The Business Success Secret Most People Don’t Do! – Do You?

I don’t know about you, but over the years I’d have to admit I’ve found goal-setting one of those tasks that seems SO easy to procrastinate on!  Over the last several years I have had written goals, and have found that very useful but still I’ve noticed that hard-to-define, inner resistance to gladly setting goals and making working with them weekly and monthly a regular habit.

Have you found the same?  Perhaps you have, as the stats say I think, that it’s less than 5% of the population have written goals, despite the overwhelming evidence that the majority of highly successful people use them!

So my wife and I came up with a solution – here it is:

Create an EVENT, that is fun in itself, and include in it,
time to focus on brainstorming and writing down goals!

So…, last weekend Carolyn and I went away to a place called Montville in the Hinterland of the Sunshine Coast here in Queensland.  The purpose of the weekend was to have a break, but also to spend some dedicated time working on our Goals for 2009.

Here’s a very short video of some photos of the weekend and the beautiful "Montville Cottage Cabins" we stayed at:

Whilst this blog is not primarily about personal development, most of my readers are business owners or entrepreneurs, and the fact is if you’re in business, you actually can’t separate your business from your own personal development!  Owning a business is probably the biggest personal development lesson you’ll ever have, possibly second only to being married, and having kids LOL!

Do you have clearly defined and WRITTEN goals for this year?  I’d recommend if you haven’t that you create an event that your mind attaches positive feelings to, then go do them!

Here’s what our weekend looked like:

Friday afternoon: Arrive and relax… Carolyn went browsing the shops in Montville, I went browsing real estate agencies, and chilled out for a while in the cabin.

Friday evening:  Lovely meal at the famous Poet’s Café (our favourite in Montville – see pic below), then watched a movie in the cabin.

Saturday morning: Walked into Montville..  This turned out to take an hour and a quarter each way, and it was HOT – phew!  But it was good exercise!  Over breakfast in a café started working on our Beliefs and goals.

Saturday afternoon: Back at the cabin, more work on goals

Saturday night… snack dinner in the cabin, finished a bit more goals work and chilled for a while (actually checked my emails – but don’t tell Carolyn!)

Sunday morning:  Breakfast at Poet’s and finished off the written goals.

I now have 61 goals for the year (probably a bit too many but that’s OK!), in the following categories:

• Spiritual
• Marriage and Family
• Business
• Money and Finances
• Relationships and Friends
• Personal Development / Mental Attitude
• Physical / Health
• Fun / Recreation / Social

(Order not necessarily intended to imply any kind of priority)

What was particularly useful was spending time identifying our beliefs that underpin each of these categories, and being honest with ourselves about what our LIMITING BELIEFS are, then working on countering those limiting beliefs with positive, supportive beliefs, goals and declarations.

I’ll share more about this, and the process we used, in another blog post.

What’s your experience with goal setting?  Write a comment and let me know – I’d love to hear from you!