Why Goal Setting Is Important?

Goals are what take us forward in life; they are the oxygen to our dreams. They are the first steps to every journey we take and are also our last. It’s very important that you realize the significance and importance of goal-setting and apply this knowledge in your life.

Successful people “think” success all the time. That is why their goals are firmly lodged in their subconscious.

While most believe that having a long-term goal is crucial to success, successful people understand that without small, daily goals, you will get demotivated easily; success will in turn become hard.

In this article, we will look into the importance of setting daily goals and how to having daily goals that help you achieve success.

How to “think” success with your subconscious

The subconscious is brilliant at prioritizing. It listens to you and gauges from your thoughts what you think is the most important task. This means that what you think about most of the time is what the subconscious will think is the most important thing for you, and will try to find creative solutions.

If you think about problems, the subconscious will try to find you more problems. If you think about solutions, goals and dreams, it will try to make them come true.

But the subconscious goes even further when trying to understand what you think is important; it “listens” to your feelings.

Luckily, it has been proven that a positive thought is over 100 times as positive as a negative thought. This makes it a lot easier to drive positive emotions into your subconscious.

How daily goals keep you positive

It is enough to be positive and keep your thoughts on what you want — and you don’t have to go monitoring your thoughts all the time.

It is enough to imbue your thoughts a few times a day with a powerful positive emotion when thinking about your goals. The more you can do it, the more powerful this exercise will be.

For many, reading their goals or making plans become a chore, something that fills them with negative emotions. This ruins the full potential of these activities; filling yourself with positive emotions while thinking about your goals will make them a lot more powerful.

Over the last several years, I have been taught several exercises that can help you focus more on your goals and spend more time thinking about and feeling about them. What I want you to remember when doing these exercises is to have fun. Never see them as a chore, you are living your goals, it is something to enjoy.

If you don’t feel uplifted at the thought of focusing on your goals, you might as well not do the exercise today. Do it tomorrow instead because it will do more harm than good if you are in the wrong mood when thinking about your goals.

Why positive thoughts inspire you ideas

In my business, I constantly need to come up with new ways to improve efficiency, new ideas to test and new subjects to teach. It takes a lot of creative work — and creative work has always been one of my weaker areas.

Luckily, thanks to all my work with goal setting (and because of my focus on my goals), my subconscious knows these are the things I need the most help with and that they are very important to me.

Every day I get new ideas of things I can try out, products I can create, seminar subjects I can offer, and so on.  All of them aren’t good but when you throw enough “mud against the wall”, something will stick. And that is what my subconscious does — it feeds me idea after idea.

How to set daily goals for yourself

This method is used by countless thousands around the world and for everyone who has tried it, the effects have been incredible:

1. Each morning, take a pen and a piece of paper and write down your 10 top goals. Don’t look at the day before, just think about what you want to most and write them down.
2. Remember to write them in the positive present tense and remember to set a deadline for each goal. Just like we did when setting your long term and short term goals. (For example you could set the goal “I make 10,000 dollars per month by the December 31 next year.”)
3. Do this for all 10 goals.

In the beginning, writing down 10 goals might be difficult. Each day, they might look a bit different and some of the goals you write never come back again.

If you forget a goal, it is because it wasn’t all that important and something more important has taken its place.

What difference does it make?

By starting your day setting your 10 top goals, you jump-start your creativity — which will motivate you for the rest of the day. You will have programmed yourself to focus on your goals and to move towards them and their completion.

What will happen to you?

If you do this, you will start to realize what is important to you. You’ll see what goals keep surfacing and what goals vanish.

You will know what you want and you will find yourself presented with opportunities that you haven’t noticed before.

You will be more creative in finding ideas and chances to make your dreams reality.

Having goals on a daily basis can change your life for the better. It will help you keep moving faster and faster towards your goals and dreams.

So now set your goals and make having daily goals your good habit:

1. Buy a notebook and a pen at your local bookstore.
2. Start writing down 10 goals every morning, without looking at the day before.
3. Take advantage of the opportunities that come your way and capitalize on them.

A TECHNIQUE THAT HELPS WITH THE FOCUSED MODE!

THE POMODORO!

Procrastination :

All of us procrastinate at some point of our lives. Some procrastinate a little and some a lot. Especially when we have to study for an exam!

When you look at something that you really rather not do, it activates the areas of your brain associated with pain (Insular cortex) = neuro discomfort.

Steps to procrastination:

1. Observation – you get a cue – causes tiny bit of unease – unhappy feeling.
2. You funnel attention onto a more pleasant task.
3. You feel happy (temporarily)

In this case the Pomodoro techniques is highly effective!

The Pomodoro Technique is a time management method which was invented by Francesco Cirillo in the early 1980s . The technique uses a timer to break down work into intervals, traditionally 25 minutes in length, separated by short breaks. Each interval is known as a Pomodoro, from the Italian word for a tomato, after the tomato-shaped kitchen timer that Cirillo used as a university student.

The Pomodoro Technique is a time management philosophy that aims to provide the user with maximum focus and creative freshness, thereby allowing them to complete projects faster with less mental fatigue.

The process is simple:

For every project throughout the day, you budget your time into short increments and take breaks periodically.You work for 25 minutes, then take break for five minutes.

Each 25-minute work period is called a “pomodoro”, named after the Italian word for tomato. Francesco Cirillo used a kitchen timer shaped like a tomato as his personal timer, and thus the method’s name.

After four “pomodoros” have passed, (100 minutes of work time with 15 minutes of break time) you then take a 15-20 minute break.

Every time you finish a Pomodoro, you mark your progress with an “X”, and note the number of times you had the impulse to procrastinate or switch gears to work on another task for each 25-minute chunk of time.

Always reward yourself after a Pomodoro task! Web surfing, A cup of coffee, Chocolate, some entertainment or how about some tomato pasta or a slice of pizza!

Do you need the pomodoro technique?

If any of the following phrases relate to your day, there is little doubt that you would benefit from the pomodoro technique;

Not enough time in the day

The pomodoro technique will help you find more time but will also ensure you finish on time. Stop fighting time and work with it instead.

Too many distractions

From YouTube to email and beyond, the possible list of excuses are long and growing daily. The pomodoro technique trains your brain to focus solely on the task at hand and teaches you to deal with distractions later.

Struggle to finish anything

The pomodoro technique enables you to pick a focus for each session, by defining this task you set a goal and work solely on that. This focus helps you to drive tasks through to completion.

Feeling tired and uninspired

The pomodoro technique encourages you to move around in your break, take a real break from what you are doing. This helps you to remain fresh throughout the day, encouraging creativity and quick thinking.

Can’t balance work and life

The pomodoro technique includes a planning period at the beginning of the day, by doing this you are setting realistic targets to complete. Further to this you are working in a focused way, which means you get things finished more quickly.

The two ways of Thinking! 

When we want to create something, learn something new or even study a topic, our mind accesses a method to tackle what we want to learn, study or create. These are ways of thinking.

There are two ways of thinking that I will be dealing with in this blog post.

1. The diffused mode
2. The focused mode

This is salvador Dalí , A Surrealist and an Artist.

Dali used to have an interesting technique to help him come up with his fantastically creative Surrealist paintings. He’d relax in a chair and let his mind go free, often still vaguely thinking about what he had previously been focusing on. He’d have a key in his hand, dangling it just above the floor, and as he would slip into his dreams falling asleep, the key would fall from his hands and the clatter would wake him up, just in time so he could gather up those diffuse mode connections and ideas in his mind, and off he’d go back into the focus mode bringing with him the new connections he’d made while in the diffuse mode.

This is an example of the diffused mode thinking style! It is a more relaxed form of thinking as compared to concentrating and focusing all your attention to one particular topic. In diffused mode you let your mind, sub-conscious/ un-conscious and body provide you with all the answers.

But what does it have to do with more scientific or mathematical kinds of thinking? 

Well, if you look down here, This guy was Thomas Edison, one of the most brilliant inventors ever. 

According to legend, what Edison used to do was he’d sit and relax in his chair, holding ball bearings in his hand. He’d relax away letting his mind run free. Although, it would often noodle back in a much more relaxed way to what he’d been focusing on previously. When Edison would fall asleep, the ball bearings would drop and clatter to the ground just as with Dalí, and it would wake Edison up, and off he’d go with his ideas from the diffuse mode ready to take them into the focus mode and build on them. 

So, the bottom line is, when you’re learning something new, especially something that’s a little more difficult, your mind needs to be able to go back and forth between the two different learning modes. You cannot be in both modes at the same time. One is a relaxed form the other is a more focused oriented form.

That’s what helps you learn effectively. 

Next up! we shall discuss a technique that helps with the focused mode of thinking!

10 ways for Increasing your Creativity and Innovation

1. Truly creative people have developed their ability to observe and to use all of their senses, which can get dull over time. Take time to “sharpen the blade” and take everything in.
2. Innovation is based on knowledge. Therefore, you need to continually expand your knowledge base. Read things you don’t normally read.
3. Your perceptions may limit your reasoning. Be careful about how you’re perceiving things. In other words, defer judgment.
4. Practice guided imagery so you can “see” a concept come to life.
5. Let your ideas “incubate” by taking a break from them. For example, when I’m working on a project, one of the best things I can do to take a break from it is play my guitar or go for a run, or two for a drive. It shifts my brain into another place and helps me be more innovative and creative. This is the use of a Pomodor technique! Look it up! This is also the use of the diffuse mode of thinking (I will talk about this in my next post!)
6. Experience as much as you can. Exposure puts more ideas into your subconscious. Actively seek out new experiences to broaden your experience portfolio.
7. Treat patterns as part of the problem. Recognising a new pattern is very useful, but be careful not to become part of it.
8. Redefine the problem completely. “Your problem is not the problem; there is another problem. When you define the real problem, you can solve it and move on.” After all, if you had correctly defined the real problem, you would have solved it long ago because all problems have solutions.
9. Look where others aren’t looking to see what others aren’t seeing.
10. Come up with ideas at the beginning of the innovation process … and then stop. Many times we come up with several ideas and start innovating, and then we come up with more ideas and never get a single idea done. At some point you have to turn off the idea generation part of the process and really work on the innovation and execution part in order to bring a project to life.

Defining Creativity

When we think of Creativity and Education, the first thing that comes to my mind is having fun in class while learning. Although educators claim to value creativity, they don’t always priorities it.

Teachers often have biases towards a creative child, fearing that creativity in the classroom will be disruptive. They undervalue creative personality attributes such as risk taking, impulsivity and independence. They inhibit creativity by focusing on the reproduction of knowledge and obedience in class.

What is Creativity?

Creativity is a function of knowledge, curiosity, imagination, and evaluation. The greater your knowledge base and level of curiosity, the more ideas, patterns, and combinations you can achieve, which then correlates to creating new and innovative products and services. But merely having the knowledge does not guarantee the formation of new patterns. The bits and pieces must be shaken up and iterated in new ways. Then the embryonic ideas must be evaluated and developed into usable ideas. In other words, there really is a process.

To help you master that process, you first must understand three important levels of creativity, which are discovery, invention, and creation.

1. Discovery: The lower level of creativity is discovery. Just as the name implies, it’s when you become aware of or stumble upon something—discover it. For example, there is art called “discovered art.” It might be a rock with a unique shape or a piece of wood with an interesting pattern. If you have ever purchased a piece of natural stone or wood art, that art was discovered art. Many inventions start with a discovery.

2. Invention: A higher level of creativity is invention. For example, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. But you have to ask yourself, “Would the telephone have been invented without Bell?” The answer is yes. Eventually the telephone would have been invented because the science was there. It might have taken longer, but it would have happened. So while invention is higher than discovery, it’s something that is going to happen. If you don’t invent it, someone else will.

3. Creation: Creation is the highest level of creativity. For example, the stage play As you like it is genuinely a creation. Elizabethan drama would have gone on without Shakespeare, but no one else would have written As you like it. Similarly, there are things that only your organisation can create! The key is tapping in to what those things are.

Next up! 10 ways for Increasing your Creativity and Innovation!

Don Norman

Donald Arthur Norman (born December 25, 1935) is the director of The Design Lab at University of California, San Diego.

He is best known for his books on design, especially The Design of Everyday Things. He is widely regarded for his expertise in the fields of design, usability engineering, and cognitive science. Norman was also part of a select team flown in to investigate the Three Mile Island nuclear accident.^[ He is also a co-founder and consultant with the Nielsen Norman Group.

In this talk from 2003, design critic Don Norman turns his incisive eye toward beauty, fun, pleasure and emotion, as he looks at design that makes people happy. He names the three emotional cues that a well-designed product must hit to succeed.