Goal Girl’s Blog

The Third Installment of Five: Time-honored Tips to Boost Your Goal Chasing Success.

Goals can be worded as either ‘avoidance goals’ or ‘approach goals’. I can set my goal as “get my projects completed on time to avoid being fired.” or “get my projects completed so that I have time to work on my proposal which might get me a huge bonus or promotion.” Consistently formulating your goals as avoidance rather than approach goals has a negative impact on your motivation to reach said goals.

Timothy Pychyl, an associate professor of psychology at Carleton University in Ottawa Canada says that tipping the scale in favor of avoidance goals relates to less satisfaction with progress on personal goals and feeling less competent in pursuing your goals.

Ergo, by couching your goals in positive terms, you give your motivation and self-esteem a little boost. Looking great on the beach is a better motivator for most people seeking to lose weight than “avoiding a heart attack,” even if the latter is less superficial and vain than the first.

The First Installment of Five: Time-honored Tips to Boost Your Goal Chasing Success.

Stop swimming against the tide! Yes, there are significant advantages to swimming against the tide. Being the one fish swimming left when the rest of the school is swimming right can get you noticed. Being the best at doing something a little different and/or more difficult than the rest of the herd can result in great rewards. For an excellent treatment of this, read Seth Godin’s “The Dip”.

In some situations though, finding a school of fish going the direction you want to go can also reap benefits. This is especially true at the beginning of your quest when you are in more of a student mode than a teaching mode. Associating yourself somehow with some big fish who’re going where you are going (or have already been there) and know the way can greatly flatten the learning curve. Sometimes the collective energy of a group of like-minded-people can contribute to your own passion (just be careful that you are only borrowing their passion and knowledge, don’t let the herd make decisions for you).

How do you find a “big fish”? First of all, go where they go. Twitter is a great place for this. Do a Twitter search to find out who is talking about your topic of interest. Then search on that person to see who is talking about them. If someone is being retweeted or discussed on a frequent basis, then a lot of folks are finding value in what they are saying. Unfortunately, not everyone you admire in the real world has mastered Twitter. I’ve had to unfollow a couple of ‘real world’ gurus whose books and lectures I loved, because they used bots to spam Twitter and provided nothing of value to me. Not naming names. If you happen to follow them, you’ll see for yourself!

You can also search blogs for people who have authority in your area of interest. Google’s Blog search or the Do-Follow Blog Directory are good places to start. If a blog really addresses topics pertinent to your goal, join the discussion. Make comments that add value. Ask questions.

Often finding someone knowledgeable in your area will also lead you to a group of like-minded people. I liked what Jodie Petals had to say about making Squidoo lenses, so I read more of her lenses and started following her on Twitter. That lead me to Jennifer Ledbetter, aka “PotPieGirl’s” One Week Marketing, a content marketing strategy. Eventually this lead me to join Wealthy Affiliate, which is a great place to pick the brains of good folks like Travis Sagos, Jennifer and Jodie.

Thought you all would like to know that the new Amazon Kindle 2 is due to ship later this month!   Ok, I resisted the first go ’round, but with the increased storage, Amazon paying the cost of wireless connectivity, and better display… I’m putting my order in right after I finish this post…

The last release sold out very quickly and the waiting list was very long, so here’s your chance to pre-order early starting today ($359):

Here is what Amazon says about the new release of it’s Kindle ebook reader:

New Features & Enhancements
Slim & Lightweight: Just over 1/3 inch and 10.2 ounces
Books in under 60 seconds: Get books delivered in less than 60 seconds; no PC required

Improved Display: Reads like real paper; now boasts 16 shades of gray for crisp images and text; even reads well in bright sunlight

Longer Battery Life: 25% longer battery life; read for days without recharging

More Storage: Take your library with you; holds over 1,500 books

Faster Page Turns: 20% faster page turns

Read-to-Me: Text-to-Speech feature means Kindle can read every book, blog, magazine, and newspaper out loud.

No Wireless Bills: No monthly wireless bills, data plans, or commitments. Amazon pays for Kindle’s wireless connectivity so you won’t see a monthly wireless bill.

Large Selection: Over 230,000 books, plus U.S. and international newspapers, magazines and blogs available

Low Book Prices: New York Times Best Sellers and New Releases $9.99, unless marked otherwise

Kaizen is a Japanese concept, of continuous improvement. It encompasses the idea of making changes, monitoring the results, then adjusting accordingly. A good concept to keep in mind on a goal quest. Great things can be achieved through the accumulation of tiny changes. I’m losing a few pounds a week toward the stated goal of fifty pounds… along the way I may adjust my exercise program or my diet, and probably will adjust my mindset many times between here and there.

I didn’t one day decide to become a successful internet marketer, then waved my magic goal stick and became one… I’m learning a little more every day, putting marketing campaigns out there, tweaking them, monitoring them… trying something a little different the next campaign based on what I’ve learned.

I didn’t pull a black belt out of a hat either. I worked very hard at learning the curriculum, teaching my muscles to move in new ways, developing habits of motion, applying power principles, monitoring the result and then adjusting. It took me a little longer than some to earn my black belt, as I took a year off to have a baby, but in all I chipped away a little bit every day for roughly six years before I was ready to test for my black belt.

This is one reason for keeping your goals measurable, i.e. so that you can measure as a starting point, and then periodically measure to see the affects of cumulative change over time.

Inertia.  You may the best at defining goals with laser-like precision, giving them deadlines, and formulating an action plan.  Unless you take the first step toward your goal and keep walking, your chances of achieving your goal are pretty darn slim.  

Why is it so hard to get moving on a goal’s action plan?   Is it the plan?   Too many steps?   Too vague?  Is the connection between the proposed actions and the desired results too iffy?    Or is it the goal?  Do you really have a driving need to reach your goal?   Is the goal something that really motivates you?  Can you see yourself, goal reached or surpassed, and when you do, are you happy?  Maybe your goal needs to be honed, redefined, or in some cases abandoned (if increased effort is not going to bring you any closer to success, and is not going to increase the rewards… why am I doing this?).  For a good discussion on when to do the latter, read Seth Godin’s “The Dip” which you can find here.

As part of my goal to replace at least $2000/month of my income with residual income, I searched around for possible paths.    I found Squidoo.com, a great place to publish sort articles, called lenses, with some good monetization modules… very quick, very easy.   Through Squidoo itself, I came across a *lot* of lenses discussion how to drive traffic to your lenses, improve their rank, bios of “Squid’s” who make a regular income through squidoo.   If one of your goals is to make an online income, I highly recommend anything written by PotPieGirl.   My favorite is “One Week Marketing Action Plan - From PotPieGirl.”  PotPieGirl is offering the first 18 pages of her eBook for free, which by itself is a great value.   This is the marketing plan that I personally use…  It has clear action steps and checklists.  It explains the why of each action.  It’s very well written.

Today I read a good post on a goal setting technique to help make goals more concrete to your subconscious.  Sort of a twist on “fake it ’til you make it.”  I found the post, of all places, on a real estate website.   The article is actually a guest post by Mel Reed.   Mel talks about wording your goals in such a way as to trick the mind into believing that they are a done deal.  When the mind believes you are already successful, a lot of the barriers that come from anticipating the hard work coming on the road to success.   

Mell goes further and says to write your goal down on a card, in past tense, date it with a future date by which you plan to achieve your goal, and sign it.  He further mentions the attributes of a “SMART” goal, specific, measureable, attaintable, relevant, time-specific.   I’ve discussed these (except maybe the point of goals needing to be attainable) in recent articles.

Nebulous goals bring nebulous results.   Defining your goal in solid terms has several advantages:

• Better Visualization: It’s much easier to visualize a dark green Mercedes SL230 convertable with a tan interior than it is to visualize “a better mode of transportation”.
• Having an End Point: If your goal is “lose weight in 2009,” how do you know when to declare victory?   Strictly speaking, when you get a haircut, you’ve lost weight, but I’m sure that’s not what you were going for!
• Ability to Measure and Monitor progress:  If you pose an exact number for your weight loss, you can check your progress as a percentage of the goal.   This is why professional project managers always assign a number to the LOE (level of effort) in a project plan, e.g. 48 hours, as well as an end-point (due-date) as mentioned in the bullet above.

In my last article, I covered a little about defining goals. To summarize, in stating your goals, in order to increase your likelihood of success, it’s important to:

• Include a timeframe for completion of your goal, and
• Be very specific, otherwise, how will you know when you’ve succeeded?

Well, now that we’ve defined the goal, what do we do with that? Let’s take our goal from my last article: “Within twelve months, I want to replace $2000 of my take home pay with residual income so that I can work less.”

First, let’s break this down a bit. Ok, let’s assume that we mean $2000/month (I should stated this in the goal, eh?). So I’ll need $24,000/year in residual income. So sometime within the next 12 months, you’ll need to be generating enough residual income to cover $65.73 per day.

Now, let’s explore some possible ways to earn money outside of our daily grind. There is no shortage of folks trying to sell us some plan for earning big bucks; just watch the idiot box at three in the morning. Surely we can find something among all the garbage that’s worth a closer look. Generally speaking residual income is going to come from two sources. Either royalties on some intellectual property, or some form of franchising, where you sell the rights to your (or someone elses’) system, image, logo, and so on (think MacDonald’s, Amway, etcetera).

At this juncture, I don’t have a ’system’ to sell (maybe I’ll get to that point sometime down the road), but being the nerd that I am, I can produce intellectual capital in the form of articles. I’ve been reading a lot lately about article marketing, specifically, the “BUM Marketing Method” of Travis Sago. Here is a good, brief intro to Bum Marketing. And here is Travis’ site. I’ll be exploring this more over the coming months.

In the mean-time, I’ve written several articles (pages, lenses) on Squidoo to get things rolling:

• Raising a Well-Mannered Dog

• Core Strength: Why, How…

• Living With Polycystic Ovarian Disease

• New Zealand Rules

• Heifer International, A Charity Providing Self-Sufficiency

• Java Me Up, A Cool Little Coffee House In Irving, TX

I have a number of additional articles I’m working on, while I’m learning the Bum Method… I’ll keep y’all updated on how it’s going!