Goal Girl’s Blog

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.

Sometimes a goal isn’t as attractive in the close-up view…

From a very early age, I wanted to be a veterinarian.    I had a small menagerie at home, a closet full of reptiles (the closet was set up with shelves of aquaria with full-spectrum light, electric rocks for heating, etcetera), cats, birds, squirrels…  I hovered around the vet’s office down the block, making a total pest of myself.    By the time I was twelve, I had catalogs from about 15 different veterinary schools, and I had planned my highschool and college curriculum around the requirements of my favorites.

At thirteen, I started volunteering at the Lafayette Zoological Park (now the Virginia Zoological Park), still wanting to be a vet.   When “Tookie” the zoo’s vet-on-call came on campus, I followed him around like a lost puppy.   I fetched and carried during necropsies.  I read everything I could get my hands on.  I was one focused kid.   With a full schedule of classes, a 120-house paper route, editorial responsibilities on the school newspaper, I volunteered ten hours a week.  In the summer I volunteered forty hours a week.   Because I loved it, but also because I figured it would look good on an application for admission to a veterinary studies program.

My second year as a volunteer zookeeper, however, I met Chris, the curator of herpetology.    I was so enthralled with his stories of field trips to the Great Dismal Swamp to collect turtles and frogs, with the work he was doing banding and rehabilitating birds of prey, and frankly, I just liked the guy <grin>, that I “graduated” from shoveling poop of domestic hoof stock to working in the small exhibit house with Chris.     Chris was the bees-knees.    Chris was cool.  Chris took me under his wing, taught me tons on reptile husbandry, carpentry (building exhibits), trapping (for biological studies), measuring, identifying reptiles and amphibians and birds, etcetera, etcetera.   A few months under his tutelage and I no longer wanted to be a veterinarian.   Vets pretty much stayed in a clinic, or maybe took a trip to a farm, except for the very few zoo vets.   A biologist, however…  !    Biologists got to go on field trips.   Biologists got to sit in bird blinds on islands in the Chesapeake Bay, drinking hot coffee out of a thermos.  Biologists got to collect bags of frogs without anyone asking why, and to set up bucket traps and sort the thousands of cool insects, arachnids and small mammals they trapped.

So I changed course.   Instead of going to vet school after college, I went to graduate school.   By some strange twist of circumstances I ended up studying honey bee physiology. I got my masters degree in Animal Physiology (LSU), and a year and a half into my doctoral program realized… this wasn’t what I wanted to do when I grew up, i.e. sitting in a lab, peering through a dissecting scope, running trial after trial on the spectrophotometer, chromatographing until I was really sick of it.

So after leaving LSU “abd, “all but dissertation”, I joined the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries doing sub-lethal oil spill effects monitoring.    Still some dissection involved, still some lab work involved, but hey, it got me out in a boat on the Gulf of Mexico on a regular basis.    Problem was, I was dirt poor.    So through several jobs I gradually gravitated toward the IT world and landed a position as the Director of Environmental Data Management at McNeese State University.   With a budget that allowed $20K for a database administrator.  I couldn’t get anyone to come for the interview for that money.  A little research taught me that a total newbie DBA, still wet behind the ears, earned more than twice what I was earning as a program director at a university!    With six months of hard study,  and a few tests, I was certified as an Oracle database administrator and hired by Oracle Corp.   The dba profession has been very good to me these past ten years.  I got to travel, I feel that the ever-changing technology keeps me mentally sharp.  I’ve made some good friends, and a heck of a lot more money than I would have made as a veterinarian or a biologist.   I ended up at a job that had insurance that covered the treatments I needed in order to be able to have my lovely daughter.    As an IT person I realized that a computer would really be an ideal gift for my mother, and as a result, she ultimately ended up working in internet support for the world’s largest bank.

Goals are good.   Flexible goals are not necessarily bad.   Don’t be afraid to re-evaluate your goals along the way!

The Life Cycle of One of GoalGirl’s Personal Goals

About six years ago, I came to a not-so-sudden realization. Well actually a couple of realizations. First, I wanted to be a mom; I mean, really wanted to be a mom. Second, I wasn’t really set up for that. I’d been divorced for several years and wasn’t dating anyone seriously. Also, at 35-ish years old, I wasn’t getting any younger either. Not that you get younger at any age, but you know what i mean.

Ok, so that was three realizations, shoot me.

The more I thought about it, the more motherhood became a burning, driving need. I guess this is why humans haven’t become extinct; this procreation instinct is really powerful. and in case it’s not enough, we also have just plain old sex drive so there are enough ‘accidental’ pregnancies to make up for an lag… lags probably due to women like me who chose to finish graduate school, find a better job, travel a bit first, etcetera, and then made silly choices of marrying a man who didn’t want kids and expecting him to change his mind eventually.

ok, so a goal exploded forth and took me by the throat. I had a goal. This goal even had an automatic built-in time limit, and as they say, a goal with no time-limit is no goal at all. The time limit, in case you are wondering is the near certaintly of eventual menopause.

What are steps required to reach this goal? Well… normally on would say, find a mate, fall in love, get married, ya-yada… but hey, my clock was ticking fast. I’d done the first three, but the latter bits didn’t follow. So check them off anyway.

What are my other options? I could have started doing a series of one-night stands. I could have approached my male friends in the hope that one or more would be willing to donate to the cause, so to speak. Maybe I could have found someone in need of a green card and married them in exchange for their, um, services… I could have advertised for a donor who would be willing to sign away their rights to any offspring… or, i could do what I did do, that is, shop around for a sperm bank.

What are the potential barriers between me and my goal? Well, I couldn’t afford doctor-assisted artificial insemination (AI), so I found a sperm bank that would ship directly to my home, along with the necessary supplies to do the job myself. Are you grossed out yet? The nice thing is that this site also had a very good forum and the community there had a good spirit of mutual support. I went four cycles with that company at about $200 a pop. I knew I had some issues, but I was hoping they were as intermittant as the symptoms. I have polycystic ovarian syndrome. I figured I would go get a fertility workup. While researching my insurance coverage, I discovered that some fertility services were in fact covered, hurray!

I did two rounds of doctor assisted AI with no success. The ultrasounds showed that my ovaries looked like a bumpy ball from all of the unreleased follicles. Time to go for bigger guns. My doc had me “rest my ovaries” for a while by lupron injection, which kept them quiescent. Then I started the hormone shots to get the ovaries producing a lot of mature follicles for egg harvesting (i.e. to be used in in-vitro fertilization). I figured out once that in the course of trying to get pregnant, I gave myself something like 80 injections. Some of these were on an airplane returning from visiting friends in New Zealand.

Then I got a letter from my insurance company. They were implimenting a new policy that all covered reproductive services had to be performed at a “reproductive center of excellence”. I went ot the URL they provided and found two such centers in Texas. One was in Dallas, but was at the Methodist hospital, which would not provide said services for an unmarried woman. The other was in Austin, an over 4 hour drive away… considering the frequency of doctor visits required by an assisted reproduction cycle, this was really not an option.

After several letters and phone calls, the insurance agreed to “Grandfather” me with this course of treatment, since I was already 2/3rds of the way through this cycle, but future cycles would have to be administered at a center of excellence. Well, thank God my first invitro cycle worked!
After a Hypnobirthing class, gestational diabetes, insulin shots, swollen ankles, and aching hips (the little darling decided at around six months to jam her head into my pelvis and leave it there for three months or so), a double nuchal chord, and an emergency cesarean (didn’t get to use the Hypnobirthing stuff, darn it!), I reached my goal. I was finally a mommy!

Worth it? You bet. My daughter is the joy of my life. It’s often harder raising a kid on my own that it would be with a partner, but I still feel that this was the best goal I’ve ever set and met. My little bug is the joy of my life and my raison d’etre …

The point of this article (besides just want to relive the past), is that if I had not actually made a goal and broken it down into the necessary steps, if I had just left it as some nebulous longing, a “someday” thing, I would not now be getting good morning kisses from a little Princess.

If anyone is interested in discussing fertility issues, single-parenthood by choice or other related topics, please leave me a comment to that affect. If there is enough interest, I’ll set up a forum.

-GG

A little about one of my goals.  I make a pretty good salary as a database administrator.   A heck of a lot more than i made as a  marine biologist.  But not nearly as much fun.   Because DBAs tend to be expensive, folks don’t usually hire enough of us… which, coupled with the fact that most maintenance activities must happen after normal business hours (and in some 24×7 shops, in the wee smalls, when traffic is least if there is any downtime required).   We’re not known for sleeping a lot.   We take our crack-berry phones with us on vacation.  Our kids learn to amuse themselves while we tap away at our keyboards.  

It’s the last one that gets me.   Don’t get me wrong, I actually like being a DBA… it’s a job that really challenges the mind, the organizational skills, the diplomacy skills and endurance.  Never a dull moment, really.   I have a four year old daughter, however, and the number of hours I have to work for my <mumble> salary isn’t fare to her.  It breaks my heart that I don’t get to spend more time with her than I do.   I want to work fewer hours and spend more time with my sweet daughter, without compromising our financial stability.   That sound suspiciously like a goal, doesn’t it?

Replacing $<mumble> of income while reducing one’s hours-worked is a very large task (hence the Elephant reference in the title).   As the old saying goes though, regarding how one eats an elephant… “you do it one bite at a time…”    As I am still very new at the web marketing thing, I doubt that I can do this in one income stream at the outset.   I am fairly sure this will take multiple income streams as I grow and learn.   Also, as I still have daycare, mortgage, etcetera to pay, I will have to continue to work my day job, so the amount of time that i can devote to this new endeavor is necessarily limited to no more than a couple of hours a day if I squeeze hard.    I’ll continue to discuss this as I continue to grow my business(es?).  

It’s midnight here in Irving now, and my darling child will wake me up, no doubt, sometime around 5am.  Time for me to head for bed.  If you are still itching for some good reading, check out my latest lenses on Squidoo about Kids and Karate and about the coffee shop I’ll be visiting about seven hours from now.  

G’night y’all…

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!

In this first article of (hopefully) many,  I’ll be talking about structuring your goals to increase the likelihood of a triumphant outcome.   Of course, everyone knows that the first step is to define said goal. 

For example: 

 I want to make more money!

This is what many people would put forth as a “goal”.   Well, if that is the goal, to split hairs, mission accomplished… most of us already want to make more money.    Even if we rephrase this to say more specifically:

My goal is to make more money!

Now what?

Fine to have such a goal, but defining the goal this way does not buy you anything (so to speak).  You probably don’t need to do a whole lot to meet this goal, as stated, as eventually you will gain seniority at your present job, or the value of a dollar will be so low that you’ll be making three times what you are now in terms of how many dollars you put in your bank account each month… so more money, but less spending power.  You can’t complain, because you have achieved your goal as stated…   but what if we put a time-limit on it?

I want to make more money within 12 months!

We’re getting warmer… The chances of the spending power of a dollar being cut by 2/3’s in twelve months is much less.   This way of stating your goal also tends to light a bit of a fire under you in terms of working toward your goal.  You don’t feel like you have forever to reach the goal, so you’d better start doing something about it now (if you are serious about the goal, and if you are not, why are you wasting so much valuable time defining it in the first place?).   Hmm… twelve months can zoom by pretty quickly.   Not a lot of time to dabble in one money generating method.  I’d better really work several methods and hedge my bets! (starting to see the advantage of setting a time limit yet?). 

Perhaps you bring home around $5000/month in your current situation.   Not a bad take-home, depending on your liabilities and life-style.  You’re grossing probably around $7200/month (will vary according to what insurance, retirement, etc. that you have taken out before you get your $5000).  Based on a 40 hour work-week, you’re earning about $45/hour.   What if you’re salaried and typically work 60 hour weeks?  Now you’re only earning $30/hour.    Assuming it doesn’t get you fired or cost you a raise, simply by cutting your work-week back to 40 hours, you’ve increased your hourly wage by %50!    So you are technically speaking, “making more money,” but you really don’t have any more money in your bank account than before.   Maybe a fewer ulcers in your stomach though, and that is certainly worth something!

Within 12 months, I want to replace $2000 of my take home pay with residual income so that I can work less!

 

A-hah!  Now there is a goal that just might get us somewhere!    

Now, how can I do that?  Personally, I’m on a quest to do it myself via online marketing, squidoo, twitter, etcetera, but that’s another article.

Welcome!  I will be discussing anything related to goals, goal-setting, and occassionally specifically regarding my own goals.    I invite you to comment freely, add to the discourse, as long as you respect me and other subscribers/commenters, etcetera.