How many times have you heard that you need goals in order to achieve huge success, wealth and all of that good stuff?  Probably a ton I’m sure, but guess what?  You haven’t been giving the full story on goals.  And if you have, you probably didn’t follow through with the full story.

You see, your goals don’t mean nothing when they’re just listed out on a piece of paper one after the other randomly.  The problem is that these aren’t goals; these are just wishes and aspirations.  Wishes and aspirations are good in their own sense, and are the predecessors to true goals, but they’re not goals.

What you’ve been told a million times is that goals must be written down for you to achieve them.  But like I stated above, a written goal is just a wish of something that you want on a piece of paper.

So when does a goal become a true goal?

A written goal should be accompanied by some very crucial information for it to mean squat. Here’s what you need for your goals to actually be more than just a fancy written wish:

1)    Written…Yes it does HAVE to be written.  This is true because if not written it’s just a fancy thought, which is even less effective than a fancy written wish. ?

2)     Specific… Lofty general goals are better than no goal at all, but a goal like “I want to make more money” compared to… “I want to have $550,000 in savings and a spendable income of $30,000 a month” is much more specific and gives your mind a laser fine target to shoot for.

3)    Deadline… If you don’t set a deadline for your goal to be achieved by you’ll never commit on reaching it. You’ll flounder around it, with it hanging over your head, but never really coming to fruition.

4)    Plan of Action… Here’s where the proverbial rubber meets the road my friend.  So far the fancy wish has matured into a goal, and now it’s time for the goal to turn into a true PLAN!  This is your blue-print, your map, your personal instructions…you get the picture.   Now the best way to do this is to figure out what you want and work backwards from there.  Let’s say you want $30,000 a month income.  Well, that’s $1000 a day, so how are you going to start making $1000 a day.

To make your goal even more achievable you’ll want to break this down into a timeline and break the big goal into smaller goals.  Let’s face it, to make $30,000 a month from zero a month isn’t going to likely happen the first month.  So you need to figure out a reasonable deadline as stated above, and then create smaller milestone goals to reach on your way there.  Maybe get to $1000 a month, then $5000, next $10,000 etc.  You get the idea.  Now you’ve got the basis of a plan, but now you need to include into your plan…

5)    Probable obstacles and solutions for them.  You’re definitely going to hit obstacles on your journey so you want to try to foresee those obstacles as much as possible and develop strategies to overcome them along the way.  One way you’ll be able to do that is by…

6)    Figuring Out the People that Will Help You Reach Your Goals…as stated in my post about relationships, this is what makes the world go round.  You’ll need people in your life who can help you reach your goals, so you may as well strategically seek them out, and begin to build and cultivate those relationships with them in the way that I spell it out in the article I refer to above regarding relationships.

So as you can see, just writing down a laundry list of things that you want in life on a piece of paper doesn’t necessarily qualify them as goals.  And if you’ve done that, and have been wondering why your goals are becoming reality, then you may want to reassess and turn your wishes into true goals, and your goals into a true plan of action.