Have you ever walked with purpose into a specific room in your house, only to forget the reason once you got there? “I just know I came in here for something,” being the common exclamation uttered. This phenomenon happens to me more often than I’d like to admit. With the hundred or so things that are going on in my head at any given moment, it is sometimes challenging to fully engage in a certain task for fear of losing sight of the other 99.
Now, take this idea to a macro level. While forgetting how much you really wanted to grab that magazine from the living room will not necessarily impact your day one way or the other, losing focus of significant goals may have a very real effect on the course of your life. I recently attended a workshop in which the facilitator spoke about the importance of maintaining focus on goals, and offered two instructions with which to make them more concrete:
1. To put them in writing, and
2. To state them in the present.
I had heard the first one many times over the years, but the second one had me intrigued. Far from the mantra of creating “SMART” (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely) goals, stating my objectives as if I was already living them did not feel right to me. However, the speaker explained that both our conscious and unconscious mind must to be able to absorb the goal, and the unconscious only understands the present. Clearly, the research suggests that goals are more attainable if both parts of the brain are involved in the process of achieving them. So I tried it. “I enjoy….(insert goal here).”
The research also suggests that it takes approximately 30 days for the unconscious brain to reprogram itself. The implications of goal writing on this information is that by writing goals in the present for 30 days, you can actually program your unconscious mind to work toward achieving the goal, regardless of any internal or external barriers or negative self-talk that manifest through your conscious brain. And by writing the goal down rather than merely restating it to yourself, it increases the level of focus on the specificity of the goal.
I have since discovered that this method has increased my perceived achievability of specific goals, and has drastically reduced negative self-talk and motivational barriers. I encourage you to try writing goals in this way so that you do not lose sight of them amongst the sea of daily disruptors.
