Your soul stirring goal to live a full and bountiful life is a journey of change. As with any journey, in addition to the smooth stretches, expect bumpy patches, potholes and hills that often seem more like mountains. Because this journey is powered by your life’s purpose, you must have a roadmap of skills to get you around the bumps and potholes. This little manual lays out the five keys to goal achievement by suggesting time-honored skills that never fail. I challenge you to develop and use them. Your journey begins when your goal walks out to meet a plan. They pick up commitment and focus. The three of them coax discipline to join this march. Immediately perseverance jumps on board. Next stop success.
This manual is relevant no matter your stage in life and the goals you set. In addition to your personal goals, you have goals for your children, grandchildren, family members, professional colleagues, your organizations and communities. This is not a manual about positive thinking nor is it a secret formula for success. It is a guide that transforms your thinking and actions by assisting you in identifying and developing reliable skills that lead to success. Its greatest value is getting you through the hard times you will inevitably experience in meeting your goals and dreams. Even though you may use the words goals and dreams interchangeably to indicate your desire for a particular outcome, the skills needed to manifest the result are unchanged. Take a careful look at the suggested skills and personal actions. Study them. You’ll find their logic and scope liberating. They work for small everyday goals as well as your large life goals. You may begin your journey to goal achievement with old habits, but adopting and using the skills recommended in this manual, you arrive with a changed outlook and new behaviors.
No one can take the journey for you. It is your walk. Own your goals and dreams and when you do, you’ll take responsibility for their fulfillment. Personal responsibility causes you to think differently. You become more creative in planning and recognize additional opportunities that link necessary information for problem solving. Believe, without a doubt, the direction of your life is yours to determine. Whatever your age, you can change direction, if necessary and reinvent yourself. This may be difficult to understand, because life experiences may have left you feeling powerless, with little or no confidence in the ability to control your own circumstances. Your dreams did not vanish: they still flicker with hope. You can begin again.
On the journey to goal you’re competing with many previously learned habits and actions that you simply don’t need any longer. But, you can be your strongest ally by developing appropriate skills. Your journey can be filled with joy, light, kindness, powerful words and determined actions, even when the wheels of life don’t always turn smoothly. Your life has value, so the way you choose to live it cannot be by aimlessness or lawless dissipation, but with proven principles that always work.