Goal Setting Exercise

This pre- goal setting exercise prepares you for, and is really the beginning of a brainstorming session where you'll outline your dreams and refine your goals.

In a sense, you've already begun this exercise the moment you started to dream of being and having and doing more. But now we'll get into what areas of your life you believe you want to improve.

Here is the exercise:

1. Identify three areas of your life that you believe are not perfect yet. These can be small things, like cooking, or big things, such as your marriage or finances.

As you write them down, realize that in bringing these things to the surface, you're beginning the process of change. Tell yourself "this is changeable and I am the one to change it."

2. As you come up with the three areas, your mind may wander a bit into all kinds of other territory. You might come up with many areas where you might want to improve. That's fine. Write those down too. We'll sort it all out in the next exercise.

Create as a big a list as you want, but for this exercise, don't write for more than one minute. We just want to see what comes to you off the top of your head.

3. In your expanded list, which of the three areas are most important to you? For those three areas, think about how they could be improved.

For each area, write down the following:

In a perfect world, this area of my life would look like this_____________ and fill in the blank.

So as an example, let's say that you chose cooking as an area for improvement. Pretty simple, right?

Unless you're an accomplished cook, and a speedy one at that (as well as a speedy shopper), it can be pretty daunting to come up with creative healthy meals for a family day-in and day-out. And, if your kids are like most kids, they're probably not so thrilled with the menu sometimes.

Sometimes it's easier just to get McDonald's and be done with it. If you're a single parent, or just plain single, sometimes McDonald's seems like the least painful option as well.

In many cases, while it may not be McDonald's, you end up spending too much money for not enough quality, for the sake of some convenience. But, it's not ideal and almost any solution seems to produce some level of stress.

So, what you really want is to provide a variety of good tasting and creative meal choices for you and/or your family. What you're actually saying is that you want: tasty food, better health, more time for yourself and/or your family, less expense, more value, and so on.

Ultimately, you want less stress and the peace of mind of knowing that you're giving yourself and your family the best you can give.

So, as you can see, this pre- goal setting exercise helps to uncover your real desires... the desire(s) behind the desire.

4. Lastly, write down why you have to change these areas of your life. Write down how your life will change once you've improved things. Write down what your ideal situation would look like and how it feels.

For our cooking example, you've uncovered some of the underlying reasons. Push further and find more.

Ask... if I don't change this situation with our meals, what will the future look like? What will that cost me? Then ask, if I do change this, what will it look like and how will I feel?

Perhaps you'd see yourself learning how to cook healthy meals better and faster. Envision yourself learning how to cook and providing the perfect meals for yourself and your family.

Or maybe you visualize your own personal chef making your meals. You've freed up hours of your time (which you can now devote to something else) and your family is eating delicious, healthy meals.

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