Jim Rohn

I’ve recently begun mentoring someone and am helping her accomplish life goals. Over the years, I’ve read many different theories on how to set and achieve goals. I’m developing a way that I think, worst case, will work well for me. Best case, it may work well for you also.

The first step is simple: Set goals. Personally, I’m a fan of the Jim Rohn method for setting goals. His talk on setting goals is fantastic. He gives many examples, but really just has a few basic steps. Here his method is, in a nutshell:

1. Write down five goals you’ve already achieved.
2. Write down 50 goals you want to achieve.
3. Label each of those 50 goals as 1, 3, 5 or 10 year goals.
4. Pick the top four most important one year goals, and write out a couple of sentences for each on why it’s important.
5. Write a short paragraph about what kind of person you have to become in order to achieve those goals.

Working with my mentee spurred me on to take the steps myself. I had definitely accomplished goals that I had already set, but had not yet written out that many goals I wanted to accomplish. So here’s some samples from my own list as an example.

1. Start a web design business, write a book.
2. Ride exercise bike on a regular basis, go to Disney World, write five books.
3. Ride an exercise bike was 1 year, Disney World a 3 year, write five books a 10 year.
4. One of my four most important was to ride my exercise bike, for this reason: My health in general, and my blood pressure specifically, is very important. This will be one thing that will be fairly easy to do that will have the biggest positive impact on my overall health.
5. Here’s my paragraph on what sort of person I need to become: In order to accomplish my goals I have listed over the next ten years, I have to become a more disciplined individual. I need to be more adept at forming and maintaining good habits. I need to increasingly make better use of my time.

Hope that helps. Stay tuned for step 2…