Affirm Your Way to All Systems Go

One of my dear friends from my old hi-tech days sent me an e-mail on Sunday morning looking for suggestions to tighten up one of his habits.  George is a person who I’d consider to be very successful in his life – spiritually, physically, career, family, etc. Whenever I see him, he has a huge smile on his face.  When I think of George, I always picture him in my mind with the same wide smile.

In his e-mail he said, “Here it is almost December and I realized, after reading a forum post on Omnifocus, that I had not had written goals ALL YEAR! Yikes!!….”  George is and always has been a very goal-oriented person.  Although he had the big-picture goals in his head, he had gotten out of the habit of checking in on the goals – and the daily behaviors associated with accomplishing the goals.

I’ll offer two suggestions to assist everyone in the art of goal accomplishment.

Pre-Flight Check List

The first thing that came to mind is the pre-flight check from the airline industry.  Prior to each and every flight, the airlines have a list that they go down in order to make sure that all systems are go prior to taking off. Because the consequences are catastrophic if something happens to a jet at 30,000 feet, the airlines don’t leave the pre-flight check to the memory of any of their pilots.

If you forgot to do something that you considered to be important in the past when you set the goal, would you call it catastrophic?

When I conduct training sessions, I hear a lot of people say, “Oh yeah…. I used to do that but, I guess that I got out of the habit”. There are a couple of ways to make sure that we never forget our good habits.

George is way ahead of most of us because he’s in the habit of setting goals for his life.  George’s error this year is that he didn’t write them down.  Here is a brief refresher on the goal-setting best practices:

• Create written goals for every major area of your life

Physical/Health |  Social |  Family |  Education |  Spiritual |  Financial |  Work/Career

• Once you’ve created all of your goals in every category, prioritize them in order – most important down to least important.  This will give you a list of your values (priorities).
• You may determine that there are not enough hours in the day to accomplish everything that you would like. If that’s the case, you can either cut back on the frequency of some of your goals (watch fewer football games on the weekend) or take some lower priority items off your list completely (give-up watching and attending football games altogether).
• In the next step, you’ll probably come up with the sub-goals/behaviors that you’ve chosen to be conducted on a daily or frequent basis.
• If you’re very serious about your goal accomplishment, I suggest you develop a spreadsheet or similar document that allows you to track each of the behaviors and frequency of the behaviors.

At the end of each day, you can check-off the accomplished items from your list of priorities for that day and week. Many people that I work with look at their personal pre-flight checklist at the beginning and end of each day.

What did I say that I wanted to do today? |  Did I do them?

When we set goals for a period of time such as a year, those goals determine our destination for those 12 months – like a jet ready to take off for London. Tracking of the daily behaviors for your longer term goals with your pre-flight checklist allows you (the pilot) to make sure that you’re still prepared to reach your ultimate destination.

The mistake that many people make after setting goals is to put that document into a drawer or leave it in a file on their computer and never look at it again until next year. It’s critical that we keep the long-term goals and the daily behaviors in front of our eyes on a daily basis.

The process above allows you to determine your goals, prioritize them based upon your values, create the daily behaviors that you want to accomplish in each area of your life and to document and track the accomplishment of those behaviors.

By tracking each of your long-term goals on a daily basis, you’ll be in a strong position to determine if you need to make modifications to your flight plan much earlier in the process.

Affirmations

The second major suggestion that I’ll make is to have you convert every one  of your goals into an affirmation (a one-sentence, present tense statement of fact or belief) that you can read at least twice a day.

The recitation of our goals in affirmation format first thing in the morning and again just prior to going to sleep at night allows our goals to stay present in our minds at all times. This process ensures that our goals will never be out of our sight or out of our minds.

Although you can put your affirmations anywhere, I like writing them on 3 X 5 index cards so that I can have them handy and repeat them whenever I have a few minutes – in-between phone calls, on an airplane, in a taxi or at a coffee shop.

By repeating the affirmations multiple times per day until the goal is accomplished or until the goal becomes second nature, we’re imprinting the new behavior into our minds. Second nature means that we’ll start acting and behaving in this fashion normally.

Everything that is second nature (normal) for you today at one point in your life was anything but second nature or normal.  The affirmation process is an assimilation process that allows you to get used to this new way of thinking, acting or behaving in your mind prior to actually have to be this way for real.

It’s a process that allows us to get used to a new, higher-level of normalcy.

The more often you assimilate your goals, the faster they will become second nature.