How are your days, after you’ve managed to get your eyes to stay open? Are you doing what you love, and do you love what you’re doing? Do you feel successful, empowered, fulfilled?

Setting Goals is the Best Way to Achieve Them

Goal-setting is the key to a successful life. You can’t “get there” if you don’t know where “there” is!

Another part of goal-setting, though, is making positive affirmations. We all have enough negativity in our lives. Our parents and relatives may have started it, unknowingly, by telling us what we can’t do. Some of it was important – “you can’t run across the street without holding a grown-up’s hand.” Some of it was crippling – “you can’t do that, that’s absurd, who ever heard of a grown person doing that for a living!” Think carefully before you speak to your child. Allow him the pleasure of his dreams!

Give Yourself a Pep Talk Every Morning

Being a positive person is as simple as deciding that you want to be a positive person. Whenever you feel a negative thought pop into your head, stop yourself! Consciously change your negative thought to a positive one. Then say three or four positive things in a row, and don’t forget to grin. Not just a wimpy little lift-the-corner-of-your-lip half-smirk, but a big, wide, show-all-your teeth grin! Learn to embrace life, and to enjoy it! Your children will reap the benefits. They live by your example. They will learn to be positive thinkers. They will learn to set goals and not only achieve them, but far surpass them!

If you don’t think you know how to be positive, here is a little four-year-old girl to teach you. The first words she says are, “I can be a SARK.” There was a lot of discussion on the internet about what she meant by that. Some thought she was being imaginative, and saying she could be a “shark”, but her speech is actually very clear. I think she meant to say, “I can be a SARK.” SARK, or Susan Ariel Rainbow Kennedy, is the author of several uplifting, positive thinking, self-empowering books for children and adults, including “Make Your Creative Dreams Real.”

So, watch this adorable video. Read great books, and fill your life with uplifting, encouraging, positive friends. Limit the time you spend around the nay-sayers in your life, for they will only drag you down. You owe it to yourself to live life fully and abundantly.

Great books to read:
The Holy Bible
Make Your Creative Dreams Real
Succulent Wild Woman
SARK’s Journal and PlayBook
The Secret
See You At the Top

A great website, to learn more about setting goals and achieving them:
www.goalsmentor.com

Dusting Off Your Dreams
by Shanna Beaman

When your children nap or start kindergarten, take some time for yourself to dust off your dreams.

As a mother or a father, giving 100% of yourself to your family is natural and you love and enjoy every minute of it. There does come a time when you have time to think about doing something for yourself, your future, and the future of your family.

What are your goals and dreams? What do you aspire to or hope for? Goals help turn these “wishes” into reality. You can have what you desire with some planning and that is what goal setting is all about. Goal setting gives you the necessary confidence you need to know that you can have anything in life that you want.

What is a goal?

Why should you set goals?

Goals give you direction; they give you a road map. You can’t arrive at a specific destination if you don’t know where you are going. When you know where you are going you will stop driving around in circles and head straight for your destination.

Goals create enthusiasm. Enthusiasm comes from within and when you have a goal, you have a purpose. Every day when you awaken you are excited to get up because you know where you are going and you are getting closer to reaching your dreams!

Goals make you happy. Your mind is alive because it has something encouraging to focus on. Goals help eliminate negative thoughts and discontentment.

Goals help you overcome obstacles. Obstacles are what you see when you take your sites off your goals, so if you don’t have goals, you’re forced to focus on obstacles.

Goals give you discipline. Goals make you mind yourself. Instead of just going through your everyday actions, now you will be asking yourself “Is this action taking me closer to or farther away from my goals?”

Goals give you confidence. When you have clearly defined and written goals, you move toward those goals with unshakable confidence. You don’t let anything get in your way.

If goals are such a great thing then why don’t more people set them? The only reasons that seem reasonable are that people don’t know how and/or they just don’t understand the importance of setting goals.

How do you set goals?

You write them down using these key factors:

• Your goals must be written in a present, positive state as if you have already achieved your goal.
• Your goal must be measurable, attainable and tangible.
• You must have a deadline, a timeframe, in place for when you will reach that goal.
• You must list the obstacles and the solutions to overcome the obstacles you may encounter.
• You must reward yourself when you reach predetermined milestones or when you reach your goal.

It is imperative that your goals incorporate these factors in order to be effective.

Be sure you set goals in every area of your life. A balanced life is a good life. The areas in which to set goals for are:

• Physical and health
• Financial
• Family and relationship
• Spiritual
• Educational and mental

Goals Make You Happy

by: Shanna Beaman

For more information on setting goals, visit: www.goalsmentor.com

Photo Credits:
Reaching the top: D. Sharon Pruit
I made it! D. Sharon Pruit