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How Goal Setting Can Make a Difference in Your Success

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By Books Author Denise Turney

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Desire for success and goal setting are like twins. When the former is paired with vision and powerful emotion, it can serve as an effective motivator. Yet, that doesn’t mean that the path will always feel easy. In fact, if you focus solely on what you want without developing and sticking to a goal setting plan, you might not ever realize your dreams.

Success Roadblocks – About Distractions

There are many reasons why this might happen. To begin, you could encounter distractions. I was thinking about this earlier today while I was walking outdoors. Less than 10 minutes into the relaxing walk, a northern mockingbird started making scratchy chat calls. Since I’d heard these aggressive, territorial birds screeching and making warning calls before, I didn’t think that the chat calls were meant for me.

So, I kept walking. Next thing I knew, the mockingbird swooped toward me. Then, it gave another round of chat calls and started to aim toward me again. This time, I turned with a bag I’d been carrying and prepared to fight back. As I watched the mockingbird glance toward a tree, I knew that it was protecting its young. It didn’t matter than I’d been walking more than 10 yards away from the tree. The bird had perceived me as a threat.

The First 90 Days

Between working to calm the bird and stay out of its path, it dawned on me that I also had to steer clear of oncoming traffic. That’s when I realized how easy it is to get distracted. One small experience, one seemingly tiny event, and you could be focused on something that has absolutely nothing to do with what you really want. It happens quickly. Even more, it happens so easily that it appears to occur absent thought. [When’s the last time you were distracted? What was going on?]

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And that’s just one real life example of how easy it is to get distracted. Decide to pursue your success goals, and you may encounter interference from old internal patterns. As a matter of fact, this may be why the first 90 days of a new initiative can stir up feelings of doubt, fear and overwhelm.

During the first 90 days, your brain has to shift out of old routines, making room for the newness that you want to introduce into your life. An example of this might see you arriving late for crucial 9am meetings simply because your brain is in the habit of starting your day at 11am. You might even convince yourself that you’re not a morning person. What’s really happening is that your routines are interfering with your big dreams.

Becoming Fluid with Goal Setting Success

This is a reason to stay flexible with goal setting success. To achieve a big shift, you’re going to have to be adaptable. This means that you’re flexible in your thinking, your perceptions and your actions.

To help yourself become flexible, start observing your routines. For instance, at this time in your life, do you stay up until early morning, retire to bed and then absolutely refuse to wake and get out of bed until 11am or later the following day?

Also, do you come up with reasons to avoid face-to-face communications? Have you started to feel more comfortable limiting communications to emails and texts messages? If so, this could signal that you have a pattern of keeping people at a distance. Areas that this pattern could turn into a success barrier for include sales, training, leadership and the arts.

Routines and Pattern Distractions

Pay attention to your routines. Left alone, they could become ongoing distractions. They could become like a bird that won’t stop swooping in on you. Before you know it, you could start to focus on steering clear of the bird to the point that you lose sight of your real success goals.

That’s when life may feel like it’s happening to you instead of like you are creating your life experiences. Therefore, practice awareness. Identify patterns, including thought patterns. Watch these repetitive choices. Don’t let them become distractions.

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To change patterns, get up at different times. Take a shower instead of a bath a few days a week or vice versa. Exercise in the morning instead of at night. Move furniture, food items, hygiene products each day. Little changes like these can help get your brain off autopilot, the process that routines hide in.

Goal Setting Using Small Goals

Other ways to stay flexible while you pursue goal setting success, are to break goal planning into small goals. Here’s an example. Let’s say that your desire is to earn six figures a year selling novels that you write.

Instead of trying to sell 25,000 copies of your first published novel within its first month of release, break the aim into little goals. Toward this end, you could create a schedule to write and publish a new novel every three months. Bake in time for a professional, experienced editor to review your manuscripts and offer quality feedback.

Small Goals at Work

Small goals to achieve your desire of earning six figures a year selling novels could include:

  • Designing and copying colorful book marketing flyers
  • Distributing a certain number of flyers a week, locally and nationally
  • Scheduling radio and podcasts interviews
  • Completing and submitting author vendor applications to attend cultural, book and arts festivals that attract thousands of attendees
  • Preparing content to push out via automated social media platforms
  • Developing and mailing postcards that spotlight your books
  • Building and promoting your author website
  • Setting up relationships with book distributors, bookstore buyers and wholesalers

This list could expand considerably. There’s that much that you could do to promote and market your books, if that’s what you want to do. Monitor your results. Pay attention to which actions get you closer to your goal of earning six-figures a year selling novels that you write.

Achieving Success After Success

But, here’s the thing. It’s important to stay flexible, to remain fluid. Why? Like that bird that seemingly swooped in out of nowhere, you may not be aware of every thing that’s coming. Furthermore, to continue achieving success after success, you will have to adjust small goals.

Who knows? Along the way, you might even have to discard goals that you’d been pursuing for years. So, stay open to change. Learn to pivot.

To stay encouraged, read motivational success quotes in the morning and at night before you retire to bed. Additionally, you might find it helpful to put on earphones and listen to recordings of positive affirmations for success. Twice a year, pause and acknowledge your achievements. But don’t stop. After all, success is not final.

Keep going. Stay flexible. Watch patterns and routines that could transform into distractions. Should you get distracted, refocus on your deepest desires, your largest goals. Break those goals down into small goals, if you start to think that your goals are too big for you, and again – keep going.

Why Is Flexibility to Change a Key to Success?

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By Books Author Denise Turney

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Change is everywhere. It’s this world’s constant which begs a question. Is flexibility to change a key to success? After all, being flexible in business, at play and other life areas can keep you free of disillusion, hopelessness and nagging frustration. And this could help your energy stay balanced and flowing.

Flexibility to Change Associations

Yet, if you have heard that it’s important to learn how to pivot to experience sustained growth, why might you resist change? To start, you might associate change with loss.

For example, if your early experiences with change caused you to feel as if you’d lost what you value, you might choose not  to be flexible and resist change. This may have occurred with me after my mom transitioned when I was a kid. That certainly was my first early experience with a major change. Not only did it feel like a massive, painful loss, I soon learned that it was a change that I could not reverse.

Reasons You Fight Change

Other reasons why you might not want to get flexible and instead fight change include:

  • Change ushers in a certain amount of uncertainty. When change arrives, you really don’t know how an experience will fully impact you or turn out.
  • People, including family and friends, may perceive you differently. An example of this is when a job layoff occurs and people no longer respect you due to the fact that your work title has changed.
  • Past instances of change may have happened after your peers pressured you into doing something. Dislike the outcome of what you did and you could resist change and also think that it’s better not to form close relationships.
  • Failure and change could be linked in your thinking. A path of freedom from this could be to start to see failure as a learning experience. Because change in this world is always occurring, failure definitely isn’t permanent.
  • Sense of loss of power is another reason why you might resist change. This could happen whether your role in a family, at work, in the community or another environment changes as you age, your children get older, etc.

Change Is Constant

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As Heraclitus shared, “the only constant in life is change”. However, rather than accepting that as truth, look around. See if your experiences prove that change is always happening in this world. For a shortcut, you could start with your appearance. Even when you think nothing is changing about your appearance, one day you’ll look up and see just how much change has been occurring to your body second-by-second, day-by-day.

Furthermore, you might notice how often your judgments and opinions change. Let your judgments and opinions change and your mood could shift as well. In fact, depending on your age and how many new experiences you let enter your life, you might discover that it’s tough to hold onto a judgment, opinion or belief.

So, stay open to being flexible. Also, similar to how you stretch in the mornings to get flexible in your body, step into positive experiences that stretch you. Examples range from being flexible at work by taking on projects with elements that are “new” for you to making friends with caring people you’d rarely bothered to say “hello” to.

Mental Flexibility

Vacationing at a different location, building your own furniture, sewing your clothes for a year and serving as the coordinator for next year’s community book festival are other examples of stretching yourself. Each of these experiences offers an element of “newness”. They may require research, speaking with people who you had before chosen not to communicate with and accessing a set of resources you’d previously overlooked.

Regardless of how “stretch” experiences turnout, you’ll learn. And, you’ll grow if you chose to be flexible. Even more, your fears that are associated with change may diminish or go away. That may invite a bounty of good change into your life.

Mental flexibility clearly comes with rewards. It can be the path to breaking bad habits and patterns that once worked but no longer do. Therefore, look for areas in your life where you could insert change. Practice awareness to spot instances when you’ve invested way too much into a rigid, strict way of thinking, feeling or behaving.

Practice Awareness

By practicing awareness, you can catch yourself planning entire days, weeks and months in advance and then becoming angry when events don’t go the way that you think they should. Also, keep in mind that it could take effort and courage to get flexible. Fortunately, to be flexible does not mean that you‘ve changed. Being flexible doesn’t change your personality and core beliefs.

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Instead, when you adapt as you make a change, you’re simply adjusting your perception of change. You’re also building courage. This is not to say that being flexible in business or other areas will guarantee success. But it will prove that you can adjust to change. Additionally, it will show you that you’re stronger than any change you could experience.

Get flexible, celebrate change and who knows what good might come into your life. Should the rewards not seem to outweigh the risks, start small. You could do this by setting goals. Then, break the attainment of the goals into small, daily actions. Honor each action that you complete. Actually acknowledge the progress that you’re making..

Celebrate Successes

Another step that might prove beneficial is to track your progress on a spreadsheet. That way you can look back at your efforts and your results midway through the year and at the end of the year. Pay attention to the progress that you’re making, even if the forward change seems small to you.

By tracking your efforts and results, you can spot areas that need to be adjusted sooner. Keep going. It may not be long before you witness the good that you’re creating. Let that happen and you might seek out good change, instead of hiding from change. That’s when you could become the driver of the blessed life that you’ve been longing to live.

What You Do Matters – Achieve Success with Integrity

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By African American Books Writer Denise Turney

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Achieve success with integrity and enjoy a good night’s sleep. Living with integrity also keeps you in high regard. Yet, operating with integrity won’t always gain you a fast track to success. Why? It’s easier to take shortcuts, especially when you feel like you’re in a tight spot.

Facing Integrity Temptations

In fact, if you’ve ever cheated on a test, you’ve experienced how easy it can be to operate on the other side of integrity. Also, some ways you may have sidestepped integrity include speeding through a red light or lying about not making a mistake on a work project. Your heart and intentions may have been good. But risks associated with operating with integrity in these instances may have seemed too high.

And, that’s the rub. There are times when you may find yourself facing hard choices. During these instances, it may seem easier and more advantageous to forego integrity. Doing so could yield short term benefits. However, over the long term, not operating with integrity could cost you.

For example, if you don’t operate with integrity in business, you could face lawsuits and employee turnover. Of course, your brand reputation could also be permanently damaged. Yet, the same voice inside your head that tempted you to take the shortcuts, may also convince you that you won’t pay for your poor choices.

Achieve Success with Integrity in the Arts

In fact, that voice may exclaim that you won’t get caught. You’ll never be found out. Television shows like American Greed and Luther have pulled in good ratings as viewers watch one person after another who thought he’d never be found out – get caught.

And, as it regards television, the arts is a prime area where the temptation to sidestep operating with integrity can be a problem. Years ago, an aspiring actress might unwillingly shortcut her way onto a major film through a powerful studio executive. Fortunately, that may be changing.

Examples Missing Integrity

But there are hidden ways to sidestep integrity and ethics in the arts and business. And these hidden actions could derail your career. Among examples of not operating with integrity and ethics in the arts and business, there’s:

  • Asserting that you graduated from a college or university you only attended for one semester
  • Paying for book reviews to be posted at books sites when you know the people posting the reviews haven’t read your books
  • Posting negative comments and negative reviews on competitor products, websites and social media accounts in the hopes of boosting your product rankings
  • Stating that you love a product that you haven’t used once

Writing headlines that confuse readers about the topic of an article in order to drive website traffic is another way to sidestep integrity. It’s almost as if you’re competing in a sport and are willing to do anything to win. Yet, if you’ve ever been on the short end of the lack of integrity, you know how painful the experience can be.

Get Clear About What You Want

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Also, if you’ve signed a bad contract, you know what it feels like to get burned by someone who sidestepped integrity. So, how can you achieve success with integrity in a world where taking unethical shortcuts is, at times, praised?

To begin, get clear about what you truly want. For example, as your primary goal, do you want to write a compelling novel with engaging characters that share universal truths? Or, do you want to sell 100,000 copies of a book in a record number of days?

Operating with Integrity

Your primary goal may impact whether or not you achieve success with integrity. So, get clear about what you most want. Other ways to achieve success with integrity are to:

  • Set clear boundaries for how you will operate in business and in the arts. Companies do this by developing policies.
  • Stick with telling the truth. In fact, setting a boundary of truth can prevent you from engaging in behavior that you’ll later be tempted to lie about to avoid penalty.
  • Talk through grey areas with trustworthy partners, family or friends.
  • Accept reality. Avoid stepping into the world of illusion and convincing yourself that doing wrong will, somehow, pay off.
  • Put yourself on the other end of the deal. For example, how would you feel or think if someone undercut you on a film, book or business contract?

Also, think long term. Consider what would happen should something you say or do not only be discovered, but gain local, regional or national exposure. After all, you’re building a reputation. Whether you want to or not, you are building your personal brand which is strengthened when you achieve success with integrity.

Achieve Success with Integrity – How Do You Want to be Perceived

Do you want to be known as someone’s who transparent and honest? Or do you want to spend long hours and years building a remarkable career only to watch that same career disintegrate because choices you made years ago caught up to you?

This raises another point. To achieve success with integrity, put your best effort into your work. In other words, respect your audience. Respect your customers. Approach them as the intelligent people that they are. For example, if you’re a novelist, avoid writing “down” to book readers.

As you get in the habit of operating with integrity, honest business decisions may become habit. You also might reduce the number of times you rationalize poor choices. Instead, you may simply accept that you made a mistake and focus on avoiding making the same mistake again.

Living with Integrity Takes Courage

This is why to achieve success with integrity you must have courage. It takes courage to stick with integrity and stay on a path that, although rewarding, may increase the time it takes you to hit success goals, like sales and revenue targets. And it takes courage to pass up an entertainment or business deal that would require you to lie, break a law or be unethical.

Over the long term, operating with integrity gifts you with a clear conscience. You can sleep good at night. And, you won’t have to live in fear that unethical deals you made will be exposed. In fact, you might enjoy a rewarding career absent regret.