Why Setting Goals and Values are Necessary for Your Success!

Hi everyone. This morning I started my day by reading this awesome email I received from one wonderful, very successful lady and a great Network Marketing coach. I had the chance to meet her in several occasions and she has always given me incredible advice on how to tune my mindset into a successful state of thinking.

Her message is about the importance of mindset and more precisely the importance of Goals and Values in your life. Read her story below and think about YOUR life. Do you have goals that you are trying to reach of are you just sliding through life with no purpose?

Good Morning,

As I write this, it’s just after dawn and it’s a crisp 50 degrees in Portland which in and of itself is truly a miraculous concept as the early morning hours of the deserts surrounding Phoenix ‘cool’ to 100 degrees this time of year! How great is it that our industry allows us the ability to have unfettered geographic freedom to live and work and play wherever or whenever in the world we want [or happen] to be? I love our industry on so many levels with geographic freedom not being the least of those reasons.

Today’s lesson is regarding the importance of Goals & Values as they pertain to our life and business.  It was inspired by a private conversation with my friend, partner [...], regarding my ‘best laid plans’ email.  (Thanks for being my muse, Pete.  I adore you.) 

Of the Six Simple Things required of us to be successful in this venture, the most important of all happens to be the issue of Goals & Values.   Not prone to small talk, it also happens to be my favorite subject matter.  Why?  Because without goals, we mortals are destined to be nothing more than a ‘wandering generality’ relegated to the crumbs and leftovers of life.  I know this first hand.

Friends, it’s important that I share with you that I was not born a competent, successful, network marketer.  I, like you, was born with one ability.  The ability to cry out for help.  To cry if I was hungry, wet, cold or lonely.  Everything in my life that I’ve accomplished since then is a learned ability. I was taught to walk and speak and play and dress myself.  I learned to be polite and say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’.  To catch the school bus and to learn to read and write.  To work.  To pray.  To overcome disappointment.  To grieve.  To heal deep wounds to my heart and soul. To be happy. To plan.  To think.  And, it’s the ‘thinking’ part that has made all the difference in how my life has turned out.

When I was little, I felt truly blessed.  Born out of wedlock, I was deeply loved by my mother and her family.  My father, an American serviceman, returned to the Philippines to marry my mother just before my second birthday.  What a miraculous gift he gave my family!  Very few children who shared my life circumstances had father’s who returned for them and their mothers.

My father, in his youth, was truly a remarkable man. Born in the hollers of Kentucky to a coal miner and his wife, he was very funny and a borderline genius. As bright as he was, he was pretty much left to raise himself.  He was quite lonely as a young child. As a young adult, he wasn’t encouraged to attend college. It never came up in conversation. Having completed high school he did what he was expected to do. He enlisted in the army.

[...] my father, was self-educated and had a voracious appetite for knowledge. He taught his five children to love great literature, music, and poetry. I owe so much to him for the example he set for me to follow (but I owe him more for what he taught me NOT do).

Dad had a great love for poetry. He would read some of the most remarkable things to us for our bedtime stories.  Gathered at his feet like little chicks, his five children would hear the sonnets of Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickenson, William Shakespeare, just to name a few.  Hauntingly beautiful words that I allowed to shape my life and thoughts. But the poem that stayed with me the longest comes from the Scottish poet, Robert Burns, “To A Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest, with the Plough”.

Though written in the lilting archaic language of the 18th century, it’s none-the-less beautiful, if only for its most memorable line, “The best laid schemes o’mice an’ men gang aft agley.”  It’s the ‘gang aft agley’ that would make me and my siblings giggle with delight.  It was simply so much fun to say! That aside, this line has nearly become a modern day proverb:

‘The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.’ 

Or, in modern vernacular, “S_ _ t happens.  Deal with it.”

My father’s plans for his life were chaotic at best. Devastatingly destructive at worst. A wandering generality, Dad had no well thought out plan. To make it worse, he was racked with self-doubt and loathing. His aimlessness, complicated by gran mal epileptic seizures, caused him to eventually lose his sanity, and our life instantly became filled with the terror of having a mad man loose in our home.

The most horrible part was that Dad would have flashes of sanity where he was his funny, good natured self for a period of time [giving us hope of normalcy], only to have him vanish once more into the dark abyss of his mind. He died in prison in 2001, having served 28 years of a life sentence for first degree murder. That said, it was during one of his dark retreats that I learned to set goals for my life. To be determined to not live my life as my father had led his. I was 16 years old.

One of the greatest compliments I have ever received comes from a childhood friend, ‘Pami Jo’. Unlike me, Pam came from the right side of the tracks, but she shared the same sense of pathos as I. Her family was not immune from the tragedies of their own dark secrets. As children, Pam and I walked the journey our difficult childhoods together. Pam’s life, unlike mine, has been fraught with sorrow and addiction. That’s how she chose to deal with her pain. But we have remained friends through all the vissisitudes of life, and I am glad to say Pam, at age, 49, beat her demons and has been clean and sober for three years. Her goal was to LIVE and, at last, become a good mother to her children.

A few years ago, when asked to sum up our friends in one word, Pam’s word for me was “determined”. I was simply the most determined person Pam had ever met… and her word for me, made me cry. Why? Because, Pam [along with my best friend and now, business partner], were both with me that day in February 1973, when I became determined.

Having survived a savage beating from my father, my friends, Pami Jo and Mary, were there to help put back all the pieces and to tenderly care for my blackened eyes and badly shaken spirit. I share this with you not to make you sad, but to give you hope and inspiration. The physical wounds I suffered that day, healed quickly, but it was my heart and mind that took years to mend and repair. Without determined thinking on my part, and the words of Robert Burns ringing in my ears, I never would have survived my childhood.

That winter’s day, so long ago, I determined:

• Not to allow my spirit to be broken.
• To never put myself in a situation where I would be battered or abused under ANY circumstance whatsoever.
• To live a stable, sane, prosperous life.
• To work hard and to have a plan.
• To provide a better life for my children than my parents were able to give me.
• To be happy, and free, and to make a difference.

Of the things I mentioned, ‘to work hard and to have a plan’, made all the difference. I owe my father’s example for this pearl of wisdom. The price we paid was high, but we paid it, and without regret.

Friends, what do you value in your life? What plans have you made that you’re willing, through shear will and determination, to see through to completion? What obstacles are you willing to face down, some painfully real and happening right here, right now, and some in your long ago past?

Learning to set a clear path for your life is a learned discipline. There is nothing I’ve created in my life that I haven’t learned to say or do, that includes everything required for you to build a successful and meaningful business. As for you? Everything and anything is possible if you’re determined to make things right no matter what goes wrong. Don’t be discouraged by difficult circumstances. Most of the things we worry about are not life-threatening. Consider the field mouse who had her nest uprooted by Robert Burn’s plough. Life happens. Deal with it… and then move on with your plan. Otherwise, we’re left to become a wandering generality, eating the crumbs of our life from the prison cells of our mind.

Today, I encourage you to begin writing out a plan for your life. I was 16 years old when my plan started coming together. I was 27 when I wrote it down for the first time. I was 33 when I fully understood the power of written Goals & Values. It was then that I was able to change the course of my life. Today, at age 52, I stand in awe of all that can be accomplished in so short a period of time. And, with tears in my eyes and a debt of gratitude in my heart, I tip my hat to that young girl of 16, who determined to have a better life than the one she was currently living.

If we want all our industry has to offer us, if we truly want to ‘live life as it should be’, we must be willing to do what is required of us. We must be determined in our actions and in our thinking and planning.  Other wise, there is no road map to help us get back on track when our plans go awry.

Even WITH a clear road map, our best laid plans still have the potential to ‘gang aft agley’, BUT, our road map can help us navigate the most treacherous moments of our lives. I speak from experience. When all appeared lost, when everything had gone awry, my written Goals & Values served as my beacon of light and delivered me to this safe and happy harbor in which I find myself today.  I wish the same for you.

As to getting started on your goals? If you can, and just for the fun of it, go see ‘UP’ and then come home, and with a clean sheet of paper, jot down all the things you want to do with your life. It could be 30 things or 300 things. From there, narrow it down to 16 Things. Divide them into four sets of short term and long term goals. One year. Three years. Five years. Ten years. Four things per year. Then, write one [detailed] paragraph about each thing you want to accomplish. Time, place, color, where, when, with whom. This discipline of writing about them helps put into place the things required to accomplish those goals based on the time you’ve allotted.

Be realistic and set your goals just slightly, but not impossibly, out of your reach. I want you to feel a sense of accomplishment when you reach them, not a sense of failure. Earn enough money to hire a housekeeper and lawn crew is a great example of a short term goal. Buy a motorcoach and, to your hearts desire, spend as much time on vacation as you’d like could be a great ten year goal (interesting to share with you that I planned this trip, a gift for my husband, in December 1999. The universe took care of how it would happen and saw to it that I would be here, writing to you, from beautiful Portland. Ah, the power of written Goals & Values!).

Friends, nothing happens by accident. We either plan our life or have others plan it for us. Don’t let  you life be buffeted by circumstances. Don’t destine yourself to becoming a wandering generality. Plan you life and live your plan. Then, when things ‘gang aft agley’, you’ll hear the giggling of little children as you correct your course and get back on track.

Onward and upward. 

Much Love.

Cindy

To Your Success,

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