When you set yourself new goals and determine what kind of life you would like to lead, do you ever consider that the people you surround yourself with could help you achieve this or hinder you? What effect do the people in your life have on your successes?

We tend to neglect this aspect of our goal setting. We look at ourselves and only judge what we are achieving in isolation to the environment we live in. Yet the people that surround us can help or hinder us vastly in reaching our goals.

You want to attend night school to add to your qualifications in order to enhance your career path. Your partner wants you home to share their life with you. You will find it extremely difficult to continue with your studies.

You live in a neighbourhood where the bulk of the young people are unemployed and have little chance of ever finding employment that is better than working as a dish washer in a food outlet. What are your chances as a young person of developing a meaningful career?

As a young person you grow up in a village where all the children go to school, but not further than the third year because they have to stay at home to help with the farming activities of the family. There would have to be a miracle for you to become a doctor or teacher that you have always dreamt of doing.

Half of your class at high school is pregnant because it is a cool thing to do. As a girl what are your chances of staying childless?

Have a close look at the people that surround you. Are they in line with what you dream for yourself. Will they support you or hinder you. But it’s not even just whether they will do this. In many cases just their existence is enough to divert you from your goals.

In many cases the people around you carry the burden of their unfulfilled dreams. This negative energy is all around them. By being with these people you too will start to feel that this is all there is available for you.

You buy into the negativity and the presumption that the world will give you a raw deal. Whereas if you have people around you who do not presume that they are destined for failure but actively view their lives as full of positive opportunities you will find that you view life in the same way.

It’s not only the goals that you might not be able to achieve if you surround yourself with people who do not share your vision. It is also the fact that you could end up finding yourself in a negative space that won’t allow you to even contemplate setting a goal.

This could be because the people that you surround yourself with, might want you to stay the same because this fits into their own world view. They don’t want you to achieve anything better than they can because this could mean that you might move away from them.

Make sure you surround yourself with people who can help you achieve your goals rather than with people who might stop you from living your life to the fullest.

When you have committed yourself to a huge task and you cannot get out of it you often use a method to help yourself through this ordeal. And that is breaking your progress down into tiny achievable steps and small victories .

An example of this is Terry Fox. Terry was a Canadian humanitarian, athlete, and cancer treatment activist. He became famous for the Marathon of Hope, a cross-Canada run to raise money for cancer research, which Fox ran with one prosthetic leg.

When he was once asked how he managed to run so far he said that he told himself ‘just one more telephone pole’. His courageous run has inspired running clubs all over the world to hold Terry Fox fundraising runs to raise funds for the fight against cancer.

When you have set yourself a goal of whatever magnitude, keep your eye on the main prize but at the same time make sure that you have many small victories that you can celebrate. Small steps that you can take regularly, even daily, towards your goal.

There are many stories about J K Rowling and how she wrote every day and sent out her books to publishers endlessly before a publishing house had the courage to take her on as a client.

In the 2009 Worlds Athletics Championship a Great Britain runner achieved a bronze medal. In a quick interview on BBC after winning the bronze medal, Jenny Meadows commented “It proves you should never say never, you should always believe in yourself. If you work hard and keep the faith, good things will happen’.

Have you set yourself a major goal and found you could not continue with it? Was it too much to ask of yourself? Did you give up?

What would have happened if you had focused on small steps towards this huge goal? Every day a step towards it. You set aside an hour a day or maybe even two hours per day to work towards your huge dream.

This could be training to your first ever marathon. It could be a dream of playing the organ in your church and you practice an hour per day. What about becoming a writer? Spend one hour per day writing a few pages of that best seller novel.

Or you might want to become a famous photographer, designer, public speaker or whatever you have secretly dreamt of wanting to do. What would one hour’s effort every day do to those dreams?

One thing is certain, that kind of relentless effort would bring you closer to your dreams. And if you did this over several years, you will be able to play the organ, take magic photographs, design those cute children’s clothes or write your first novel.

Take those small steps, run to the next telephone pole and take just one more step towards your goal. As the old saying goes ‘Rome was not built in a day’. Take this saying to heart, it still applies today.

How can you reach your goals? Practice the rule of seven every day. In a nutshell what that means is that you determine seven steps that you should take every day to take you closer to your goal. If you do this, over a period of time you will reach your goal.

How does this work? Every evening before you shut down your work for the day sit down and decide on seven things you need to do the next day that will seriously improve your chances of reaching your target. Of course you could make this ten steps, or if you are pressed for time only five steps.

As an example, if you wanted to sell your services as a tax consultant you might implement this plan. You have recently started your own consultancy and you have no clients. What seven activities would get you closer to having as many clients as you would need in order to make a good living.

If that means you need to have 30 or even 50 clients then work out what seven steps you can take every day that will get you closer to finding these clients. You could decide on the first day of your plan of action to design an ad, write the copy, get rates at your local freesheet, check the radio ads, place your ad in both media and pay for them.

Your second day could involve setting up a website, writing your copy for it, designing a contact form, adding a blog and writing your first article. Then your next day’s activity would be to contact your local chamber of commerce, negotiate an ad for their site, see if they will take an article of yours to publish and book yourself into the next networking events.

And so the process continues. Every day find seven imminently important things to do that you know will move your business forward. Sometimes these activities will not bring any results for you. You might get a list of people and start on a task of phoning at least seven people on this list to see if they might need a tax consultant.

It could be that you do not get one new client in this way for a few days. Yet every day you are phoning up seven people with the view of finding somebody who could be persuaded to try your services. Whether you are successful or not is not the point.

What is important here? It is the seven step process that pushes you to actually work on your business every day with a focus on the end goal that you wish to achieve. If your end goal is 30 new clients every one of your 7 daily steps has to focus on this target.

The principle behind this process is that if you hammer away at the nail, eventually it will go into the wood. If you continue to work at the process, eventually you will find success.

If you phone up enough people, run many ads, write articles on your blog, have them published in newspapers or on relevant websites, you will find that your 30 clients will come to you. There is no doubt about this.

Don’t think that you can skip steps when it comes to improvement. There are not many times in your life where you can get away with skipping a few steps. You have to plan your progress step by step and don’t skimp on the in between steps.

It’s impossible to attend a post graduate degree course if you haven’t got a first degree. You cannot speak a language if you have not learnt new words. You can’t run a competitive race if you have not trained. And the list goes on.

Yet in life how often do you get sold something that is supposed to take those steps away and make life easier. Almost daily you get spam in your email inbox that tells you that you can buy a degree. You get sold a course where you can learn a language in fourteen days.

Somebody tries to sell you running shoes because that will enable you to complete your first race and maybe even win it. What about all the promises on the internet that tell you that you can earn $20 000 in the first three days.

You buy a house that you can’t afford but the bond salesperson tells you that you won’t have to pay until the second year. Well, in the second year you will have to pay those installments. They are not going to go away.

Somehow we actually believe these. Or at least we almost believe them. But we manage to bury the voices that tell us that this is unbelievable and we go for it thinking we can easily take that short cut.

There are no short cuts. Have a look at Tiger Woods and how he trained to become the golfing champion he is now. As a small child he was already practicing for hours a day. He did not have a short cut to world fame and fortune.

See what the famous pianists did or an opera singer such as Pavaroti. They had no short cuts. They worked for their success and achievements. They worked incredibly hard.

The same applies to you.

If you want to see improvements in your life you will have to put in the effort. You will need to fight hard for everything. And you cannot skip any steps.

But then if you work on small steps every day you will find yourself slowly but surely moving towards the achievements you wish for yourself. This applies to you getting fitter, improving in your job or working on a happier relationship.

Every small step you take will help you towards achieving the improvements you want for yourself. Ignore the false promises that you are constantly given. Understand that putting in your own effort will guarantee your improvements.

Hoping that somebody will give them to you on a plate is not going to make it happen. Not even the Law of Attraction will bring you the huge house you dream of or the new and bigger car every year.

Dreaming fabulous dreams will not give you the money for world travel or bring a wonderful partner into your life. You will need to put in the hard work, the constant effort and only then may your dreams eventually come true.

Deciding on what to improve on could be an overwhelming thought. What of the many areas of your life do you want to have more success at? Where do you want to feel more confident?

Some people are lucky. They have one overwhelming passion and they end up spending all their efforts in improving their performance in this area. This could be anything from a hobby such as growing orchids to a professional athlete.

These people set their goals seriously and with intent. They know what they want to be able to achieve. They track their progress minutely and record every success and failure. This focus is what gets them to their goals.

Most people do not have the same passion. They can’t even decide on a specific goal they want to achieve. Their goal is a vague one such as ‘want to earn more money’, or ‘have a nice relationship’.

Then others set vague goals such as ‘want a better job’ or ‘climb a high mountain’. They want to ‘run a race’ or have a ‘nicer garden’. None of these goals will bring you any further achievements. They are so vague that they cannot be achieved.

How can you decide on what to improve upon if you have no idea what your goals should be. If you are Usain Bolt you know that to break the 200m world record you have to run quicker than 19.30 seconds. So you target a quicker time than that to a fraction of a second. Then you run it during the World Championships in Berlin in 2009. A cool 19.19 seconds in fact.

Would he break that record if he had this vague notion that he wanted a world record but had not idea what time he would need to run in order to break it? Yet we find ourselves day after day deciding on getting better at something, more efficient, better skilled or more knowledgable and yet we have not quantified what that actually means to us.

So how do you improve? You have to decide what exactly you want to improve upon. Of course in some smaller goals you will find it easy to do this. It boils down to a mental exercise.

You got to work late? You know you need to find a route that is not as busy or get up earlier and have a clear run on the road to work. You know exactly what time you have to be in the car or at the bus station in order to get to work on time. You just take a chance every morning.

In your mind you can work out what needs to be done. You just need to get up fifteen minutes earlier. That’s all it takes. You just do it in the mornings. If you push that behaviour through and make it a habit you have your improvement. And it didn’t require massive amounts of planning or goal setting on paper.

But that’s an easy one. There are goals that can not just set up in your mind. They need to be planned and worked at. Inevitably the big ones will have many set backs that you need to face.

Cut them down into small achievable steps of improvement that you can tackle easily. It will make your work that much easier.

There is no such thing as a smooth ride. In all your endeavours there will be obstacles. Sometimes, if you are lucky, these will be small ones that you barely notice. Other times these hurdles may be so large that you think there is no way around them.

How do you get around these obstacles? Your first step towards jumping those hurdles is to check your attitude. Having a positive attitude is half the battle won. If you groan at the thought of these hurdles they will become twice as difficult to navigate around.

You could think that an obstacle is an opposing event. Something or somebody is working against you and doesn’t want you to achieve your goals. This attitude will make it extremely difficult to tackle your tasks, It will be heavy going. Even before you start.

You might have had the following happen to you. You are in a hurry for an important appointment and you get stuck in a traffic jam that slows you down. You fume about this. It’s going to kill your chances of that new job.

You make your way through the traffic and on the open road you come across another traffic jam which in fact is a serious accident. If you had been there earlier you could have been the car involved in this.

Your obstacle could have ended up being your life saver.

Your obstacle could be an event that is purely there to re-route you. This could mean that you need to learn more skills, attain more knowledge for your goal to be achievable. It could also mean that the goal you have set yourself might not really be right for you at this particular moment.

Maybe you have other important relationships in your life that don’t allow you to complete your goal. You need to take a detour. Possibly your children are too young for you to be able to take on the challenge of that senior position you are hoping for.

It could be that you want to be an athlete but your body needs to develop further so that you can achieve the success you have set yourself. Many top tennis stars for instance tend to be pushed into competitions too early.

Their bodies cannot cope with the strain of the work that is required to compete at the top level. Many young tennis players burn out before they have the chance of fulfilling their potential.

Then there might be your plans to study for a degree or add on a specialist diploma to your qualification. You might not be accepted to the college or university straight away. That means you have to study hard for an entrance exam. Possibly, this could give you an insight into the course and make you realise that this is not in fact the right career move for you.

There could be many reasons why you are faced with an obstacle. Examine them with care and see what positives you may be able to learn from these. How you approach them will be more important than the size of the hurdle.

Persistence is most probably the most important quality that you will need if you want to be a high achiever. But even if you just want to achieve your goals for a happier life then never giving up on your dreams is the key.

This is the one area where we mostly fail. We give up far too easily. One or two small hiccups in our plans and we start wondering why we ever considered this onerous task as a goal. What were we thinking?
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We had dreams of getting a trim figure and feeling healthier. But we gave up after a few weeks of fiddling around with a diet and half heartedly attending a gym. We stopped before we could start benefiting from the new life style.

What about the evening course we started on? We had always dreamt of learning French. So now was our chance. Two nights a week to class, got the books, started learning the first words. But as we carried on going the class started getting smaller and smaller.

Then you missed a lesson because a friend had a birthday and you went out with the group to celebrate. Then the next week you were too tired and suddenly you were missing class because you couldn’t keep up anymore.

Twenty sentences of French later and you gave up.. There went the idea of reading your favourite French authors in their original language. It got too hard. You didn’t want to give up your own time anymore. You had better things to do and in any case you always knew you were no good at languages.

Do you recognise yourself in this scenario? Have you started something that you really wanted to do and then when it got a bit hard to follow through on what was required, you bailed out, gave up or words to that effect?

Who said following your dreams was going to be easy? Yet that’s what we all expect. We want it all to come effortless. No pain. We want it to come to us in our sleep never mind any other method of learning.

There comes a time in any learning process where you overcome that painful first barrier. That’s when you have sufficient skills or knowledge for the process to become a little more fun.

That happens for instance while learning a language when you can actually start picking up the meaning in some sentences. That positive feedback is a huge encouragement. You’ve learnt enough to say hello to somebody and enquire of them how they are doing.

Then you add the next amount of work to your small success and it becomes easier again. Now you can also ask for directions and you feel that trip to Paris could just be on the cards soon. After all you can speak the language already.

Often you have to face obstacles that have been thrown at you by external factors. You might not be able to continue with French classes because you had an unexpected expense and you cannot afford the fees anymore.

Or it could be that the language college has to close down because of a lack of students in an economic down turn. These obstacles can be quite devastating. Here you are working hard, achieving some success and your opportunity is withdrawn.

Learn how to over come these obstacles in your path, whether they are the ones you are making for yourself or the ones circumstances serve up to you.

What in your life would you like to improve on? What is there in your life that you might not be happy with? You might think that because you are in a happy relationship and your career is going good you need no further improvement.

This is of course true if you want to just relax and drift through life. If you want to increase your pleasures, get more out of your life have a higher standard of living then you might want to check what in your life could do with some improvement.

Most people consider the word improvement to have some negative connotation. We think it means that when we need to improve we somehow are failing or are not adequate. This is not the case.

Improvement is about getting better at something. From good to excellent maybe. But it doesn’t mean that you are failing. So if you can play the piano reasonably well, improving your playing by more practice and lessons, will give you much more pleasure.

If you are swimming ten lengths of the pool easily, you might want to work a bit harder and swim twenty lengths. You know this will be good for your health, will increase your heart rate and in general add to a better weight and a glowing look of healthy skin.

That is an improvement. You were not failing before. You have just improved on an activity in order to give yourself more benefits.

So what in your life could be improved upon?

Have a look at your life. Go through your daily activities and see where you have aggravation, annoyance, anger or disappointments. Everytime you feel these negative emotions you will find that there is something you can do to improve on the situation.

If you are constantly angry at your boss because he is treating you disdainfully then there is something you can do to improve the situation. You could talk to your boss and find out why he does not respect you. If you find you do not have the courage to approach him then see if you can find a course where you can learn how to become more assertive.

You might be annoyed every day at your partner for throwing his clothes on the floor without putting them into the wash basket. What can you do about this to improve the relationship so that he will do this for himself and you do not need to clean up after him?

What if you are unhappy about your weight and you can’t fit into your clothes anymore? What do you do about that? You can change the food you eat or start an exercise regime. You could avoid the staff canteen and pack your own healthy and less fattening lunch box or you could read a book at lunch rather than joining your friends for a hamburger.

There are many ways that you can approach each of these instances where you know that improvement in a situation or change in attitude and effort could give you much happiness and a welcome improvement in the quality of your life.

Many people consider working on self-improvement as a constant work load rather than looking at it as the invigorator of your life. Attitude will make all the difference in your life when it comes to improvement.

Listen to the interviews of athletes who have lost a big game or didn’t achieve what they had set out to do. Very few of them say that they are fed up of not winning and are going to give up. Most of them state emphatically that this was a learning experience and they would go home and rethink their training strategy to improve on their performance.

They have the idea of winning set in their minds. And they will work on improving their performance until they are first in their field. And sometimes these very sports people don’t ever get to be number one. Many of them work around the periphery always just on the fringe of success. But they don’t give up and continue to work at it.

In fact in many sports such as tennis or golf you can make a really good living just getting through the first round. Sure you are not going to see huge returns such as the Roger Federer’s or Tiger Woods’ have. But they certainly make a fair income by working hard and constantly improving their skills.

Every improvement you make to your life whether with regards to personal relationships or your work, will bring you greater happiness and contentment. That doesn’t mean you will be number one in your field. But by constantly striving and working at your skills you will find your own level of satisfaction.

Do not see this focus on improvement as a task or job. It might certainly feel like it on many occasions especially when you find yourself not reaching your goals as you had hoped.

You might have studied at evening school over several years for your post graduate degree. Yet it did not bring you that career advancement as you had hoped. There are a fair number of MBA graduates who have found this out much to their disappointment.

Yet the years spent learning will have contributed to that person’s life. New knowledge will have been absorbed, new friendships made, new skills acquired and a mind pushed and stretched to achieve more.

That qualification will benefit you in other ways even if it might not have gotten you a jump into senior management. It could have kept you your job for instance. Without your MBA you might have ended up getting retrenched.

View every bit of improvement as an achievement. Realise that sometimes just the effort you expend to improve yourself could be the benefit not necessarily what you had wished for. Just using your brain and learning could be it rather than the actual qualification itself.

What about older folk who at the age of 90 go back to school to learn to read and write. Is this a wasted effort? Not at all. Just keeping the brain active and using and exercising your memory will add considerably to your enjoyment of life.

Does anger have power? Are you being powerful when you are angry? The answers to these questions depend on what you mean by power.

Certainly you can intimidate many people with your anger – especially children or others who are physically weaker than you, or people who are terrified of disapproval and rejection. Anger – other than the outrage from the loving adult that leads to taking action against injustice – is a form of control. When you succeed in making others afraid of you, it often it works to get them to do what you want. But it will never work to get them to feel what you want them to feel, and it will never lead to the sharing of love.

Power Over or Power Within

There is a huge difference between “power over” and “power within.”

Anger at others is about power over, while taking responsibility for your own feelings is about power within.

People who use anger as a form of power and control believe that the means justifies the end. They believe that intimidating others into doing what they want them to do will work for them to make them happy. This is a huge false belief.

While you may be able to achieve financial success through various forms of manipulation, people who do achieve success in this way are not happy people. Have you ever seen an angry person be truly joyful?

Happiness and joy come from personal power, not from power over. Happiness and joy come from taking responsibility for your own feelings and behavior, and from caring about others rather than using or discounting others. Truly happy people are cooperative with others rather than controlling.

How Do You End Up Feeling When You Get Angry?

If you tend to get angry at others, take a look inside. How do you feel when you get angry? You might feel good for the moment, as all addictions feel good for the moment. But does getting angry at others lead you to feeling fulfilled, joyful and peaceful inside? Does it lead to connected, fun and fulfilling relationships with others? When you manage to get your way or get someone to do what you want them to do, do you end up feeling worthy, lovable, and filled up inside?

If you are honest with yourself, you will discover that anger or other forms of intimidation lead to feeling empty inside. The fullness of inner peace and joy come from being loving to yourself and to others – not from getting what you think you want.

Anger Meant to Intimidate May be Abusive

Anger meant to intimidate can take many forms. It can be loud or it can be silent. It can come through a look that says, “If you don’t do what I say, I will punish you with shutting down and withdrawing my love.” It can be a quiet threat, a menacing look, or overt rage. It can be physically violent or emotionally violent. But when it completely disrespects the other person, it is abusive. It is about getting what you want while disregarding what the other person wants and feels.

When your intent is to protect/control, anger may be one of the forms this takes. When it is habitual and addictive, it will change only when your intent changes from controlling to loving yourself and others.

While the wounded self believes that anger power works for you, what it is really doing is creating your aloneness and emptiness.

So what do you really want? Do you want to get your way, or do you want to be a happy, fulfilled person, able to share your love with others? You get to choose.