A lot of people set goals that aren’t strong enough, personal enough or motivating enough to create real passion. It is important to keep writing and adding to your dream list because as you write more and more you gradually unlock the layers and release your true passion.

Once you get your list together start to organise it into dreams that could take a little time with few resources and people up to dreams that may take a long time and require more resources, training, and people etc. The more you rely on other resources and people the less control you begin to have. You might mark them as being A, B or C or you might use colours to distinguish easiest to hardest goals.

It is important to make your first goals very easy. This way you can build trust in yourself to set and achieve goals. So many people start the goals process and don’t finish it. This breaks trust with yourself in your ability to achieve goals. It is so important to follow through, not only to achieve your goals but to build trust with yourself so you can aim higher.

It is great to have lofty and exciting goals but limiting beliefs in yourself can sabotage your efforts to achieve your goals. Some people need to take time to grow into their shoes so to speak. Sometimes you need to take lots of incremental steps on the way to your ultimate goal so you can acclimatise to your success.

 You see this happen in weight loss all the time. Someone loses 20kg and starts to feel good about themselves only to put it all back on over a period of time. Or the person that wins the lottery and is even poorer a year later.

[btx_quote author=”– Allan Waddell” style=”border” position=”center”]Attitudes drive behaviour, behaviour drives actions and actions lead to results.[/btx_quote]

In my teens, I always felt smaller than my friends. When I played football I was even ashamed of being skinny. My friends seemed so much bigger and more equipped to deal with the roughness of football.  I remember finishing a training session once and the coach wanted us to take our shirts off and leave them there. This meant I had to go through the whole school to get to my locker. Instantly I became anxious and ran as fast as I could. In-fact I had no reason to be concerned as I was very fit playing football, rowing and doing weight training but my mind was focusing the wrong way. My view of myself was not very confident. My over-riding attitude was that I need to be bigger, add to this a childhood with domestic violence then you have someone who in their core needs to be bigger for self-protection.

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that for me, this would have acted as a limiting belief when it came to eating and it is true this contributed to a yoyo weight issue. Of course, there may be other factors but this definitely sits somewhere in my belief system. This belief system would eventually attack my goals programme at the deepest level even though I had a burning desire to change.

It is important to understand when you are setting goals that you must move beyond just changing what you do to get better results but more importantly how you think.