Warning: Goal Setting Can Make You Fail

Goal setting is preached from the heights of Harvard to the aspirations of infants. Its virtues are extolled everywhere.

But I would issue a serious caveat before you go plunging into your next goal setting journal: Setting goals can make you fail!

The difficulty is in knowing what limits to impose. Suppose your goal is to become a millionaire - a common enough desire. Now, if you have 999,000 in the bank, we can fairly say that your goal is well within your reach. But what if you're starting from stony broke? If you set the goal of being a millionaire by this time tomorrow, you might be pushing your luck. Although people have made vast quantities of money almost overnight on the internet, if we are to believe some of those tales.

In addition, there's the question of if you really know what a million (dollars?) can buy, (assuming you are the dreamer of being a millionaire). In surveys, people rattle off a list of things they'd purchase if they won the lottery for example, and rarely "spend" more than a fifth of this amount!

The reason all of this can make you fail is because you will either keep moving the goal posts, (by revising your "wealth" downwards or by stretching the time scale), or you will consider that you are not doing enough to achieve the goal.

When you combine "realism" with what you believe is possible, minus the negativity of those who will tell you it's impossible and try to get you to give up dreaming, (because they have), plus your own limiting beliefs, time constraints, family and work demands ... you will be forced to conclude that it's you that's the root of the fault. Then you feel a failure. It can be a long way back up from here. Some people, sadly, never make it. (They become the ones who tell others to quit dreaming).

Fortunately, there is an antidote. The answer is to think in "outcomes", not goals.

Let's go back to the goal of becoming a millionaire. Instead of asking what you might spend it on, ask yourself this: "How would it feel if I had a million dollars in the bank?" Now you will get a completely different set of answers.

You may come up with results such as, "Safe and secure. Happy, excited, ecstatic ..." Every one of those feeling states is something you can already relate to at some level, even if you've never experienced any of them in combination with having a million dollars before. Those feelings are really what you're after. That's your outcome. Now you are free, because now you can create those feelings in any way that occurs to you. You don't have to wait for your million to show up - and even if it never does, you'll feel great undertaking the journey.

Thinking in outcomes - which is always a feeling state - sets you up to succeed, because you can always create a state of mind.

Curiously, once you do this, that "vibe" is what seems to kick start the Law of Attraction and all too often, you'll achieve the goal - as if by magic.

And perhaps that is exactly what it is.

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