recently worked with the Information Technology department at one of the large universities in South Africa. They have had a really flowery and eloquent vision, which has been displayed throughout the corridors of the university for many years now. When we started the strategic planning session for 2013, I asked who knew what their vision for the future was. Only two people in the room had a vague idea of the content of the vision statement and even they did not feel that it had any meaning for them.

After exploring what they really saw as important for the future, which was to become a real value adder, to their students and the community at large, delivering top quality students and internationally recognised research in the Information Technology arena. We created a pictorial representation of what that meant to them. This pictorial representation was made of various analogies and pictures which allowed them to all grasp exactly what was required of them. This picture of possibility, will also serve to allow them to easily communicate this picture to all the other stakeholders in the university. The feedback from the university has been extraordinary. Everyone now understands the vision and most importantly their role in delivering the vision.

Creating your Vision

Action Idea: Get clarity around exactly what you want to create in your business in the future. Then invest time with your team to get their input towards, understanding of and buy-in, to this vision. Now all that is left to do is to convert this into understandable pictures and phrases, which your team can comprehend and most importantly one they feel committed towards using. To make this work in the long term, it is important to consistently remind your team about the vision and their commitment towards it.

Goals

Work with your team to convert your vision and mission into understandable and achievable goals. These goals must be easy to understand, written down and each team member must clearly comprehend their individual responsibility to deliver on the organisations goals. The way to make this process really work requires you to take the big picture and for you to break it back into smaller pieces, which individual team members can take action to achieve.

Each organisational or departmental goal must be broken back into individual projects or smaller bite size goals, which must then be allocated to individuals to achieve. These individuals must commit to a reasonable time frame to complete each project and they must create a set of measurement criterion, to measure their progress daily, weekly and monthly.

Action Idea: Each individual project must then be converted into action lists, which each individual can use daily to guide them on exactly what actions they need to take to achieve each project. These action lists are the input documents each team member uses to drive their daily activities.

Make it Fun and Don’t Give Up until you Succeed

To successfully fulfil all your business goals, requires consistent and persistent effort on the part of every team member. So if you want to make the journey more pleasant and sustainable, find ways to create an atmosphere of fun, excitement and real deep passion around this process. When you do this, it changes the concept of that dirty four letter word called work, into something people enjoy, is fulfilling and something everyone will eagerly want to participate in doing daily.

I know it sounds counter intuitive, where you make work fun, but when you can find creative ways to make your team members enjoy their work every day, they become far more passionate and driven to deliver their best. Many organisations such as Zappos shoes, Caribou Coffees and Google have introduced the concept of fun in the workplace. They encourage people to enjoy their work daily. As you know all these businesses have shown exponential growth since they opened their doors for business.

Making this work in your Business

Action Idea: Introducing fun as a concept in the workplace is not as simple as walking in one day and telling everyone they must have fun at work. It is a long term investment into creating a new culture, where people feel empowered to deliver their best and are encouraged to enjoy the process. This can only happen in an environment of openness, support and understanding. So to start the process, you need to ensure that everyone understands the vision, their role in delivering it and they must be supported and encouraged to be autonomous, master their abilities and enjoy the process.

Make Time Available

Each team member must be allowed to be at the helm of their own job and commit to implement their part in achieving the overall plan daily. They must be supported and encouraged to take inspired action daily, which will help the team achieve the desired results. To do this, they will need a system to make them both effective and efficient. This means that each team member will need a system to help them manage their time, activities and energy productively.

Action Idea: The first and most crucial element, when introducing a system to support your team to become effective, must ensure that they are clear on exactly what actions need to be taken. Once each team member is certain that they are taking the right actions, introduce a system which allows them to improve their efficiency, or in other words one that allows them to allocate how they will utilise their available time daily. The system you introduce must be flexible and must be suitable to support each team member’s unique circumstances. Allowing them to allocate time to their top priorities, whilst ignoring time wasting things, which do not serve their purpose or fit in with the overall vision.

Whatever Gets Measured Gets Done

When on the path to achieving your organisational goals, you will need to have consistent and regular checks, to ensure that you and your team remain on track. Each team members commitment towards monitoring their progress on a regular and frequent basis, will allow them to constantly measure their daily actions, to see if they are delivering the desired results. Should the individual or collective actions not be aligned with where you want to go, you can quickly change or improve them to ensure that you eventually do achieve the desired results. When each team member monitors their actions daily, the team leaders monitor the their teams activities weekly and the organisation monitors their progress monthly, it means that only small corrections are necessary to ensure that everyone stays on track

Action Idea: During the planning process, ensure that each team member’s goals or projects are time defined and their progress is easy to measure.  Each team member, department and organisation needs to have a predetermined set of measurement criterion to help them regularly measure their individual and collective progress.

Have Fun

If you want to invite sustainable long term success into your business, then you and your team must commit to have fun and deliver your best every day. Encourage them to look at their own mirror of assessment and to enjoy what they do. When everyone commits to the businesses’ success and they take bold focused and prioritised actions every day, success is inevitable. This daily commitment to take the right inspired action daily will make you and your team unstoppable.

Author: Andrew Horton a Motivational Speaker

http://www,andrewhorton.co.za

What is your Commitment to your Life-long Growth and Learning?

Formal education is important, but not crucial; to create sustainable success in your life, as it only equips you with the fundamentals for making a living. A commitment to lifelong learning and consistent growth, on the other hand is crucial, if you want to achieve and sustain greatness, as it allows you to keep expanding your limits and invites new possibility into your experience.

Your objective has got to be, to wake up every day, just a little better than you were the day before. This consistent growth, even though it will be almost imperceptible, will keep your universe expanding and will allow you to embrace new opportunities, which may have remained hidden from you, had you not grown into a better version of yourself.

Dare to be Different

If you want to stand out from the crowd and become a super achiever, you must commit to on-going self-learning and continual growth. Your on-going commitment to self-learning and perpetual growth is the foundation and beginning of great wealth, health, meaningful relationships, and spiritual enlightenment. This is where all the magical future success you deserve is born.

Apply your Knowledge in your Life

Yes a commitment to on-going growth and expansion is crucial for success, but always remember that, knowledge alone is of little value; until you take action and accept that you must take your new found knowledge and actively apply it in your life. When you commit to apply all the knowledge you gather, you equip yourself to attract anything you want into your life and you establish the basis to become a super achiever. Remember, you attract success by the person you become, as you become more, so you will attract more.

Become an Expert and apply your Knowledge

Gather as much knowledge as possible and become an expert in your field. Become someone that is committed to on-going learning and you will eventually grow into someone, who has all the right answers. Yet is driven to apply sufficient discipline to make productive use of all the knowledge they gather.

One of the greatest investments you can make, of either your time or your money, is an investment in your own education and growth. This investment over time will deliver returns on happiness, fulfilment, wealth, health and deliver amazing relationships too. This is one of the best investments you can make as you will see every resource in your life increase in value, many thousands of times over.

Applied Knowledge will become Great Wealth, Health and Relationships

All the self-education you gain can never be taken away from you. It is something you can use anywhere in the world. When you have grown your knowledge base and you have become an expert in your field and you cross a border to live in a new country and they ask if you have anything to declare, you can honestly say no. However your mind is filled with knowledge, ideas and potential to create staggering wealth, great health and harmonious success in all areas of your life. There is no other asset that is so freely movable, and of such value.

Combine your Inspiration with the Right Education

Inspiration alone is not going to deliver the success you deserve and desire. Although when you are willing to combine your inspiration with the right education, you will realise outstanding results every time. When you are travelling down the wrong road, great inspiration alone will only speed you along the wrong path. It takes education to keep you on the right path and to turn you around if you are travelling along the wrong one.

When you consistently seek knowledge, you strive to be a little better today than you were yesterday and you sharpen your interest in life and people. You create a solid foundation to have, do or be anything you want. Have the courage to make a real commitment to a life of learning and growth and you have discovered the foundation for inviting unlimited success into your experience.

How do you Learn Best?

You will always gather better and more valuable information from sources you are really interested in. So stay alert and at the guard of the doorway to your mind. Consciously strive to feed your mind all the best knowledge possible. Your future happiness and success is enhanced every time you learn something of value. Something as profound and simple as consistently increasing your knowledge will help you achieve greatness. Should something this profound not be one of your top priorities.

Author: Andrew Horton a Motivational Speaker

http://www.andrewhorton.co.za

Unlock your greatness, turn learning into earning

Motivational Speaker

Unlock your greatness and know that even when the prize you are seeking seems out of reach or you may be facing challenges that seem insurmountable, you have what it takes to triumph. Light a candle in your mind and allow yourself to look inside, discover your incredible level of resolve and ability to overcome anything that may come your way. Calm your mind and believe it, trust yourself and you will achieve it. Look inside and you will discover someone that is filled with possibility and when you learn to trust, listen, believe and to take inspired action, nothing can stop you.

It is time to develop a sense of humour and to stop taking your life so seriously. See life as something that is to be enjoyed and allow yourself to laugh a little. Enjoy your current circumstances, see them as an integral part of your journey, see any challenge as only fleeting and give yourself permission to enjoy every moment of your day. This small shift is incredibly refreshing and allows you to turn any circumstances or event into something positive and manageable.

Motivational Speaker

Commit to a lifelong strategy of never ending growth and improvement. As you become a lifelong learner, you will gradually grow into a substantial earner. Strive to wake up every day, just a little wiser and more skilled than you were the day before. This commitment to on-going and never ending improvement, will allow you to grow into the person that you need to be to deserve the success that you desire.

Create a learning strategy

·         Schedule learning into your itinerary, measure and review the type and quality of learning you achieve every day. As you know whatever gets measured gets done.

·         Break your year back into four 90 day segments.

·         Choose an area that you want to improve and focus all your energy on acquiring only that knowledge or skill, during that 90 day cycle. This level of focus allow you to grow your knowledge in a specific area, exponentially during each 90 day cycle.

·         Select 3 books, 5 audio books and attend one seminar, during each 90 day cycle. All of these must be focused on the area you wish to improve.

·         Schedule time into your day to read the 3 books, listen to the audio books during your commute to and from work every day and schedule the seminar into your itinerary.

·         Re-read the books as many times as possible, during the 90 days, writing in the margins and  highlighting all the important concepts. Pull the three most important concepts out of each book.

·         Listen to the audio books, as many times as possible, during the 90 day cycle.  On arriving at the office in the morning or on arrival at home, write down the most important points you can remember.  Pull the three most important concepts out of each audio.

·          Consolidate all the points you have pulled from each book and audio book during each 90 day cycle. Refine these down to three super concepts and then build a strategy to introduce these into your life. This strategy will see you actually apply the knowledge you have learnt into your life.

Motivational Speaker

Your sense of humour, commitment to on-going learning, focus on one area of growth at a time and willingness to strive to keep improving, is of little value unless you introduce the concept below into your life. This concept is a dirty four letter word that has probably kept you from realising your potential until now. Success is also very often not attained because it is disguised by this word. This dirty four letter word, I want to introduce to you, is “WORK”. No matter how much skill, ability, knowledge or how massive your sense of humour may be, you will remain trapped in a life you hate, until you commit to take consistent daily action. Unless you develop a good work ethic and do what is required every day, something amazing will happen, NOTHING!!!

Introduce these simple concepts into your life today and the way the next five years unfold, will astound you and everyone around you.

Author: Andrew Horton Motivational Speaker

http://www.andrewhorton.co.za

Set Yourself Free and Fly on the Wings of your Potential

Set Yourself Free and Fly on the Wings of your Potential

A Motivational Speaker

You possess an incredible amount of potential and can achieve almost anything if you have the right amount of inspiration and it is something you really want to achieve. The way to turn your dreams into your reality is to explore the outcomes or goals you are trying to achieve and then to measure them against the model for sustainable long term success detailed below:

1)      Is the outcome or goal aligned with your definition of success?

2)      Is achieving this outcome really important to you?

3)      Identify and clearly describe the specific reasons why achieving it is important to you.

4)      Make sure that the outcome, you desire, is something you really want. It must not be something society or anyone else thinks is important.

5)      Make the choice to do whatever it takes to acquire the skills or knowledge you need to succeed.

6)      Create a plan, detailing individual daily actions that you will take.

7)      Build measurement criterion into your plan, to allow you to assess the effectiveness of all the actions you will take.

8)      Set time aside to take these actions daily.

9)      Take consistent action daily

10)   Measure your performance daily.

11)    Make any improvements necessary to ensure that you stay on track.

12)   Be patient

13)   Expect challenges

A Motivational Speaker

When you use the above model and you ensure that you follow each step, you virtually guarantee your success every time. The last two steps in the model, namely – have patience and Expect challenges are probably the two most important parts of the model and are the reason most people do not achieve everything they set out to accomplish. Even if you have all the preceding elements in place as described in the model above, you will find achieving long term sustainable success difficult, unless you embrace the concept of having sufficient patience for things to begin to happen. Although we may have our own timetable, things seldom go exactly according to plan and we inevitably encounter challenges along the way. These challenges are not unique to us and our circumstances, they are similar to the challenges that everyone that has achieved the type of success we desire, encountered on their path to super achievement. The operative word when on the path to success is to shift your mind away from overwhelm and how am I going to overcome challenges that cross my path, to the mind-set of how high can I  BOUNCE, every time I encounter any challenges. All challenges are merely an opportunity to find new and better ways of doing things, an opportunity to bounce even higher and to achieve even more. To win the game of life you need to expect challenges, welcome them and then look for ways to bounce even higher after learning from them and discovering the opportunities that may be hidden within each challenge. Never allow challenges to cause you to collapse in a heap, look at every challenge as a way to learn something new, and find better ways of doing things. Always look at every challenge as an opportunity to grow and a way for you to come back better than you were before, better equipped to achieve even greater things in the future.

When you make the shift in the way you view challenges and you no longer allow them to overwhelm you, but you see them as inevitable and an integral part of the success process, you empower yourself to bounce higher after encountering, learning from and overcoming each challenge. When you encounter any of the inevitable challenges on your path to super achievement, you will go through four phases on your path to bouncing back, learning from and overcoming any challenge.

A Motivational Speaker

1)      Encounter the challenge

2)      Feel overwhelmed by the challenge

3)      You explore the challenge looking for opportunities, hidden within the challenge.

4)      You bounce back higher and more determined than ever.

Encountering the challenge

Challenges are inevitable and are an integral part of any success process. Any challenge you may encounter is not unique to you and your circumstances. I am sure that the all the people that traveled a similar path to discover their success, that you are traveling, encountered similar challenges and setbacks on their way to success. The reason they achieved the level of success they have is not because they had a path, without any challenge. They most certainly did encounter similar challenges, they just chose to bounce after each challenge that they encountered, learn the lesson offered and become more. Always remember that falling and encountering challenges on your path to super achievement is inevitable, choosing to give up and fail is always a choice. There is a massive difference between falling and failing. You only fail when you give up and are no longer trying.

Overwhelm

When we encounter any challenges we feel overwhelmed and our identity is bent out of shape. Who you thought you were is morphed and put to the test. This is where you get to choose to allow any challenge to overwhelm you or you get to choose to bounce. This is the moment that you get to earn the lesson offered by the challenge, the moment you decide to learn all you can from it and the moment you must search for the fight needed to become something you may never have driven yourself to become, had you not encountered the challenge. The pain the challenge is causing is the energetic force you must use to bounce in the opposite and positive direction.

Uncover Opportunities hidden within each challenge

As you begin to bounce back, you realise that who you are is most certainly never defined by any challenge you may encounter. Who you are is most certainly defined by how you choose to respond to any challenge and how you choose to rebound and bounce back; discovering many new opportunities that may have remained hidden from you had you not encountered the challenge. This is the time to take your eyes off the challenge and to once again focus on where you are going.

Bounce Back – Higher than before

This is the time for you to enjoy the bounce and to find yourself in a better position than before you encountered the challenge. My experience has shown me that, it is most often, the very challenges that we encounter on our path to success, that shape and mould us into the type of person; we need to be to attract the success we desire. Make the shift today and see every challenge that crosses your path as an opportunity to grow and learn. The challenges do not go away, but the level of stress we feel and what we can do with every challenge become s a potential opportunity and not a reason to give up. See every challenge as an opportunity to bounce. Every time you encounter a challenge in the future and I am certain that you will encounter many, see them as an opportunity to take yourself to new heights of achievement.

Author: Andrew Horton A Motivational Speaker

http://www.andrewhorton.co.za