I think I ate a very strange curry last night, all on my own – the joy of business travel. This strange curry opened not only nose but also my mind – I must share the address of this place! I spent the whole of dinner drawing pictures on scraps of paper and developing personal goals for my new adventure. I discovered that I am not afraid to set MONSTER goals. I hope there was more rationality involved when helping staff to set their goals in the past!!

I now have 10 very tough goals for the next 5 years! None are not going to be easy to achieve at all, but I suppose that is why one puts goals together in the first place. I have always understood that there is a tiny percentage of the population that have goals and even a smaller percentage that have them written down. This means that very few people actually know what they are aiming for in life. I want to be very clear WHY I am making my choices and I refuse to let life dictate where it will take me. I suppose that when life takes over, most of us end up chasing societies’ dreams and not our own. It is also possibly why so many of us are so unhappy with where we are in life. It is time to take our lives back from the insatiable vulture that is society.

I used to have some pretty good written goals and was well on track to achieving them. I am probably a bit anal in this area and had created an 8 year income statement and balance sheet that planned my financial path that I wanted to achieve. I would then regularly update this fantastic model to ensure that I was fully on track. My unhappiness realization caused me to stop and smell the roses. In the end I have used my financial model to plan my year off concept (who knows perhaps it will become a lifetime off concept). Without this detailed planning, there would have been no way that I ever would have been able to make this happen. It is funny to think that these are techniques that I would have employed daily at work BUT never think to apply in my personal life. If it works for a business why on earth should it not work to manage the exciting, dynamic, amazing and routine business that is my life?

Back to my goals, I have long thought about what I wanted to achieve with my life but last night was the first time that I have put pen to paper and crystallized that thought. It was really liberating! I am lucky in that I have had the experience now at both work and at home of having well thought out goals and actually achieving them through the focus and single minded dedication that they require to be achieved. I am now starting to sound like a goal guru. The point is that there is so much clutter in life that if we are not focused, we are going to get swayed by all sorts of influences and then not really achieve the things that we want in life or the things that make us happy at heart. A point I should make is that I did have all of these goals that I was on my way to achieving BUT they were not making me happy. Only once I have included this year off concept, did I truly start to look deep within myself and understand that I did not really know myself and what I wanted. I also started to understand that I was aiming for the wrong things in terms of my own happiness. I have long since ranted about the values and norms of society and yet my goals initially mirrored those of society. Talk about being hypocritical. I don’t like society and what it wants and yet I was trying to deliver the same things. For me it was a great realization that I was stuck like everyone else and that this is the norm. I sure had to find a way out! It has taken me 2 years to find it but until I focused my attention, there really was no way on earth that it would be possible – viva the human mind!

Another key reason why goals are so wonderful is that they help me make decisions now that may affect my longer term outlook, i.e. all of the decisions I make now have my long term goals in mind. Most goals should be set with the bar very high – this means that they are not easy to achieve. The only way to achieve them is to do it in baby steps. I can then make decisions about these baby steps on a daily basis knowing where I want to end up – it sure simplifies the decision making process.

My last word on goals is that they should be shared with your friends and family. I have been amazed at the support that I have elicited, as well as the spirit unleashed within myself to meet those marks (I would hate to let them all down!). I always thought that this stuff was private. I was convinced that others would laugh at my thoughts and ambitions. Now that I have published some of my thinking, I have heard plenty of sniggers (which I ignore), but those who really love and care and understand me, have become an amazing source of inspiration and support. This blog already includes a few surprising incidents that have happened to me in the recent past. There are plenty of people out there that are behind me and yet I did not even know this support was there. AND boy do I need that support. I think rather take the chance of being laughed at, than lose the opportunity for the amazing gifts that those around us have to share with us.