How To Plan Your Goals

The key on how to plan your goals is to outline what you want and how you are going to get there. For best results, you should use pen and paper to start. Using pen and paper gives you the opportunity to be very creative and get your mental juices flowing.

In school, one of the ways teachers would get students interested in English class would be to get them free-flowing on paper.

Students were told, write whatever comes to your mind, be it a short story, poetry or just thoughts that flow through your brain.

Doing this on a computer is harder because your fingers are poised over the keys and your brain automatically kicks into, “this needs to be concise and perfect.” Using a pen or pencil allows your brain to relax and let loose with all those ideas.

As you write out your plan, you scratch items out, free flow ideas and finally come up with a solid plan.

After that, you can open a word document and type out your final 90-day plan. But don’t throw out your notebook that has all your free flow ideas, you may want to come back to them later for ideas and inspiration on how to plan your goals.

To start, you need to make a decision.

What do you want to achieve in the next 90 days?

Do you want to lose a large amount of weight? You know that you need a safe way to do it and one that will also increase your physical fitness.

Do you want to write a novella and sell it on Amazon? You need an action plan of how to create the novella, how much you will write each day to finish in 90 days and how you will get traffic to your finished product.

Now that you have made your decision, you need to decide what the most important elements are going to be for you to work on. Remember it will be for the next 90 days, so these elements need to be a top priority.

For significant weight loss, will you focus on what to eat, when to eat, what exercises to do? Having a main focus will kickstart your action plan because you can see a straight path.

Having too many focus points will make your path crooked and easy to wander off in the wrong direction.

For weight loss, you need to decide the top elements of what you personally need to do. Everyone is different, so really think about how you gain and how you lose weight. What have been the issues in the past? Start a list of what needs to occur, how to plan your goals and getting there step by step. I could be something like this:

1. Get rid of all the unhealthy food in the house.

2.  Replace it with a supply of good food and healthy snacks.

3.  Write out a meal plan for breakfast, lunch, and supper.

4.  Talk to your family and make sure they are going to support you, not hinder you.

5.  What will you take to work for lunch, instead of hitting the fast food places?

6.  Decide what exercise you are going to do.

7.  Pick a time for exercise and how many days a week.

8.  Get rid of the scales in the house or have someone hide them. Use the mirror to see your progress.

9.  Figure out how much water you need per day, depending on your body size.

For writing a novella or a short report (for non-fiction), write out your list of steps to take.

1. Come up with your topic and list out the chapters.

2.  Decide what hours per day you can devote to writing.

3.  How many words per day would you like to do?

4.  Will you edit as you go or just get it all down and go back and do a full edit?

5.  Who will format your book and upload it? Can you do it yourself?

6.  Getting a great cover done? Decide how much you can afford to pay.

7.  How will you spread the word? You need your own burst of traffic before Amazon kicks in and sends some your way.

8.  Make a blog to talk about your book.

9.  Decide if your book is going to be big enough to do a print version.

Now that you have a list of items that you can follow, you need to prioritize which is most important.

Go back to your list and put them in “must do first,” order. This must do first order should also include the elements that are going to highly motivate you. For example, if you are doing a novella and the idea of printing out your book, taking a highlighter and editing it…. causes you to hesitate-then put it towards the very last thing to do. If you have it in your top five, then it is very likely you will never finish the novella.

There is nothing wrong with doing the first draft, then a cover and coming back later with fresh eyes, to do a full edit.

In fact, many people would start the number one task as getting a cover done for the book. They view this as a high motivation tool since they can look at the cover and then visualize the completed work. Just another way to motivate yourselves when deciding how to plan your goals.

Creating Your 90 Day Vision Board For How To Plan Your Goals

Vision boards have come a long way. Many years ago, life insurance salesmen would use single elements to help them visualize what they wanted to achieve. One idea they used was deciding how many sales they had to make that month, then writing the number down and placing it on the inside of their shoes. As they put their shoes on in the morning, in preparation for pounding the sidewalks and cold calling… the number they needed would be implanted in their minds.

Modern-day vision boards are an extremely useful tool. When creating your

90-day vision board, think about where you can place in your house, for maximum viewing. You need to get your family onboard, so they understand what you are trying to accomplish, and they do not move the board.

Using a 90-day vision board stimulates your creativity and allows you to visualize what you want in life. When your brain is activated in this matter, it puts out a call to the universe and suddenly you will find yourself attracting opportunities and new friendships that can help you achieve your goals.

There are many ways to make a vision board. You can do it in a binder, on large marker board or one of the big poster boards that the kids use in school. The preferred method for 90-day plans is using a poster board. Here is an example of how you could make a specific 90-day board.

Your board would show a set of steps going from the bottom left-hand corner, up to the top right-hand corner. Divide the steps in a group of three, for 30, 60 and 90 days. Highlight those numbers in red.

Use the outer spaces to place the photographs or images that you have found, relating to the goals you are going to achieve.

Images alone are not enough. Gather up motivational quotes or powerful intentional affirmations and place these around the images you have picked.

It is best to pick the images and quotes that you are positive will move you forward. You want the board to have all motivational tools you need but not so much that the entire board is cluttered, and you lose focus of what you are trying to achieve.

Now to make it really fun, buy some gold stars or something similar that can be pasted along the steps and you will see how to plan your goals more clearly.

As you progress along in attaining your goals, mark off a step using a gold star. This works really well and even more so if you have a family. They can encourage you as they see the progress you make and the whole vision board idea will bring a smile to everyone’s face as it gets built.

Now it is true that not everyone is going to love doing a poster board. There are other methods that may appeal to you. Here are two:

1.  Buy a good sturdy binder. It should have solid cardboard inserts with plastic sleeves. Create your board using an insert at a time and make sure everything is glued into place. This type of vision board is preferred by people who commute or have activities with kids, that has them sitting around for long periods of time. Using a sturdy board like this, you will be able to take it anywhere you need to.

2.  There are some folks that just adore putting everything online and the idea of pen/pencil or physically putting together a board does not appeal them. An alternative is to create a 90-day vision board on Pinterest. You can do it all in one category or create different boards for different areas, like health, work, relationships or even finance.

Find images that really appeal to your senses. Pinterest is perfect for creative people.

Now that you know how to plan your goals, to reach those goals in ninety days click here.