Pick up any self-help book or attend a corporate meeting, you will probably hear the word goal. Louie Armstrong once said that dreams are goals with endings.

Dreams, goal setting and goal achievement are part of daily life. Everybody has dreams. Everyone sets goals in some fashion. And everyone wants to see many of those dreams successfully realized. If these three statements are true, then why dont we see more success?

Success is much more about goal achievement than goal setting. How consistently you achieve your goals and how you manage your goals is what will catapult you farther than everyone else.

Unfortunately, there exists a presumption that individuals know how to set, achieve and manage goals whether personally, professionally or organizationally. This fatal presumption starts early in life and sets people up for unnecessary failure.

So how can someone turn the tide and become a consistent goal achiever? For me, the answer to this question laid within the adoption of an Action Plan For Success. This plan allowed me to explore my dreams and self-assess my life. This self-assessment included mental, physical, social, family, career, financial, ethics and beliefs.

My goals within this Action Plan are prioritized and organized. Each goal has been written using specific proven criteria. For me, each criterion is much like an ingredient in a recipe. When all the ingredients are blended together, a consistent outcome is assured.

Finally my Action Plan for Success includes a mechanism to monitor all current goals and a way to capture all achieved goals. I believe that a goal achievement summary is critical for personal motivation. We all have those gray days when we feel that we havent accomplished much. My goal-accomplished sheet accurately displays the results of my past efforts. Also, this helps me to see all of those dreams that have successfully turned into achieved goals.

If you take the time to create an Action Plan for Success or find has such a performance tool (thats what I did because I dont believe in reinventing the wheel) and then commit to the necessary actions to turn your dreams into goals with endings, you shall too receive unheard of results.

Copyright 2005(c) Leanne Hoagland-Smith, www.processspecialist.com

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