|
Desire
Whenever you set goals, it is important that you
are
energized about them. Setting aggressive financial goals
that
are not really important to you and do not really
matter to your
overall life plan is a waste of time. Just
because your friend wants
to own an apartment complex,
doesn’t mean it is the right goal for
you. On the other hand,
you might have some financial goals that you
do not particularly
care for, but that are critical to your overall
financial success.
For these areas, you need a plan to “create”
desire around the
activities you will need to complete. This can be
done by
attaching consequences and rewards to every goal that you
set.
Focus
You can have all the desire in the world, but if you do
not focus
your efforts, you will still be unsuccessful overall. You
have to be
very specific about what you want to achieve
before you
can really begin to see significant
progress on your goals. For
example, a goal
of “I want to be wealthy” is not very specific
and
not very helpful. What does it mean to
be “wealthy” – to some
people, this means
they have to become debt free, but to other
people who are already debt free, it means to
have enough passive
income to cover their monthly expenses.
A more focused goal would be
something like: “I want to pay off
two credit cards in the next 90
days.” Now that is specific and focused. |
|
|
|
Accountability
Once you have desire and
focus, you need to create an environment that will keep you honest
about achieving your goals. This is where accountability comes in –
it is very easy to say that you are going to do something if there
is nobody to challenge you when you do not do it, but when you know
that you have to give a report of your progress, something in your
nature usually kicks in and makes you execute. One of the key
elements that the Set-4-Life! Success System creates around you is a
mindset of accountability – you must have someone that you have to
“answer to” for your financial progress.
Consistency
With your accountability structure in place to make sure that your
desire and focus lead to success, the only thing left for you to do
is execute – to get the things done. I have found that the best way
to execute on very aggressive goals is to break them down into
smaller parts that you can do every day and every week for the
timeframe of your goal. Rather than keeping your goal at: “I am
cleaning up my credit in 90 days” you break it down a little further
and set the goal: “I am writing 3 letters a week to my creditors to
clear up items on my credit.” The key to creating consistency is
having a pre-planned, written strategy that you can refer to often. |
|
|
