Think about it, anything you want to accomplish, to do, any place you want to go, anything you want to read, etc., is a goal.

A great quote said I heard once says: "A goal not written down is a wish."

That's all fine and good, but writing down something like: "I want to be the world's best hopscotch player." is pretty vague. It's a start at least, but where do you go from there?

I'm glad you asked because I'm going to tell you.

Once you have an idea for something you want to do and have written it down you need to need to figure some other things out. They follow the acronym: SMARTY. Real, challenging, goals need to be the following:

• Specific (What exactly is it that you want?)
• Meaningful (Why is this important?)
• Achievable (If you want the moon, you're going to need to build up to it)
• Time Bound (You need a reasonable but challenging time frame to hold yourself to)
• Yours (Is this something you really want?)

So once you've decided on something and run it through your head and listed why things are important and why the goal is yours, where do you go from there?

Well it's time to start on an action plan, what are you going to do to achieve your goals?

Be specific, If my goal was: "After 30 days I want to be able to do 100 push-ups without stopping." The things I would need to do would probably be along the lines of:

• Take a baseline of where I'm at presently
• Everyday do as many push-ups as I can at one time
• Once I can't do anymore push-ups, do at least 10 negatives (letting myself down slowly)
• Re-Assess where I'm at every week

That seems to be a specific list of actions to take. I even gave myself places to re-assess where I'm at, that way I can see just how far along I am.

Which brings me to another important part of achieving big things, you need to have places to check your progress and see how far along you are. That way you can see if you need to push yourself a little harder or maybe you'll come to the realization that your timetable needs to be changed to allow for unforeseen requirements to meet the goal.

In my example goal I would would say the first milestone would be the day I start, the things I would need to have achieved that day would be to do a baseline set of push-ups and record the results. From there I could extrapolate the needed increases in the number of push-ups I would need to be able to do at the end of every week. Say, when I started I was able to 27 push-ups. So I would need to increase that number by 73 at the end of thirty days. That rounds out to a little over an 18 push-up increase every week. So at the end of the first week my milestone could be to be able to do: 45 push ups. If I don't quite reach it (or not get anywhere near it) I could stop and evaluate where I'm at. If I didn't quite hit the milestone on the first week, I'd probably just brush it off and push harder the second week. If I didn't make the second milestone then I'd look a the goal and reassess whether it was achievable in the month time frame I set.

At that point, depending on how far from the 2nd milestone I was I might keep pushing or I might push the finish line back a week and see what happens. There may also be other factors to take into account, perhaps I might see that my nutrition isn't up where it could be and I might need adjust things there. Then *BAM* suddenly I'd be on  track.

If you don't hit your original target date, but do follow through and hit your goal, are you a failure? Well it might depend on what the goal was, but 99.9% of the time it still makes you a success in my book.

Now I did skip the emotional importance of this goal, so lets cover that.

Why on earth would I want to be able to do 100 push-ups without stopping? In my case, the muscular endurance would be great. There would also be an increase in strength. That and it would be cool to be able to do well beyond the normal amount of push-ups that the average male can do (I think it's 23). It would also mean I was well past prepared for the next Black Belt test I take, well at least that portion of the test.

Being able to look at something to evoke the feeling that you will have when you look back knowing you completed your goal is crucial. It will keep you motivated to keep going toward your goal until you ultimately accomplish it.

So now that we've talked about how to set a goal that you'll follow through with, I want to present a little form that I've been working on. It will allow you to give a basic description of your goal and describe what the goal with do for your life as well as what you will feel like when you accomplish it. There is a section to lay out a basic action plan and a section for milestones and dates. For the finishing touch, I set it up so that when you go to print the output it hides the data entry portion.

If you go to: http://www.hitchhiketheuniverse.net/utilities/goal_setting.php you can use the form. I'll have a version up that you can download and edit in a word document soon.

Until then, everyone enjoy!

P.S. If you guys have ideas for improvements, let me know and I'll see what I can do!

It is amazing how much a change of setting can help clear your mind. I have nothing to worry about right now. Talking to my mom she helped me see where I've pulled myself into a spiral of worry. I keep telling myself to relax but I never seem to really be able to. As my mom pointed out, I worry about how I'm relaxing.  Strange when I think about it, "Why are American's so violent about being non-violent?" -Unknown (To me anyway, I'l dig it up from In Search of the Warrior Spirit later).

I've been thinking on what I want to do during the upcoming new year. I've come up with becoming more disciplined, being more relaxed, and improving my outlook on life.

The big thing on my agenda is to start my programming classes by the beginning of next school year. The other really big thing I'd like to do is to take my Martial Arts training to the next level, I feel like I just kind of floated into my 2nd Degree. I did put some work and effort into getting it. I gave it my all while I was testing, but I could have done a much better job getting ready for the test. I've got at least a couple years to work up to 3rd Degree.

The biggest area I've been working on is balance, a couple things I learned from Tai Chi is to put your mind into your feet and into your center, as well as to move from your center. I'm amazed at the difference I feel in movement and stability.

Well everyone make it a great one and happy holidays!

Some lessons learned this week: Be active in how you spend your time and have specific goals. I put those lessons into play today, by making a to do list. I ended up giving myself a dozen tasks to do and I've completed all but two so far. (This post is one of them so when I'm done here ) For a while I've had a negative association with to do lists. That happened after listening to the program: Focus by Stephen Covey. I did like what they had with priorities and understanding what is really important. As far as budgeting my time goes, I've started devising a method to keep track of all the things I have to do, as well as prioritize them and to make sure that I get a lot of things done from various areas of my life.

I'm thinking that I'll break my life down into areas such as: School, Work, Homework, Teaching, MA Practice, House Cleaning, and Play. With categories like that in mind then I can budget my day around what needs to be done. Such as having school for an hour on Monday. Then figuring out time for Homework, which I can budget to a specific block, say something like 10:30 - 12:30. Then repeat for other things that need to be done. The priorities would come into play like: 1st Priority: School, 2nd Martial Arts, 3rd Work, 4th House Keeping, etc. The priorities will vary from day to day. As on day like today, both Play and House Keeping are about the same priority level. While Homework comes after those.

Something else I've been doing this week is spending time listening to myself. In my last post I was asking for help with finding Durable Fulfillment, I still haven't found it by any means. But thanks to a comment from Nathan, I've been stopping and listening to myself and to life. It's been interesting. I'll write more about that as I have more experience with it

Alright, well I'm going to call it a night and just spend some time relaxing in my freshly cleaned and reorganized room. It is interesting to not how much of an effect the arrangement of space can have on your mood. Or at least the cleanliness of space. Actually there was a quote I gave to Mr. Smith earlier this week when he was talking about doing a deep clean on his office at home. I got it in an Insight of the Day e-mail: "Every mess in your life is an obstacle to abundance." It really seemed to hit home for him. My own experience of having my closets pretty well organized, my bed made, and I rearranged the space in my bedroom so it seems a lot more functional/inviting. Essentially, I've created a space I can retreat to and shut a lot of noise from life out of. Now I'm realizing I need some more things to hang on my walls, there's a lot of empty space that can be used for inspiration/soothing things

Everyone have a good night, I'll post a video tomorrow.

Make it a great one!