This post is part four in the Goal Setting Success series.
You know that feeling you get when you’ve accomplished a goal?
It’s a sort of mix of elation and surprise, right?
The surprise doesn’t come from the fact that you reached your goal. Anyone who sets goals is pretty confident that they’ll reach them.
No, the surprise comes from how you accomplished them. And from the people and opportunities that appeared to help you, that you didn’t expect or plan for.
This is what happens when you put your goals out there in the wild, and to me, is the most exciting part of the whole goal setting process.
To Get Something, You Have To Ask For It
The goal setting process is really a way to ask for what you want. Think about it.
You are asking from your self, and the larger universe around you, for help to reach your goals.
And rarely does that request go unanswered.
You map out a plan of action, and suddenly new opportunities start to appear. About 2-3 steps into your plan, as if by magic, something shows up that allows you to skip ahead a few steps. An email, a comment on a blog, a new acquaintance met at an event.
When you put your goals out in the wild, they take on a life of their own. Things fall into place and begin to take shape. Sometimes it’s almost spooky.
That’s the real power of goal setting — when they start becoming a reality, both through your own actions, and through the “greater happenings” around you.
But How Does This Happen…?
One of the best things I’ve learned in this process is to stop asking how. See, it’s not all that important, and you really don’t have enough information to definitively answer that question anyway.
Knowing how an illusion works isn’t a prerequisite for enjoying a magic trick. In fact, it can make it less entertaining.
You have your own ideas how it happens already, so why dwell on it? Let the universe do it’s magic (or science, or psychology, etc.).
So whether you call it answered prayers, Law of Attraction, a cognitive bias, the Cocktail Party Effect, or the Plate o’ Shrimp Phenomenon doesn’t really matter.
All that matters is…
The Results
When your goals are congruent with your Key Elements, things tend to work out better than you imagined. When they’re not, the results are usually disappointing. But that’s only because you were on the wrong track.
Achieving your goals is really about fulfilling your deepest desires, and doing things you were born to do.
True success comes from being true to yourself, and attracting those things that make your life amazing.
You can have everything you ever wanted. The only catch is you have to know what that is, and take the actions to get you going.
What you end up with is usually more than you dreamed. Because reality can be so much more fulfilling than dreams.
back for a visit to your your blog. love your blog, content and design. big goal for me at the present time: i am trying to master my hawaii blog!
what i like with your design is that you don’t display the entire blog post on your index but rather deep link from your index to individual posts, so making it much easier for your readers to find what they really want to read.
question to the successful blogger: can i do that with blogger blogspot blog as well? i guess i would just write the complete post in order to get a post link, then shorten the post and link to it???!
hope i made myself understood. thanks for your response. aloha, pua
Pua – Thanks for the kind words. I’m not sure how you’d do it on blogspot. My recomendation? Move to WordPress.
But I’m a WP evangelist so I’m a little biased 😉
True success for me is to move forward with your goals. If you can’t reach your goal then just reset it. Don’t put it aside.Successful people don’t quite when they fail. They continue to move forward.
You are right about expectations regarding our goals. Most of the time it’s how we achieve it that surprises us. However, it doesn’t mean that we can rely on the flow of events. We still need to identify the right answer in the question, how to achieve our goal.
Nice post. I’ve had the experience of achieving a goal without expecting that it would be finished in a different way. Sometimes it’s frustrating because it didn’t go as planned. But there are also times that they are a lot better than what was planned
I really enjoyed letting your goal “go out into the Wild” nothing ever goes exactly as you plan it. Besides consistant hard work & focus ,it’s exciting to realize everything is working for you to succeed.