To achieve your goals & happiness in life you must fill your mind with thoughts, words, images, and emotions consistent with the person you want to become. For realizing your full potential, you must become powerful, purposeful, and self-directed.
Here are the seven key parts of your life in which you must develop absolute clarity in order to unleash all your mental, physical, and emotional powers toward great achievement.
1. Values
Values clarification is one of the most important exercises you can do in your life. Begin by writing out a list of the three to five values or virtues that are most important to you. Then resolve to organize your life around these values, and stick to them without compromise. The happiest and most effective people are very clear about their values—what they believe in and what they stand for. Unhappy, average people are unsure of their values if they have any at all.
Many of the ancient philosophical greats, from Plato and Socrates to Aristotle, have identified certain virtues and values that seem to form the character of exceptional people. Among these are integrity, courage, persistence, generosity, compassion, love, and strong family relationships and friendships.
There are dozens of values that you can use to form the foundation of your character. But those are some of the very best, and they are the values that most great men and women are known for.
If you want to know the true character of a person, just watch how he behaves in the face of difficulties or when he is under stress. As the Stoic philosopher, Epictetus taught, “Circumstances do not make the man; they merely reveal him to himself.”
When values are clear, strong, uncompromising, and positive, they give you a strong character and a pleasing personality. A person with clear values is more positive, has a firmer handshake, makes more direct eye contact, and even walks and moves with greater strength and purposefulness.
Develop of Value
How do you develop a value or a virtue as a permanent part of your personality? The answer is simple: You practice that value whenever it is called for. By the law of practice, whatever you do repeatedly soon becomes a new habit, and stays with you permanently. If you decide that patience is one of your most important values, then you resolve to practice patience in every situation in which it is called for.
And if you want to develop courage, you must practice courage whenever you feel afraid. If you want to develop the quality of integrity, then you resolve to speak and act honestly in every situation in which it is required. By practicing the values that you most admire, you can program them into your personality.
2. Vision
Once you are clear about your values, the virtues that you stand for, and the principles that you will not compromise, create your vision of your ideal future life and conditions as organized around your values. To do this, project forward five years and imagine that your life is perfect in every way. What would you be doing and what would your life look like? What would be your situation in your work, family, and personal lives? And especially, how would your perfect life be different from today?
The happiest and most successful people are very clear about where they want to be in the long term. The greater clarity you have about your future, and the more consistent it is with your values, the easier it is to make the necessary decisions each day that will eventually enable you to get to where you want to go.
3. Mission
What is your mission in life? What do you want to accomplish by applying your personality, intelligence, ability, and skills to your world? And what kind of a difference do you want to make in the lives of other people, especially your family?
One of the ways to determine your mission is to imagine writing your own obituary, to be read at your funeral and published in the newspaper. What would you want it to say about you, and about what you accomplished in life? What would you want your obituary to say about the effect you had on the lives of other people, and how you will be remembered?
The greater clarity you have about how you want to be thought about after your departure, the more likely it is that you will do and be the kind of person who leaves that kind of legacy behind.
4. Purpose
You need absolute clarity about your purpose on this earth. Every person is born with a special reason for being here. What is yours? You will be amazed on the day you find the purpose of your life. Why do you get up in the morning? Why do you do the job you do? And why are you in that relationship, or raising the family? What is your real purpose? Where do you want to end up?
A review of more than five hundred biographies and autobiographies of noteworthy men and women found that the one common quality among them was that, from an early age, these people had a “sense of destiny.”
They absolutely believed that they had been put on this earth to do something special with their lives, something that would help to improve the lives of other people in some way.
In order to be purposeful in your achievements and your life, you must have a purpose. In order to be focused and channeled, you must have a direction. Keep asking yourself, “If I had no limitations on what I could be, have, or do, what would be my vision, mission, and purpose in life?
5. Goals
You need clear goals and plans for every area of your life. It is said that success is goals and all else is commentary. To achieve your full potential, you must have clear, written goals that you are working toward achieving each day. Without goals, you can just go around in circles, working for years and making very little progress.
Thomas Carlyle wrote, “A man without goals is like a ship without a rudder. He makes no progress on even the smoothest seas. But a man with goals is like a sailor with a rudder, a map and a compass who makes progress on even the roughest seas, and sails to his destination.”
Resolve to do something every day that moves you in the direction of your most important goal. Every morning when you get up, think about at least one step you can take that day that will move you closer to the attainment of that goal. Resolve to do something every day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, without fail.
When you do something every day, you trigger the magic power of the momentum principle. This principle says that it may take ten units of energy to get started on a new goal, but once you start moving, it takes only one unit of energy to keep moving forward. When you force yourself to launch toward your goal, you break the bonds of inertia that hold most people in place, and you begin to unleash all of your powers.
6. Priorities
You need clear priorities to determine what is important and valuable to you, and what is not. You cannot manage time but you can only manage yourself and how you spend your time. Time management is life management. Time management is the ability to choose the sequence of events. It is the ability to choose what you do first, what you do second, and what you do not at all. And you are always free to choose. This is the key to success in life.
You will always be overwhelmed with too much to do and too little time. No matter how clever you are in organizing your time and your work, you will never get caught up. Throughout your life, you will continually have to set clear priorities on the use of your time, based on the value of that activity compared with anything else you could do at that moment. To accomplish anything of value, you must be able to set priorities and stick to them.
7. Actions
Nothing moves in life without actions. Once you are clear about your values, vision, mission, purpose, goals, and priorities, you must have the willpower and discipline to launch yourself into continual action in the direction of your dreams. So don’t wait for the right time, but start taking action. Actions will lead to success or provide you learning experiences. With learning experiences, you will correct or improve your future actions. The day will come when you will achieve your goals & accomplish the success. (Excerpt is from ‘Believe It to Achieve It’ by Brian Tracy & Christina Stein).
