Polished Professional Image Blog

Your success depends on your ability to turn dreams and visions into reality. Yet, according to a survey conducted by ThinkIQ.com, less than 15% of the U.S. population has written goals. How will you know if you have arrived, if you don’t know the destination? So, what is a goal and why do you need to write them down? Goals have been defined as dreams with a timeline. But they are more than that. Goals are dreams with timelines that you have control over. Consider - winning the lottery is a dream; winning the lottery this Friday is a dream with a timeline, but you have no control over picking those winning numbers, so “winning the lottery” is not a goal. Now, the reason that you write your goal down is that writing them gives them credibility to your brain. “Ooh”, your brain says, “this must be important. She wrote it down”. Writing your goals also gives you a vehicle for keeping track of them, allowing you to see when you are drifting off-course. It has been said that airline pilots are off course 95 percent of the time. What keeps you from landing in Maine when you had planned to go to Florida is the fact that pilots constantly look at their “goals” which come in the form of their flight plan, their altimeter, the horizon, their compass. Because they constantly review these tools, they are able to make adjustments when needed.

So what are your goals?