How to Make 2018 Your Best Year Ever!

How to Make 2018........................ Your Best Year Ever!

I can’t believe that 2017 is almost over. It has been a whole year of “New’s” for me:

a new country,
a new business,
a new home,
new friends,
new connections,
new experiences…..

Certainly disruptive and painful getting to this point, but as I always say:

‘On the other side of diversity is growth’

And 2017 has been an amazing growth experience both for myself and for all of my family!

The power of goals

There’s no doubt that a key reason why I am living in Sydney today, doing work that is completely aligned to my purpose and effectively ‘living my dream’ is because I learnt at a very early age about the power of goals.

I remember the day back in 1999, sitting at my desk, unsure of which path to take. I was at the time a marketing executive, working out whether or not to take a job in a new tech startup. I started to write in my notebook and before I knew it my inner thoughts were coming out on the paper, and they just kept pouring out. I couldn’t have stopped if I tried.

That was the start of a goal-setting habit that has continued for nearly 20 years.

I’ve certainly become better at it over time, over the years taking courses and training to be a life-coach and then a health coach and spending hundreds of hours doing extensive reading and researching on the best success habits, which has given me access to a huge range of tools and resources that enable me to help hundreds, if not thousands of people, via my coaching practises, books and training courses.

But the fundamentals of the exercise that started in 1999 have remained the same.

Goal setting has given my life focus and, looking back, all of the goals that I had originally set have now been achieved, and others too that I have set since have also come to pass. Each and every one of my goals, and I haven’t stopped yet. I routinely set new, more ambitious goals every year and review them at least every quarter to ensure that I am on track. This is the secret to my success.

Over the years, I have learnt many things, including the fact that success doesn’t only come from achieving the goals. I have often found that my biggest growth came from the times when ‘bad’ things have happened.

A growth mindset

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about Mindset and it’s correlation with success, very much inspired by the work of Carol Dweck, the world-renowned Stanford University psychologist.

Carol proposed that everything in your life comes down to your mindset and there are only two types – Fixed and Growth. Whereas the former is underpinned by a belief that your abilities are fixed by your upbringing or genetics, a Growth mindset supports the belief that your abilities are the starting point from which to expand and develop through effort, perseverance and practise.

Four tips to set inspiring goals

As we hurtle towards the end of the year, you’re no doubt busily preparing for the many activities that need to be completed before you can head off for a well-deserved holiday break.

Make some time, though, when you’re away to create some inspiring goals for the next chapter of your life. I’m not talking about new years’ resolutions, but deep, solid intentions for the year. As Napoleon Hill once said: ‘Goals are Dreams with Deadlines’.

To give yourself the best chance of setting goals that inspire you, follow these four tips:

Set realistic goals – if the goals are too challenging, they can hold you back. With coaching clients, I often start by setting very low-bar short-term goals as getting started can be the hardest part of the whole process. Once you hit your first milestone, there may well be another 25 to go, but you’re on your way, having already achieved something and more importantly, having achieved a state of momentum. As Newton’s first law (or ‘The Law of Inertia’) states:

An object at rest will remain at rest unless acted on by an unbalanced force. An object in motion continues in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.

The trick is to just get started!

Be flexible and values-driven. If you’re passionate about your goal and it’s a dream of yours to achieve it, you’ll be helped by what psychologists call ‘intrinsic’ motivation. You don’t need anyone to motivate you, you’re inspired and motivated for some greater purpose, what Simon Sinek has popularly labelled ‘your Why’. One way to get to this big Why is to ask 4 little whys? For example, why do you want to lose weight? The first why might be to fit into those old black, pants that you liked, but ask another why and keep asking until you get to the true reason why you must achieve the goal. Digging deeper may well get to a reason like ‘I want to live long enough to get to know my grandchildren’, which, I’m sure you’ll agree is a lot more motivating than being able to fit into a particular garment.
Celebrate often. As I write these words, I can’t admit to always being good at celebrating along the journey, but as I’ve got older I have learnt that this ‘make-believe’ notion I had that I’d wait until everything was perfect before celebrating was a big waste of celebrations! Life is never perfect, there’s always going to be someone or something that will come along and take your positive emotional energy away. So don’t delay, what can you and your team celebrate today, which will help you on your road to your even bigger goals?
What’s stopping you? Now be clear, what is likely to stop you from achieving your goal? Yes, money, time, other people….. but I often find that the real reason people don’t attempt their goals is because of a lack of self-belief and confidence. Well, the best way to get that belief is to get to work. There is no better way to build confidence than to have a set of achievements behind you. So be clear what’s likely to get in your way and make sure that you, as a priority, get out of your own way first!

My special, totally free, gift to you....

As a gift to you, the tool I used to create the life of my dreams was called the Yellow Book, simply because the very first goals list I wrote was in a yellow notebook! Today, what seems like a million years, and a number of evolutions later, I call it ‘A Better Life’.

A Better Life is a practical blueprint that gives you everything you need to make your life extraordinary. It takes you through, step by step, a tried and tested methodology to design your life, from the ground up, the way you would want it to be. Once designed, it tells you the best way to make your greatest dreams come to pass. And all by doing really easy, straightforward exercises and daily habits.

20-years in the making, with a tried-and-tested results-driven methodology, ‘A Better Life’ was designed to enable you to ask and answer some of the questions required to achieve the things in your life that I know you can achieve. You may not even know yet what you truly want in life, let alone how to get them, so the first step is to get clear on what you really want to achieve in your life. Your life is so special, you really want to get the very most you can from it. You deserve the very best that life has to offer. The secrets to how to get there are to be found in the pages of this book.

It’s my gift to you to thank you for being a reader of my blog. I want you to experience the joys and accomplishments that I have been blessed to have achieved, and am looking to achieve in the future. It is completely free to first 50 people to download it today: https://getrawenergy.co/6-steps-to-a-better-life/

To your success,

Lawrence