Chocolate Blues Business Networking Festival August 2013 | Page 16

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The POWER
of GOALS

“If you set goals and go after them with all the determination you can
muster, your gifts will take you places that will amaze you.” -Les Brown

This is one of those topics that I could write about all day, every day. Goal
setting, goal achieving… goals goals... goals!
I remember my elementary school teachers teaching me about goals right
from the get-go. When it came to handwriting, they had us repeat this
jingle over and over again, “Good, Better, Best; Never Let it Rest; ‘Til the
Good Gets Better and the Better Gets Best!” We all have goals. Each and
every one of us do. However, I believe some of us think we gave up having
to set goals a long time ago. We wake up everyday with the goal to live
another day. Ok… maybe that is a stretch, but don’t we all have goals to
some extent? And, why is it so important to have goals?
The most successful people on this planet didn’t wake up one day with an
idea and a few minutes later, after they got dressed, became successful…
No way. They had an idea, and they developed a plan. Within that plan
there were goals – some big, some little – some attainable, some way out
there.
Each day they worked at it – chipping away, having triumphs and failures
along the way but tweaking and re-evaluating and working toward goals.
Goals!

We have had goals from the day we were born. Sit up. Crawl. Walk. Talk.
Feed ourselves. Dress ourselves. Express ourselves. Make friends. Learn.
Communicate. Develop relationships. Learn a skill. Get a job. Get married.
Have a family. Buy a car. Buy a house. Take a vacation…. Many of these
things are milestones that we can only achieve with a plan of action and
goal setting.
Goals are objectives that you intend to achieve. Going through life without
goals is like getting in your car and driving aimlessly while expecting to
arrive at your destination…all the while not having a clue how to get there.
If you had a roadmap or a GPS, you could have gotten there in a reasonable
amount of time. Because you just drove and drove – maybe you would
eventually get there, but at what cost? How much time and energy did
you waste because you didn’t take a couple of minutes to punch in the
destination in your GPS?
Moving through life without a roadmap and expecting to reach certain
milestones haphazardly is certainly one way to go. However, if you want to
get somewhere quickly, using less energy and time, then set goals. Work
towards them, and you will find yourself exactly where you wanted to be.

-by Sue Bridgman, Chocolate Blues

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