Would you like to see what the future holds in store for you?
In this next part you get to look into your future for a little while. This is a fun exercise that will let you determine reasonably what you can do over the next few years. This shouldn’t be an overwhelming task or something you worry about.
Instead, I want for you to end up with a feeling of satisfaction and some direction.
In this next step to what we will do is go through each one of your goals again and write and number beside each one. What we want to do is come up with the goals you can accomplish in the next one year, the next five years, the next 10 years and finally label the goals that you will see beyond 10 years.
You can simply write a 1, 5, 10 or a 10+ beside each goal.
By doing this you will get some perspective on what you can reasonably do with your list in the time you have. You should be able to project out five years and have a pretty good idea of where you would like to be. The same with 10 years. My 10+ year goals are my “someday/maybe” type of goals. I will get to them down the road, but they don’t warrant me starting them right this minute.
Your goal list might look something like this:
- Find an marry the person of my dreams (10 years)
- Increase my personal salary by 60% (1 year)
- Pay off my $1,500 credit card balance and cut up the card (1 year)
- Learn to speak conversational Russian (5 years)
- And so on…
One more note, these dates are not set in stone. You just want to get an idea of what you’re looking at. I will caution you though – you probably do not want to shove too much into the first year.
If you make $30,000 per year, you don’t want to say that over the next 1 year you will start a multimillion dollar company, lose 150 pounds, get married, and buy a small island in the Pacific. Is it possible? Sure, it’s possible… anything is possible. But it wouldn’t be realistic. And I’m afraid you wouldn’t believe you could do it, so you may never start trying.
Besides, as smart and talented as I am sure you are, we don’t want to go overboard, save some fun for your future!
So as the last task for today, go back through your entire dream list and write either 1, 5, 10 or 10+ year(s) beside each goal.
If you have a question or some feedback on how it’s going so far, please feel free to leave a comment below.
This is tip #5 of the 31 day series 101 Goal Setting Breakthroughs: A 31 Day Blog Series That Will Make 2008 Your Best Year Ever! Subscribe to my free RSS feed to get the rest of the series and never miss a tip!
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