I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about goals and the practice of goal visualization.
A few years ago, a friend of mine purchased Tom Venuto’s Burn the Fat Feed the Muscle eBook and I read it when she wasn’t looking. In reality, she never got around to doing the whole diet and exercise thing and I inherited the eBook.
The very first chapter in that book was How to Set Powerful, Compelling Goals That Will Propel You Forward and Charge You Up With Unstoppable Motivation. I’ll admit it, I blew that chapter off the first time. Not completely, I half-assed it. I did write goals but they weren’t very good and I never completed the process of reviewing my goals daily, visualizing them or anything else. I wasn’t successful in what I wanted to do either. Doh!
The strangest secret in the world is that you become what you think about.” – Earl Nightingale
Have you read the book or seen the movie “The Secret”? Even Paris Hilton is reading it. /:)
“If you can conceive of a goal, and believe in that goal, you will achieve that goal.” – Napoleon Hill in Think and Grow Rich
None of this stuff is a secret. People have been writing about our sub-conscience, our mental computer, our incredibly literal dumb auto-pilot for years.
“If you have a strong enough why you can bear almost any how.” – Fredrich Nietzsche 1844 – 1900
Tom references Psycho Cybernetics, a book that was written quite a few years ago (1960) by Dr. Maxwell Maltz – he was 61 at the time. In that book, Dr. Maltz described the human brain and nervous system as a “perfect goal-striving servo-mechanism.”
“For imagination sets the goal picture which our automatic mechanism works on. We act, or fail to act, not because of will, as is so commonly believed, but because of imagination.” – Maxwell Maltz
“Our self image, strongly held, essentially determines what we become.” – Maxwell Maltz
Whatever you think, that’s what your goal-striving mechanism goes for. If you don’t provide positive goals and continue to think about them, your sub-conscious will direct you to whatever you thought about last or revert to habits, good or bad. It will chase even negative goals.
- I’m fat and will never be fit
- I haven’t worked hard enough for a raise
- Nothing good ever happens to me
- I’ll never make $100,000 a year
- I hate running on the treadmill
- I can’t …..
ANYWAY, I decided to go back to step 1 and rewrite my goals and actually apply the process, faithfully this time.
“Remember you will not always win. Some days, the most resourceful individual will taste defeat. But there is, in this case, always tomorrow – after you have done your best to achieve success today.” Maxwell Maltz
I’m definitely a tekkie so I went looking for a tekkie way of handling my goals (a 3×5 card in your pocket is really all it takes).
NOT TREKKIE! – I once had a female co-worker that dressed as a Ferengi and got her arm broken by a hit and run driver on the way to a Star Trek Convention in Washington DC. Wonder what was going through that guy’s head – ALIEN! w/a scream or Dayyyyum, there are some ugly hos in DC!
Anyway, I digress. I went looking for some open source (read free) goal keeping software on the Internet and much to my surprise, I found that Goal Genie is now FREE (I love free BTW). Tom Venuto recommended it in his book so I decided to download and install it. It’s a simple program. It’s the tutorials, the bonus documents, and process that go with it that are worth a whole lot more than what they are charging for it now… FREE! (did I mention that I love free?).
I installed a copy of Goal Genie on my work and home PCs. Maybe I’ll list some of my goals on here as I develop them. I’ll definitely be writing more about Goal Genie as I continue this process.
