Setting your goals is only one part of achieving them, the second part is needing to hold yourself accountable.
You can do this by having an accountability buddy. This is a person who can support you achieve your goals and action plans.
Defining your goals can be difficult, but a nice trick we learned was writing the goals in the current tense as if you are there now.
Not ‘I want to be’ but instead, ‘I am’.
Doug interviewed Sarah Bloxham, who is the director and chief talker of Let’s Talk! Mortgages & Insurance (Episode 7 Let’s Talk Goals and Accountability). They discussed her first time setting goals and where she is now, and how they’ve helped her go from the bottom of everything, where she thought she was going to have to sell her car to try and have money to feed the family, to winning multiple awards and being able to have her weekends free from work.
Some of her first-time goals went like this:
- I am an India T team member
- I have two holidays a year
- I cook regularly
- I get weekends away
- I am appreciated
- I can breathe
- I have a new office
- I have an assistant
- I have balance
After forgetting about these goals she had written, in a little black book that Doug had given her in 2018 at a conference in Australia Doug was speaking at, she found she had achieved 70% of them by 2020!
‘Sometimes you think it’s just not possible, but the madness is you just need to write them down’ – Doug Bennett, CEO
The goal-setting process isn’t just for work life, but it can also help various different aspects of your life, such as personal goals, which can improve your work-life balance.
When you run a business, you can get excited and carried away, but you have to remember the work-life balance aspect of things. Perfecting time management is also crucial for setting and achieving goals.
‘Balance is important everybody, it’s one of the most important things’ – Doug Bennett, CEO
Although lockdown and COVID-19 have made it more difficult, if it’s a goal it’s still possible. A lot of people are worrying about the world coming to an end, but if you’ve got something to look past, something to look at, and something to aim for, it helps.
The madness of it all is once you’ve set the goal up and you’ve told your subconscious how big it wants to be, all of a sudden it starts looking out for the information you need to be able to achieve that goal, that’s the craziness of it all.
Unless you tell your subconscious what it is that you want, it’s just going to wander around aimlessly pulling things in, sometimes it’ll pull things in that don’t make any sense or certainly aren’t going to take you towards anything meaningful.
The important thing here is to get your goal first off, write them down, that then connects to your brain. This will then open the doors and open up the opportunities for you to actually find the things that you need to be able to achieve them.
Goal setting is an integral part of the Work Optional Lifestyle Financial Planning™ service where we ask our clients to think about their goals and what they want to do with their lives, once they make work optional. It’s a very rewarding process that our clients love.
Click here to enquire about our Work Optional Lifestyle Financial Planning™️ service.
Listen to Doug’s ever-growing podcast series by clicking on one of the links below:
Spotify: Goals DO Come True with Doug Bennett | Spotify
Apple: Goals DO Come True with Doug Bennett | Apple
Google: Goals DO Come True with Doug Bennett | Google
Doug Bennett, a Lifestyle Financial Planner, Mortgage Broker, and International Speaker, has now released his first book, Goals Do Come True – From the Edge of Financial Oblivion to a Life of Freedom and Fun. Click the link to purchase! You could even leave a review to help others find it.
Read our blog on ‘The Benefits of Wealth Preservation with DB Wealth Planning and Preservation’
Read our blog on ‘The importance of goals & thoughtful planning for your future wealth’