All about daily rituals and SMART Goals Examples.

Let’s be honest: we’ve all heard about the need to set goals if we want to achieve results in our personal life or in business. You may even have delved a bit deeper and looked at some SMART goals examples. The problem however often is that we’ve started a project with enormous passion, only to find a few weeks later that we’ve run out of motivation and can hardly bring ourselves to keep working on it.

There are two reasons for this. The first is purely psychological: we start seeing more pain in moving forwards on a project, and more pleasure in not working too hard on it. Whether you started working on an interesting personal project or you kicked off with your business startup ideas you thought of the project as stimulating. But, your brain now sees it as drudgery to even do as much as an hour’s work on it. In your mind, the challenge has gone. That’s why it’s so important to keep thinking about all the good things that will come about when you reach your goal. By forcing yourself to think constantly about the ultimate success ahead, you remain inspired to keep going until you get there.

When you give up on something or lack the motivation to keep going, you’ll find that you’re spending a lot of time thinking about how boring or unpleasant the steps to reach your goal are, rather than concentrating on the satisfaction of actually reaching your goals. Big mistake!

The reality of achieving success is that it is made up of lots of small, often tedious steps. If you expect excitement all along the way towards your goal than you’ll definitely be disappointed. The larger the goal, the more tedious the steps are that you’ll have to take. It’s as simple as that! If everyone accepted this vital key to success, they would be far less prone to giving up when the going gets tough.

There is one important reason that allows even an average person to become a champion of life and at the end of the day outperform others who would appear to have more talent. It’s a facet of success often overlooked, yet it is perhaps the main determent of success or failure in any major personal or business undertaking. It’s the power of adhering to daily rituals. It is what you make a habit of doing that keeps you on track long after the exhilaration has faded. Rituals really work. They are crucial to your success, regardless of your area of interest. The reality is that if you are not achieving everything that you would like in life, it’s most likely because you don’t have a daily ritual and live by it. Daily rituals are really that essential! You may have started your project using some great SMART goal examples but with out your personal rituals in place you may still find it hard to follow through and even the best business opportunities could well stay beyond your grasp.

As an example, browse through the self-help shelves in the book store, or check out those hyped-up motivational seminars held everywhere. A few short weeks after you’ve read that best-selling self-help genius’s book or sat in on the seminar, you’re back to once again doing the same old stuff all over. Why? It’s Habit! If we just simply get into the right habits, we can actually make fantastic progress. If however we rely only on inspiration, it is almost inevitable that we will slide back into doing things the old way as soon as the initial burst of inspiration has been depleted. Sadly the majority of people have few if any positive daily rituals.

They

• Wake up
• Trudge to work
• Go back home and
• Sit down to watch TV on their sofa until
• They drop off to sleep.

The following day they get up and repeat it all over again.

I know, some do a little daily exercise or perhaps read a positive book. That is definitely a good start, but only precious few people have developed strong daily rituals, both personal and in business, that gives them the support needed to achieve at a high level. It would make the biggest difference in the world if everyone did this.

Just think; if you have a “successful ritual” that you carry out each day and that has three goal oriented actions, at end of the year you will have taken more than 1000 steps towards your goals. An astonishing achievement! And yet it’s just three action steps per day.

So here is what I suggest you do: Get a goal setting template and look at some good SMART goals examples. Once you’ve bedded that down, select a ritual system that suits your personality, make some copies and post it in places where you can easily see it (perhaps near your bathroom mirror and next to your computer). Then, first thing each morning, make a promise to yourself that whatever happens during the day, you are going to complete your success ritual. Without Fail!

Here are three examples to get you going.*

Anti-procrastination ritual
The key to beating procrastination is being crystal clear about what you need to do, setting priorities and doing the most valuable tasks first.
Daily:

• Visualise your goals to achieve (10 minutes)
• Write today’s to-do list.
• Choose the most important goal on the list and start immediately on it.
• Spend at least 10 minutes on each of the other tasks.

Do this, and within a short time, you’ll have three weekly social appointments. Easy!

* Extract from Why people Fail by Siimon Reynolds (Penguin Books)

Make up your own variations of these rituals to suit your personal needs. Achieving success starts with setting goals and as I’ve mentioned before getting a good goal setting template and some SMART goals examples is a great start but you need to get into the habit of following your rituals to make it work. Following a small business course may also be of help if you have problems getting going with setting goals for your startup business ideas.