Make It Happen

Goal Getting

It was early March and as leaden skies filled the air for yet another month my heart sank further when I realised that my New Year Resolutions had not passed first base. Shame on me! Reading my Myers-Briggs profile (incidentally you can do one at www.personalitytype.com) ENFPs like me are supposed to be brilliant at self-motivation. We are the archetypal Inspirers of the world! Yet, we also dislike what we consider to be mundane detail (now where did I put the hoover?). And we procrastinate.

So I set myself the task of reading up about motivation and procrastination and why we fail to reach our goals. ‘Grow Your Own Carrot’ by Bob Griffiths and Chris Kaday is wonderful and there I learned that I may lack motivation because we of a hidden agenda.

I have several goals right now, several Big Hairy Audacious Goals or BEHAGS as Nigel Risner (www.nigelrisner.com) calls them. But for now, let’s talk about my Monthly Inspirer Ezine.

When I first started the ezine 36 issues ago I decided to keep it simple and to manage it all myself: the database, the content and sending it out. But the list grew. The ezine grew. My needs grew and now I’m left with a whopping great list of subscribers and a ton of content that has become not only unwieldy but still looks the work of an amateur. Do I want to look like an amateur? Of course not. So why have I done nothing about whizzing up my ezine. Instead I do the urgent jobs. The ones that pay. And check my email. And check my email again. Procrastinate, moi?

So, going back to the carrot book, what was I afraid of? Success maybe? Having to set a standard and maintain it? Or having to face all that nasty techie stuff I so detest?

Or was I procrastinating simply because I could? No-one was nagging me to do my ezine. Not one of you lovely subscribers told me that my newsletter was a poor reflection of my talent. No, you subscribers just keep on praising me for my insight and my talent. I guess you were just too polite to say what you were thinking. But I knew deep down that something had to be done.

I read Shad Helmsetters’s book ‘What To Say When You Talk to Yourself’ after Inspirer Subscriber Chrissy Sawyer told me how she used the suggested tools and dropped two dress sizes. Learning about the power of affirmations, I realised I may have to repeat positive present-tense phrases, such as’ I am an Ezine Queen’ (let me recommend the real ezine queen, Alexandria Brown on www.ezinequeen.com) and ‘I have a powerful database’.

So, armed with what I had learned and what I knew already but never did, this is what happened:

1. I found four other people who also had goals they were not achieving (funny that these were the first and only four I approached).
2. We agreed to meet fortnightly to discuss our goals and support each other.
3. We agreed to commit to making time for our goals.
4. We agreed to create a visual representation of our goals (most of us have made dreamboards – and if you want to read about them you can find my Dream it to Create it article here
5. We agreed to break our task down into manageable chunks and to work towards those achievable goals between meetings.
6. We agreed to do anything it took to make our goals come true, which included feeling complete idiots as we repeated our affirmations 20 times a day.

So, did it work? Well, it is early days. Just three weeks and two meetings in, in fact. But I have already discovered that simply by getting up one hour earlier to work on my goals I have found an impressive 15 ‘spare’ hours and today, I was so excited at the prospect of getting somewhere that I added another six hours to the total. I have also delegated the yukky detail to my assistant Rebecca. Why didn’t I think of that before? Now that is a weight off my mind!

Meanwhile, I am committed to my goals and committed to the group. This time I will make it work. And now I have told YOU about my goal too and I’d feel pretty stupid if I let you down too, wouldn’t I?

Do yourself a favour, and see if you can find a way to get your goals too.

Believe in blue sky
Jo Parfitt