Setting Goals

The easiest actions for us to take are the ones we perform out of habit. The easiest way to grant yourself a wish is to make a habit out of the actions you must take to cause that wish to come true.

You can create new habits the same way you created all of your existing habits - through repetition. Every habit you own you formed by doing something over and over again until it became second nature. To form a new habit, all you have to do is to apply the same principle.

Suppose you wish to take a walk each morning to work yourself into shape, but you’re having trouble giving up your morning routine - your habit - of reading the newspaper. What you need is a new habit to replace the old one. For thirty days, practice walking each morning instead of reading the paper. At first, you may feel uncomfortable because your old habit still has hold of you. But by the second or third week, you’ll begin to find it more natural to walk each morning than to read the paper.

If you try this and find that the new habit isn’t taking hold, it’s probably because you skipped a day. That won’t work. You can’t afford to skip even a single day. If you do, your momentum will drop to zero, and you’ll have to start over again. During that first thirty days, if you miss even one day of practicing your new habit, reset your thirty-day clock to Day One and start from the beginning. The next time around, practice every day. By the thirtieth day, you will have given yourself a new habit.

The Thirty-Day Plan

You can turn almost anything into a habit if you implement the Thirty-Day Plan. All you have to do is to decide what new habit you want to acquire and then agree to practice that habit every day for just thirty days. If in thirty days you don’t like the results, quit.

Make sure you schedule practicing your new habit each day and then honor your schedule. Don’t let yourself skip days because of weekends, holidays, illness, or because you had to go out of town. Don’t accept any excuses for missing even a single day. If you do miss a day, start over.

The beauty of the Thirty-Day Plan is that it minimizes your natural resistance to change. You aren’t asking yourself to give up anything; you’re just asking yourself to try something new for a while. You can stand almost anything for a few days. After thirty days, if you don’t like your new habit, you’re free to go back to the old one. But the chances are that by then your new habit will more comfortable than the one it has replaced.

Affirmations

Although we might hate to admit it, we all talk to ourselves. More important, we all listen. Psychologists call this affirmation. What that means is: If you tell yourself something often enough, you begin to believe it.

Most of us are pretty good at affirming our shortcomings. For instance, we knock over a drink at a party and say, “Sorry...I’m such a klutz!” We forget to bring important papers to a meeting and work and say, “I’d forget my own head if it weren’t screwed on!”

We don’t have to just affirm our faults - we can affirm our strengths as well. We can even affirm strengths we don’t yet have, as a way of developing them into habits.

For example, if you would like to become the kind of person who bounces out of bed every morning at six, you can tell yourself: I love to get up each morning at six, refreshed and invigorated for the entire day. If you’re a salesperson and you want to learn to love prospecting for new clients, you can tell yourself: I love to prospect for new clients.

I’ve used affirmations to create all sorts of useful habits. For example, I used to hate speaking in front of people. I avoided addressing groups of people whenever I could. After several years of hiding my head in the sand, I realized that I would never get what I wanted from life until I learned to enjoy speaking in front of people. It wasn’t enough for me to just speak in front of large groups; I wanted to learn how to enjoy doing it, so I made the following contract with myself:

For thirty days, at least ten times a day, I agree to tell myself: I love speaking in front of people. I agree to say it with kind of heartfelt conviction that will leave no room for doubt. At the end of thirty days, if I still hate speaking in front of people, I will allow myself to cling to that habit for the rest of my life.

The first couple of days I felt resistance. Every time I repeated my affirmation, an angry little voice in my mind would say, “Who are you trying kid with affirmation crap? You hate to speak in front of people!” I couldn’t disagree with that (and I didn’t want to lie to myself) so I pretended I was an actor, playing the part of a character who loved speaking in front of people. Before I knew it, the resistance disappeared.

Within a week, I began to enjoy repeating my affirmation. Within two weeks, I began to look forward to saying it. By the end of thirty days, I found myself looking for opportunities to speak in front of people. Whenever I encountered one, I would hear myself say: I love to speak in front of people! My affirmation had come true, and that allowed me to make a quantum leap forward in my life.

The first step in creating an affirmation is to make certain it supports your values. If you feel it’s unethical or undesirable, then it won’t work. The next step is to follow similar guidelines to those you used when you created a presentable wish. Be specific. Affirm what you want instead of what you don’t want. Use the present tense. Give it intense emotional impact.

The last point is the one that counts the most. The real power of an affirmation comes from how deeply you feel it, not from how many times you say it. You want emotional content, not repetition for the sake of repetition. But how can you feel emotion about something you don’t really believe?

Don’t worry about whether you believe an affirmation, worry about whether you want to believe it. If you want to believe it - if you intensely want to believe it - and you repeat it with that same intensity, then you will soon come to believe it, the same way you’ve come to believe so much negative garbage about yourself. If you’re going to pump yourself full of propaganda anyway, why not choose propaganda that serves a useful purpose?