Commit to It
Whether you’re an artist, entrepreneur, CEO or homemaker, goal setting is the best way to achieve personal and professional growth. More important than anything else you can do, setting goals and working on them daily is more critical to your success than all the books you could read in a lifetime.
Progress is empowering. The more you do the more you can do, and the more you want to.
Progress in the direction of your dreams ignites an inner fire that sustains through thick and thin.
Where the Rubber Meets the Road
Some people have the admirable goal of reading a book a week. Some even a book a day. That’s amazing. We love books and have overstuffed bookcases ourselves. However, don’t just read. Put the reading to work for you. All the books on the shelf will not help your ultimate growth if you don’t apply the learnings through daily effort.
Take Yourself Seriously
If you are compelled by a big goal or called by a dream, believe in it, commit to it then set to work on it. If you are just interested, it’s not going to happen.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if…” doesn’t get it. You must become obsessed with it… obsessed with success in achieving your dream. Or settle for less. Take yourself — and your dreams — seriously.
If This is Too Hard
If you wish for an easier, more comfortable life, and aren’t at that place of pushing beyond your comfort zone for more, make peace with that. That becomes your goal.
It’s your choice. Make it a conscious one. No regrets.
“Income seldom exceeds personal development.“
~Jim Rohn, entrepreneur, author, speaker, 1930-2009
Table of Contents
- Growing into Goals
- Personal and Professional Growth Through Goal Setting
- The Day is the Way
- Goals Become Habits, Habits Become Effortless
- Stacking Success
Audio Article – Personal and Professional Growth:
Personal and Professional Growth Through Goal Setting
Recently, I set the goal to increase my content creation from one to two articles per day. For me that means writing a new article and/or editing and updating an old one, then publishing it to one of our websites. It also entails keyword research for SEO, and depending on the site and topic, may require deep dive research into published studies.
Prior to setting that goal, I was not yet 100% consistent with one article per day. There were always other things crowding in demanding my attention. But as we started focusing on goal setting through the iCreateDaily Facebook community, it was clear that the best way to make the most progress was to rev up my capacity to do more.
How to do more in less time? Setting goals and working them daily.
What Did You Do Today?
Another valuable benefit of goal setting is it frees up tremendous mind-space to get your goals out of your head and onto paper. It’s easier to assess and organize it when we can see it.
Have you ever gotten to the end of a busy day and found yourself unable to quickly recite all that you’d done and accomplished? We are often so busy doing stuff, but is that which fills your day the most essential next thing for achieving your dreams?
Assessing Efficiency
A Question to Ask at the End of Each Day:
Is that which filled my time as I would have it be?
If not, identify one thing you can adjust for a better day tomorrow. Repeat daily.
Personal and professional growth comes from setting goals and working them daily.
Progress is empowering. The more you do the more you can do, and the more you want to.
~LeAura Alderson, cofounder-iCreateDaily.com®
The Day is the Way
To set the habit and rhythm of increasing my content output, in the first quarter, I set a simple quarterly goal of increasing content creation. The corresponding daily goal was to write and/or edit and update two articles per day.
My Q1 Goal Example
- Quarterly Goal – Increase content creation
- Daily Goal – Increase from writing and publishing 1 article per day to 2 articles per day
So I met that goal and felt really good about it. Setting that goal helped me to also see where and how I could be more efficient toward achieving it. Not only did I get more done, I got more done without working harder or longer after the initial week of getting used to the habit and setting a rhythm around it.
That improvement led to me seeing how I could increase it to from two to three articles per day. So my 2nd quarter goal was to set to a new high of three articles per day.
My Q2 Goal Example
- Quarterly Goal – Increase content creation without working more
- Daily Goal – Increase publishing efficacy from 2 to 3 articles per day
And indeed, I met that goal about 90% of the time. So in just 6 months, I increased my productivity by almost 200%!
Progress is empowering. The more you do the more you can do, and the more you want to.
“Every moment of one’s existence, one is growing into more or retreating into less.”
~Norman Mailer, novelist, journalist, playwright, film-maker, actor, 1923-2007
Goals Become Habits, Habits Become Effortless
You see, in order to achieve a goal requires instilling a daily habit that helps you get stuff done. That habit then, becomes the driver for achievement. You can settle in for the ride without spending time and energy figuring it all out and without the daily battle with the dragon of resistance, (a la Steven Pressfield, who has an excellent article on dreams and resistance).
Instead of daily battles with resistance, you can have daily dances doing work that matters to you. Your habits set the rhythm for stepping into success.
The work to achieve a goal requires daily habits. When your goals become habits, they tend to happen without so much effort from you. The goal shifts from being a goal to being a habit.
“Daily goals become habits and habits become effortless.”
~LeAura Alderson, cofounder-iCreateDaily.com®
Stacking Success
What we’re talking about here is stacking success. Another way of putting it is compounding. Goal setting creates habits that compound into success. These daily successes (achieving daily goals) compound into achieving your bigger goals. Achieving your bigger goals compounds into success.
“The only way to arrive is one day at a time. Create daily.”
~LeAura Alderson, cofounder-iCreateDaily.com®
When the Hard Becomes Easy
If you’re learning to swim, that is your goal. Once you know how to swim, you might then change your goal to learning how to scuba. Scuba then is built on your automatic habit of knowing how to swim. Knowing how to swim—what once was a scary unknown—became a habit that you can do without having to think about it.
That’s what goal setting through daily actions does for you. Evolving goals create habits that help you achieve bigger goals. Just be sure to come up for air and take an aerial view of all that you’re doing.
The 90 Day Goals Journal is set up to do this at the end of each day, on Day 7 of each week and also at the end of each month and quarter. When we’re in the trenches doing the work, we need to climb up to the lookout daily to be sure we’re on the right track, otherwise, all the work we’re doing may not be going in the right direction.
“Goals are like eyesight. You need the ability to see far and close and to adjust between the two at will.”
~LeAura Alderson, cofounder-iCreateDaily.com®
More to Enjoy
For more on keeping the macro perspective and big picture thinking, you may enjoy this article for short term goals, or this one on setting macro and micro goals.
“Progress is empowering. The more you do the more you can do, and the more you want to.”
~LeAura Alderson, cofounder-iCreateDaily.com®
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Hello! I’m LeAura, owner and co-creator of iCreateDaily.com®. As an autodidactic philosopher, generalist, personal development advocate, entrepreneur, writer, editor, author, ideator, media publisher, and podcaster, I’m passionate about helping others achieve their best possible life! Our small family of entrepreneurs, writers, investors, educators and creators own and run websites around topics we enjoy, such as gardening, health and fitness, creativity and pets, with more to come.
While my greatest teacher is Life… my formal training includes certifications in mediation, fitness, and strategic intervention coaching, including marriage and family. Today, the synergy of creating websites, articles and podcasts, brings together all my favorite things: family, learning, growth, creating, connecting and contributing. To share these with you is a privilege, that serves my lifelong aspiration to help others.
My personal areas of creativity are in writing, masterminding, ideation, synthesis and bringing ideas to life through business and entrepreneurship, all with a pervasive spiritual foundation with a focus on elevating the lives of others.
Want to submit your photos, videos and/or article content for publication? We love to consider your contribution for publication! creators@icreatedaily.com