I have spent the last couple of days wondering how i can prioritize my goals… as I mentioned in my earlier articles, I feel that I have too many goals, and need to prioritize them! I went to Stockholm this weekend, and had a wonderful time with a good friend of mine.. Just to relax and defragment my mind! We ate at fancy restaurants, and had cool drinks at nice cocktail lounges at SturePlan in central Stockholm! The weather was beautiful and we really got to chill out. But in the back of my mind I felt the stress caused by the “too many goals issue”. On the way back, I was browsing through an FHM magazine… I do not particularly like those kinds of magazines, as they are all pictures and no text… nothing that can actually inspire you except from cars you cannot afford, and cool watches! What they did have though, was a “HOT or NOT” scheme about fashion or tv series or whatever! even though I did not pay attention to what it was about, I noticed that this scheme was what I needed! I am going to make a “HOT OR NOT” of my goals… Ill just put in some other factors, namely URGENCY and IMPORTANCE!

When I have my goals visualized it is much easier to control them! If the goal is not that important but urgent, I will see if I can get it done fast, if it is important but not urgent, it can wait a little… every week the schedule will move one click to the left, and all the goals will get a bit more urgent! If you think this is interesting I have made an Excel ready for you to download here: PRIORITIZE GOALS Just download it and plot in your goals… it will help you get a better vision of your goals, and how you prioritize!

My next step is to make a PAL list inspired by the sales departments of large companies. A PAL is short for Potential Accounts List! The list is made up by large and interesting accounts that the company would want/like as clients. This helps me in ONE major area… Because a PAL can only have a certain number of accounts! So, if they put in a new account, another one has to go. So, Iam going to use this for my goals. I will make a list of all the goals I would want to acchieve! But only 10 can make it at the time to my  PGL = Priority Goal List! When one is acchieved, a new one can enter from my goal list… if I would want to put another goal on my PGL, another one has to go! This way my PGL is always high priority goals!

Let me know if you can use these tools, and if you think there is anything we can change a bit, to optimize it!

/Kas

CRISIS!!!! What can I do?

I have reached a bit of a crisis in my personal development journey. Yesterday I had a long talk with my wing man on this journey, and had the idea that I might be trying to reach too many goals at one time! Currently I have goals within Personal Finances, which are going ok, Social Dynamics, which are kind of stagnated, Time Management which I am not really following up on 100%, sports, which is going really well (I was awarded “best on ground” at my first Aussie rules football match this year, last saturday) and on top of that I am constantly finding other areas that I would like to improve on! I know from earlier that it is an issue that I am not focused on a few things at the time! It really gives me a head ache thinking about these things all the time, and I think I need to rethink the whole thing… take a break, and defragment my mind a little. My motivation has suddently plummeted. And this is the wrong time of year for this…. summer is comming, I should be totally motivated and focused.

One of the biggest issues is actually TIME… I dont feel that i have time for my friends at the moment! I train boxing monday, wednesday and friday, football tuesday and thursday, match saturday, social experiments/ dynamics wednesday and friday, I need to see my family more often, hang out with my friends, go to work, work on facebookdater and rankajob (my two new private projects) and…. STOP!!!

I dont have a clue what to do other than sit down and REALLY go through my goals! So, Iam going to go to Stockholm for the weekend and relax a bit… do nothing, eat out, sleep in and so on for three days. Then I want to find just a few goals that I want to follow up on and stay focused on those, till I reached my goals.

Hi everybody, sorry it has been a while, I have been flat out busy!

Saturday I went to a really interesting workshop lead by the just 21 year old Marlene Hörfarter. She is incredible… very inspiring for that young a girl!

The workshop was named something like “Take Life Into Your Own Hands!”, and gave me a really good point towards my personal change journey. The very fundamentals of such change is working on your goals. I say “working on” because you need to really define your goals. I have been a bit naive towards this the whole time. I have had hundreds of not very defined goals, one day working towards one, the other day working towards another. I have totally changed my head around these things. From now on I will work on ONE goal at the time, when I cannot work towards that goal anymore, I will start on the other. I have been thinking a bit about my goal of getting out of debt. This is a goal, that Iam working on, but I cannot do much more than I do now (well I could, but i have prioritized other things) So, I take out an amount of cash every sunday. This is all the money I spend one week at the time. My point is that this goal, I will be working on for a while, but I can work on other things meanwhile. I guess you could say that Iam latently working on this goal, which makes room for other goals, to be worked on!

So, the very first thing to do, is write down your goals… all of them… spend a couple of hours, writing down your goals, dont be too specific, just write it down, and throw out the ones you find irrelevant in the process. After a couple of hours, you have your goals, and you are ready to start working on those. the next thing we did, was working on our values. What are your values in life?

Make a list of 10 values… spend some time creating those! after doing this, you sort out 3 of the less important ones, then another 2 and another 2. You are now down to 3 values, that should define you the most. The real question here is this: “Do your values correspond with your goals?” think about it for a minute… In coaching often we are talking about goals, as ”end-goals” and ”means-to-an-end-goals”. End goals often correspond to your values, while means-to-an-end-goals are often goals, that actually hides another goal! Ill give you an example: Us guys are often talking about wanting a new cool car. This is almost never an “end-goal” but a means to an end. Because when we want this cool new car, we want that because of what it can give us; respect, status, chicks…. so… what we REALLY want is respect, status and chicks… often those are also means to an end goals, so you could ask the question; why do you want respect, status, and chicks…. It could be that you are depending on external sources of acceptance, and a REAL “End-Goal” could be that you want to be able to rely on your self for a feeling of acceptance. So, if your real goal is “An Internal Source of Acceptance”, how do you work towards this?

To be continued…

Imagine a scenario, where you achieve ALL your dreams… then imagine another scenario where you achieve, say, a great part of your dreams… I have had a problem, always chasing a dream, then halfway there, I see another thing I would like to achieve, and then I start chasing that dream, or thing in my life. So, it is obvious that I need some structure on my dream chasing! As Kung Futze said:”A man chasing two rabbits, catches none!”. So, as I have felt that exact saying on myself quite a bit lately, I have decided to find a solution. Finding out what dreams I want to chase right now, which ones should be put off till later, and which ones to focus on right now!

So, I am going to make a list of Goals, I NEED to achieve in my life. Just jot up anything that comes to mind, I am not going to do that here, but will wait till I get home, and can sit quietly and do it. I have some of those dreams jotted down in my moleskin already. But how do I find out which dreams are more important than others, and how can I arrange those in groups?

When prioritizing my goals, I will put them into categories, after priority, hereby identifying which ones are more important and which ones to get started on first. The most important Goals/ Actions in my life i am going to name “BIG ROCKS”, those are the ones that are REALLY meaningful (to me). Then the lower priorities are going to be named SMALL ROCKS, SAND and (maybe WATER). The reason for those metaphors are the story about the old man and the big rocks…(I am going to replicate this as good as I can… (This story may vary, but you probably heard it quite a few times, if you have been going to a lot of weddings ;))

”

A wise old man once wanted to teach his disciples an important learning. He emptied a bag full of rocks onto the ground in front of him. He then took all those rocks and put them into a container placed in front of him. The container was filled to the edge with the rocks, and the wise man asked his disciples:” Is this container full now?”

All the disciples nodded their heads eagerly, excited about what the old man’s point might be. But then the wise man took another bag, and emptied the content of smaller rocks, into the container. The small rocks fell in between all the larger rocks. He let the small rocks settle and looked at his disciples with a smile on his lip. Then he asked:” Is the container full NOW?”

All the disciples laughed and nodded their heads, “Yes NOW the container was full!” But then the wise man took another bag, and poured sand in between the large and smaller rocks. Then, after all the sand had settled between the rocks and stones, he asked again:”is the container filled now?”

His disciples was laughing out loud, and yelled;” Yes, the container IS filled now, and we DID get the point!”. Oh, did you?” the wise man said, as he poured water into the container…

”

This story is about many things, but the most important to me is the symbolism of big rocks, stones, sand and water.

The big rocks are the large important things in life, the stones are smaller but still important things. the sand is smaller issues in life, but also an important stabilizer for the rocks and stones. In the end the water is further assisting the sand to settle, and is therefore important to sand, stones and rocks.

If you want to see my Goals, Objectives and Procedures CLICK HERE!

By identifying the BIG and often Dificult actions I have to get done, to reach my full potential in life, I have sorted those, and made a very simple version of Steven WORKSHEET from “7 habits of the highly effective people” and made an overview on what goals to work with every day and week. with a very clear vision on what goals, and how to get there, I believe I will be able to reach my Goals faster!

See my WORKSHEETS CLICK HERE!