You might not see how the past affects your ability to reach goals in the future. How can your past life affect what’s going to happen in years ahead? It is really quite important to understand that your past experiences affect you strongly in all you do.

Some of these past experiences may hinder you directly in working towards a goal and some might just be slight hurdles. In all cases these memories can affect you as to how well you do when heading towards a new goal.

Some of you go through life dragging an imaginary anchor around with you. It slows you down, it makes you unable to react to the changes in your life and it certainly weighs you down when trying to work towards new goals.

Releasing that weight would enable you to move quicker and succeed more easily. Perhaps that’s you holding on to past hurts, past incompletes, past resentments, anger or fear. Yet letting go of those anchors could be what you need so that you can fly into the future.

Have you allowed past failures to slow you down in achieving new successes? Have you remembered a friend telling you that you will never achieve anything? Do you remember the teacher at school who told you, you were an idiot and couldn’t do anything anyway?

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What about your parents? Did they always encourage you as much as you thought you needed? Did they support you with your school activities and sporting endeavours or did they show no interest?

What have those people done to your confidence in moving forward and achieving new successes? Have they kept you back because you remembered what they said about you? Do your memories of anger, resentment and desire for revenge make you waste valuable energy that could be used to better effect in attaining success?

It’s important to move forward in your life with love and forgiveness. Forgive those who have hurt you, who might have lied to you or stolen from you. Maybe they gossiped behind your back or cheated on you. That doesn’t mean you condone their action, but just that you are letting go.

Letting go will release all that negative energy and will provide you with newfound momentum to perform in your life and attain successes that you might have never thought possible to achieve.

Best way to achieve this release is to actually note down all the people you need to forgive by creating a list showing anyone who has hurt you. Work on each of these hurts until you are able to forgive them.

The release of new-found energy will amaze you. Negativity can be unbelievably draining and in many cases can even be harmful to your health.

Yet it is one of the hardest things to do. Forgiving somebody and letting go of hurts and resentments is the biggest life challenge you face. You feel that these people who have hurt you have made you lose your confidence and contributed to your inability to succeed in life.

It’s not these people who have hurt you that are holding you back from earning the successes you deserve to have. It’s the fact that you are allowing those hurts to hold you back that is so damaging. For your own sake forgive the people who have hurt you. It will clear the way to personal achievements you wouldn’t otherwise even dream of reaching.

Make space for those goals in your life. That seems an obvious statement doesn’t it. But what if you want to study a course that will help you to further your career. Take a look at your life and see how much time do you actually have available.

Will a new goal fit into your life if you are already rushing every day to complete the tasks you have to do in terms of your commitments to work, your relationship with your partner, the time with your elderly parents, the hobby you have, the musical instrument you are trying to learn, the marathon you want to run for the first time and never mind keeping in touch with your friends?

Where in the busy schedule would a course fit? Not very likely. But you sign up for it anyway. Within the first month you find yourself not attending the evening classes and not handing in assignments. You just don’t have time.

You need to make way for that goal if you are serious about achieving it. University Business Schools know all about the falls off rate of students who sign up for MBA’s or Management Advancement Programs.

The drop out rate is something like 40% within the first term of the course and only about 70% or so finish. And yet at sign up time every student is informed as to how much time they will need to free up for this course.

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Somehow in our minds the time available to us has an elasticity that has no boundary. Of course this is not the case and many times we set ourselves up for failure by not de-cluttering our lives sufficiently to make time to achieve a goal we have set.

Examine your day and see where you spend your time. What of the time is being wasted on non-essential activities, which of those can be let go and which activities have to be kept. Get rid of the clutter that keeps you frantically busy but that gets you absolutely nowhere.

We all have mountains of clutter around. This could be physical clutter that means that every time we are looking for something it takes twice the time to find. It could be tasks that we have taken on ourselves such as doing all the housework while our partner watches TV that easily eliminate our free time.

Or it could just be too many repetitive activities such as running to clear the mail once a day instead of once a week, or finding a quicker route to work, or using an easier shop close by for the daily grocery requirements. All it needs is a closer look at what you fill your day with and with some clever planning you could free substantial time for all sorts of great achievements.

Check against everything you do in a regular day whether this needs doing or whether it can be relegated to the trash can of bad habits. You will be surprised how much time you spend on aimless tasks that add no value to your life.

Just alone canceling some of the time spent in front of the TV could help you find the time needed to attain a wonderful goal such as learning a new language.

Achieving ones goals will depend on celebrating the successes you have on your journey. Nobody likes to continue working on something when there are only defeats. It’s the successes that spur us on to achieve greater heights.

It’s therefore really important when working towards a goal to keep track of your successes. The best way to do this is to write them down, or journal those in a file on your computer or even better write about them on a blog.

There is also great project management software available online that allows you to keep accurate track of what’s happening on your journey towards your goals. Many of these are free if you use the basic entry level option.

Keeping such an accurate track of your successes makes you appreciate your achievements. It allows you to pat yourself on the back and to encourage yourself to achieve even more. It also provides you with a history of your activities which will allow you to reflect in future years on the steps that you took to reach your goals.

Set up your journal to show the day and date and then compile a list of activities that you completed during the day. If your goal is to lose weight you might want to fill in the first block of your journal with the point that your scale showed you had lost some weight.

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That would make you feel good about yourself. To achieve further progress you might consider a personal trainer at the gym just to give yourself a bit more momentum in the exercise regime or you could work on the next day’s menu with nutritious fruit and veg to fill the whole day with so as not to need to grab that packet of crisps because you are hungry.

Looking at your success journal will allow you to work out the best experiences for the next day. It makes it clear in your mind what worked for you and what you need to do more of to continue your successes. Leaving your weight loss program to chance will lead you to miss reaching your goal.

Add to this powerful exercise by visualizing your next day and how it could be absolutely perfect for you. Imagine the day as you would like it to happen. You see yourself complete your work quickly so that you have time to enjoy your day at the gym and even add a quick swim to your exercise regime and maybe extend those precious minutes in the sauna.

You see yourself having time to really enjoy that healthy salad you have planned for lunch instead of having to resort to grabbing a quick hot dog to fill that hole in the stomach. You see your day run smoothly and efficiently with many friendly and helpful people making it a pleasurable experience.

With such a wonderful day you will feel that you can go home happily and that you won’t need to relax with that bottle of wine that you know will pile on the pounds faster than you can exercise them off. You have had such a great day you just know your body is loving you and your scale will show the effect by dipping further.

Visualizing your ideal day will help you create it. By doing this at night just before you go to sleep your subconscious mind will have the opportunity of working on it for you and helping you make it a reality.

You’ve written your goals down for the year. You’ve identified the little steps you want to take to achieve the goals and you feel positive that this time you will be able to attain your goals. It’s time that you finally you get around achieving those goals.

None of the above steps are going to ensure you have success in reaching your goals. They are great ones to work towards a goal, but there are many further processes that will need to be completed as well to ensure that you reach your dreams.

One critical process that will help you with achieving your aims is to evaluate and check your progress every day. The best time for this is in the evenings just before going to bed. Consider this preparation time spent to help you with the next day’s tasks.

This is the time when you acknowledge your successes, review your goals, focus on what you wish to happen in your future and make plans to accomplish them. Specifically you want to know what you will be doing the following day to work towards your goals.

If one of your main goals is to lose weight then you will reflect on how much exercise you managed to fit into your busy day, how well you stuck to that healthy eating plan you had set up for the day and how you felt about yourself all round.

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Then you plan the next day’s steps to move towards your goals. What activity could you fit in to help you work a bit further? Where could you improve your skills and how could you swap that packet of choc-chip cookies that you like to reward yourself with, with something that wasn’t a food item. Would you have time for a soothing massage maybe?

On the other hand if your goal is to grow a business on the internet, then your checks and balances would be quite different. You would determine how many articles you managed to write, how much traffic that brought into your site.

You would check your statistics to see how many people signed up to your newsletters and if anybody bought your eBook. You would check your progress on your next eBook and make a note of the content you would develop for it.

After all of the evaluation you would decide on what to do the next day to bring you closer to your goal of a successful business. Many small steps that are easily achievable will make you reach your goal more easily.

But it’s not only making those small steps that’s important. It is also vitally important that you check your progress every day. This helps keep you focused on your goals. It makes you see that you are making progress which is always immensely encouraging and it ensures that you do not wander off the path.

For so much time in our lives we occupy ourselves with activities that kind of fall in our way. We spend hours browsing shops without having any idea what we want to buy. When we see it we know we will want it is our reasoning.

It’s the same with surfing the internet. We get stuck in a loop of reading a mountain of articles that are kind of interesting but add no value to our day or what we wish to achieve ourselves.

With so much information and so many stimuli constantly hitting our conscious mind we find it increasingly difficult to focus on what is good for us and what would add to where we want to be.

By focusing every evening on what our day delivered to us and what we made of it, and working on what we want to do the next day, we start training ourselves to be more selective in terms of the experiences we want to have and the goals we want to achieve.

What has happened to those New Year’s resolutions you ask yourself very soon after you have set them down. It’s only a matter of weeks before those grand ideas have wafted away in the morning mist not to be seen again for another year.

When you made them they seemed so easy to adhere to. You were going to go to the gym three times a week. That was an easy goal to set. You were going to drink and smoke less, maybe even give up smoking. Seemed reasonable at the time.

Arriving at work on time every day was definitely possible until they started those road works of course and all traffic ground to a halt in the morning. After all that couldn’t be your fault then could it. Phoning your parents once a week was on that list, so was signing up for a new course to help your career along.

By February those New Year’s resolutions had evaporated and you felt guilty that they didn’t at least last until mid-year. It seemed that every year those goals set at the beginning of January have a shorter shelf-life.

What stops you from keeping those promises you make to yourself? What stops you from making those changes that could enrich your life? Why do you hang onto those old habits for dear life, never wanting to let go?

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Setting goals and sticking to them is one of the most difficult things to do. Countless self-help books are available in shops and online stores. The proliferation of eBooks on the topic shows that there are many people who want to learn the secret to goal setting.

The biggest secret and one that is seldom discussed is that goals need to be packaged into small achievable steps. It is the idea of one enormous goal that often puts people off and stops them from trying. It’s like planning to climb Mt Everest but you haven’t tried to climb the local hill.

As long as you keep your eye on the goal or your final outcome you will manage to get there by using small steps.

An interesting story was told by a woman entrepreneur who started a very successful weight loss club in competition to the more famous Weight Watchers. She set up her office in the garage of her home. That’s where she tested and assembled her product line of diet foods and supplements and planned her marketing strategy.

Her weight loss club grew into a huge organisation with the additional income of product sales in supermarkets. During an interview for a program on successful women she said that if she had known how big her organisation would become, she wouldn’t have had the courage to start it.

That’s how our goal setting fails us. We set our goals to be so large we fail at them because we lose courage. We need to lose weight? We don’t set a realistic goal, we want to immediately get rid of all the excess weight. The fact that it might have taken ten years to creep up on us is forgotten. We want to get rid of it in a month. When that doesn’t happen we give up.

We want to go back to University to get a degree to help with our career and we give up after a few months. It wasn’t supposed to take that long and be so much work.

Break up your goals into small bite size pieces. Make them smaller and easier to achieve. Being able to easily attain many small successes will more easily encourage you to keep going to reach the bigger goal at the end of the road.