Keeping It Real

Good evening,

I’ve come back from camping out in the Hills of Wales with my partner and her family, and now I’m back home I can finally write about making a dream board. It’s such an important element in reaching success in life – in fact if you do some research you’ll find all the top achievers keep their vision in a real, tangible form somehow – that I didn’t want to do this by halves.

At the top of the page is a photo of my front room wall, that’s right that picture is literally my wall and it’s covered in pictures of things I am going to do. Things like visit The Fat Duck in July next year, and Go to Iceland and see the Aurora Borealis next year in March, things I dream about doing. It’s also got big dreams off to the right hand-side, things like buying a brand new Aston Martin in July 2017 & building my dream house by December of 2017 too. All these pictures mean alot to me; in fact every time I look up from my desk at them – they inspire me to act!

You’ll notice that when I talk about them they are real to me, solid and tangible, I can reach out and touch the pictures on the wall and I can see, hear, feel, taste, smell what it’ll be like to get there too! There’s another important element there too though, you might have already spotted it…

They’ve all got a timescale!

“A goal without a date is just a dream” – Milton H. Erickson

I know I talk alot about dreams, because they are so important to build your belief in, and to have as real as possible. But when you set a date to your dream you’ve given yourself a Goal. It’s easy to have a dream you never achieve – they can be such vague & wishy-washy things – but once you fail to achieve a goal it can be crushing. I have some dreams I haven’t turned into goals yet, because I haven’t decided when I’d like to do them, here’s a couple of examples that I already have pictures for:

Visiting Machu Picchu with Sophie (possibly sometime 2014 but we are also planning a wedding around that time too!)

Visiting the Great Wall of China (I have considered adding this to our honeymoon plans, but we’ll see how that plays out in the long term)

Now these are my dreams, they aren’t solid or real enough to me yet. I do want to do them, but I don’t know when, and I have no real plans towards achieving them.

Let’s have a closer look at my vision wall now:

This picture represents visiting the only Michelin Starred restaurant on the Wirral, it’s been an aspiration of mine for a few years now – but the £200 price tag for two people has been just out of our price range. However I will be there on the 31st October this year (I’ll post pictures when we go!), and we’ll be eating the 9 course tasting menu with matched wines. I have no idea what the menu will be that day, but I can see the waiters moving deftly between tables opening bottles & serving the food, I can smell the dishes on other tables and the way the scents all mingle together to produce the delicious aroma of freshly prepared top quality fayre. I can even hear the chink of glasses as we toast our new found success and the pop of the cork from our bottle of champagne as we talk long into the evening about how our business heads into Christmas and beyond to 2013.

This picture is the car I’ve wanted since it was first released in 2009, Ford Ka Titanium with all optional extras and pearlescent paintwork, I can feel the leather gear knob as a slide into 5th heading down the motorway towards my next meeting, with a Jim Rohn audiobook playing through my iPhone on the stereo and the Climate Control keeping the temperature at a lovely 20C. I can see myself getting into this car every morning with a smile on my face, and the nearly £15,000 price tag is nothing compared to that repeated pleasure. This car will  be on my driveway by November of this year (again wait to see pictures, they’ll be up then!)

These images are deeply personal to me, and form an integral part of my hopes and dreams, my aspirations and goals for the next 5 years. There are things yet to go up, our Wedding is being planned as we speak, and we have a book specifically for this enormous goal (suffice it to say that the budget stretches to around £30,000 and we’ve set the date for April 12th 2015), as soon as we have an appropriate photo we both love, it’ll be right up there – dated, costed and named.

The important thing is these goals must move you, everytime I look at the picture of my future family home I get a lump in my throat and hold back tears at the thought of finally being able to bring both of our families under one roof for a Christmas day we’ll never forget. They must be dated (otherwise they are just dreams), and you must have an idea of cost.

Costing is such a key thing, because without a price you have no idea how that will break down into your daily action plan. If you can’t see the £200 cost of the special meal, then you certainly can’t look at what activities you are doing in your business or job, and see how much you need it increase it by to achieve that goal on time. It’s even more important with big goals – for example:

• To be able to afford the £700 meal at the Fat Duck next year in July, I know I need to be earning around £4000/month – roughly double my current income.
• To achieve this I can break it down over the months, it turns out I need to increase my efforts by about 50% every month to make this happen
• This means that I need to make 10 extra calls every week, and find 2 extra regular customers too
• So I’ll need to make 2 extra calls a day, and aim to find at least one new customer every day as well (that way I’ll get the regular customers through sheer force of numbers)

This has brought my goal right down to nuts and bolts of my daily activity, but without working on my vision board I’d have never seen that far down the line.

By now you should have worked on your dreams, and worked out what you want to achieve in the next 5 years, so to sum up all you now need to do is:

1. Set a date to your dream – and turn it into a GOAL
2. Find out the cost of your goal – so we can work out what activity needs to be done to make it happen
3. Find a good picture to represent your goal – so you can see and touch it whenever you need motivation to carry out your daily activities.

I love goal setting, and will be covering it in various levels of detail as we head into the weeks and months ahead, but for now I’ll sign off and see you all tomorrow for more on mental rehearsal and some deep stuff about focus and the power of the mind. 🙂