Brian Tracy on Goal Setting

Here's a great excerpt from an AudioMotivation interview I conducted with Brian Tracy in 2006:

Me:
Can you take us through some of your world famous goal setting techniques for both long term and short term goals?

Brian:
When I began my life, I had not graduated from high school. I worked as a dishwasher for some years and as a laborer for many years after that. One day I discovered the concept of goals. It changed my whole life. The whole idea of picking a specific target to end that and then channeling all of your efforts toward that single target was a life transforming experience for me and I never recovered from it in a very positive way. Over the years, I have studied goal setting for thirty years. I’ve written books on it and trained more than a million people. I can give you one of the best techniques I have ever found. I use it myself virtually every single day. It’s called the Ten Goal Method.

The Ten Goal Method is very simple. You sit down with a sheet of paper and you put today’s date on it. Then you write out ten goals that you’d like to accomplish in the next year or so in the present tense starting with the word ‘I’. You start off and say, “I earn X number of dollars. I weigh X number of pounds. I sell. I live. I drive such and such a car. I travel to.” In other words, it’s I plus an action verb which locks it into your subconscious mind. I’ve given this exercise all over the world with phenomenal results. People write down their ten goals and then a week, month, or a year later they open up that list of goals and they have not even read it in the last year. They are absolutely astonished eight of their ten goals will have been achieved in the most remarkable ways.

Now to make this exercise even more powerful I also had people write out their ten goals, which takes about three or four minutes. I then have them say, “Imagine you could wave a magic wand and you could have any one of the goals on this list within 24 hours.” Which one goal would you choose? Which one goal would have the greatest positive impact on your life? Whatever that goal is you put a circle around it. Then you transfer that goal which now becomes your major definite purpose, your focal point in life. You transfer that goal to the top of a clean sheet of paper and you set a deadline for achieving that goal. You make a list of everything you can think of that you could do to achieve the goal. Then you organize the list by what you should start doing first, what you should do later, what is more important, what is less important, and take action on that list. Every single day you do something to achieve that one single goal. Here is the most remarkable thing that happens. As you begin to move toward that goal, which you will, you will start to make progress on all of your other goals as well. That one central goal will have the greatest positive impact on your life and begins to activate all of your other conscious, superconscious powers. You begin to attract into your life people and circumstances that you never would have imagined in the past.

This is the great miracle of goal setting. Decide what you want. Write it down. Make a plan. Work on it every day. You will be absolutely astonished what happens. When you get up in the morning think about that one major goal. All day long think about that goal. In the evening think about that goal. Read, learn, talk, discuss, and do things to achieve that goal. Surprise, surprise a week, a month, or a year from now you will look back and will be absolutely astonished at the progress that you’ve made.