Apply these 13 keys of effective goal setting to unlock the door to total success!

By Alison Greiner, Life Coach

Are you striving to achieve weight loss? Following your meal plans, exercise program and taking your vitamins is essential to successful weight loss but without a plan you’re simply adrift on the tide. Truestar has a comprehensive goal setting program that works to improve many areas of your life: personal development goals; family and relationship goals; material and fun goals; career, educational and learning goals and financial goals.

Failing to plan is planning to fail, yet less than 3% of the population set goals and less than 1% of people write down their goals.

Many studies, including those done at Harvard University and work by Abraham Maslow agree on one thing, every peak performing person sets goals. When you write out your goals and review them, your subconscious mind goes to work immediately to bring the goals into reality—making us more alert of opportunities, ideas, motivation, incentives and insight.

Apply the following 13 Keys to Accomplishment:

1. Desire: You must yearn for your goal. Set a goal that you intensely desire.

2. Belief: You must absolutely believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that you can achieve it. If your conscious mind can’t accept the goal there’s no way your subconscious mind can go to work to achieve it.

3. Challenge: Your goal should take you out of your comfort zone. It should stretch you and bring you to your next level.

4. Write it down! This is the most important step—until a goal is put on paper it is simply a dream. Use your Truestar Goal Setting Program to record all your goals in detail.

5. List your accomplishments: Make a list of all the things you will experience when you accomplish it. The more reasons you have to want to achieve it, the more motivation and desire you will have to follow through.

6. Analyze your position: Know where you are starting. If your goal is to lose weight, record your current weight. Or, if you want to increase your income, know how much you currently make. For there to be an end there must be a beginning.

12. Get a clear mental picture of your goal as already accomplished: Visualization is a technique of focusing in a highly concentrated manner on a task, project or goal. Visualization has been used by highly successful athletes such as Michael Jordan, Jack Nicklaus and Wayne Gretzky, as well as by brain surgeons and successful business people. As recommended by the SPTS Daily Life Improvement Checklist, spend time everyday visualizing the accomplishment of your goal. For more on visualization read Thirty Seconds to Successful Visualization.

13. Persistence: never give up! Keep working toward your goals. If you fall, pick yourself up and keep going. The best plan on earth will never work unless you do!