How to Write a Highly Effective Goals List

Last Updated on March 14, 2022 by Latrice

If you’re like me, you’ve probably written lots of goals and wish lists with hopes of making some real things happen. Your list was long, but you remained hopeful and got motivated anyways. Then a few weeks to a month go by and the steam you started with is damn near non-existent. You give up on your list and life goes on until you feel compelled to make another list.

It’s an ugly cycle many of us go through. We want to achieve our goals, but life and its many excuses get in our way or we are confronted with challenges we allow to end our progress.

Achieving goals starts with developing the mindset of the person you want to become that has the things you want to have. Then you’ll develop the dedication, persistence, discipline and consistency pretty quickly and easily.  

What usually makes achieving new goals hard or something we don’t do

We fail at making our minds our partners in change. Usually we jump right into action without considering how we are still the same person that got us to the point we want to change. Eventually the old us breaks down our efforts and we fall back into old habits.

Ever hear how you can’t solve a problem at the same level of thinking that created it?

Without work, our minds become our greatest resistors to change. It’s just doing what it’s evolutionarily meant to do. Keep you safe from harm and remember the familiar. But when pursuing goals that require you to grow, being what your mind considers safe and familiar are likely the last things you need.

Stop writing your precious goals in future tense

Stop using terms like “will be,” “going to,” “becoming,” “about to” and any words that indicate these things are not yours already and are happening at a later date. Own them and own them NOW!

To your mind, “going to” isn’t good enough for it to help you do what you’ve got to do right now. It doesn’t recognize time like you and I so it won’t anticipate that change needs to happen NOW to get to the “going to” part.

Telling your mind things “will be” or should happen “some day” allows it to be loose and easily swayed from your efforts.

Write your goals as “I am” affirmations

Take ownership of what you want to be, do, and have by using “I am” affirmations.

Turning your goals into “I am” affirmations improves the chances of your mind working with you instead of against you. When your mind is working with you, it becomes easier to resist the urge to back slide and you become better receptive to the opportunities and tools that’ll help.

You’re basically working your mind to start becoming the person you want to become that’ll get you the things and accomplishments you want to have. Going at it without this work is where struggle and resistance usually knocks us upside the head and kills our desires.

Case Study: Amber Rose

Have you read Amber Rose’s book “How to Be a Bad Bitch”? It’s pretty good overall, but especially good in showing how mental ownership makes goals happen. And in some pretty “out of our control” types of ways.

In the book, Amber Rose shares how she always believed where she grew up was not where she was going to stay. She knew that she wanted more out of life. A lot more. She didn’t know how she was leaving or when, she just knew she wasn’t staying and what she wanted.

Knowing she wasn’t staying, and that she was destined to have a larger life, helped her prepare for what she wanted. She avoided getting pregnant as a teen like her friends did, she worked out regularly to keep her body tight, didn’t allow losses to discourage her, and she knew how to take opportunities as they came.

People usually belittle her accomplishments to “just” being some lucky stripper. But when you peep her journey, she was preparing for the opportunities way before her first dance in a strip club. Way before her appearance in a music video. And waaaay before running into Kanye.

Conclusion & Homework

Writing your goals as if they are already yours is how you get your mind on board with your transformation. Getting your mind on board is how you weaken and beat the struggle and resistance usually accompanied by trying to achieve new goals. Your mind starts to become who it is you need to be to have what it is you want to have.

Homework tonight is to take that list of goals you wrote with my last post and turn them into “I am” affirmative goals. Take ownership of what you want by writing as if you already have them and are them.

If you want to have more eloquent speech, instead of writing “I want to have more eloquent speech” say “I am an eloquent speaker.”

If you want to lose 30 pounds by March of 2018, instead of saying, “I will lose 30 pounds by March 2018” say “I am healthy and I weigh a healthy weight.” And don’t worry, your mind won’t keep you at your current weight. If you associate health and a healthy weight with losing 30 pounds, your mind will get the point.

Have you ever tried using “I am” affirmative goals after failing at writing goals the “usual” way? If you have, let me know and what your results have been like so far. For myself, I am noticing a huge difference that is helping me get stuff done. Including these blog posts. 🙂

Hi! I'm Latrice

Latrice

I weighed 245 pounds and had tried

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