Bringing life dreams and reality together
Living the Dream
3/2011
Want your life back??
Most of America has been held hostage by the struggling economy that has prevailed over the past couple of years. For those fortunate enough to remain gainfully employed, the trade off was often working more with less. For those of us in the recruiting industry, this meant putting more time in, making more phone calls and essentially working harder to hopefully get the same results. More time on the job translates in to spending less time with our family, friends and enjoying the things we really want to do. My question to you - “If you had the option,would you rather work smarter, not harder? Would you like to get your life back?”
Start with a simple exercise. What are the three things you spend the most time on during the day? Write them down. Next question, what are the three things most important to you in life? If you are like most of us, you will find the three things from the first question do not correlate with those from the second. We all have to work, but finding ways to spend more time on the things that are most important in life should be a top priority. We all know, that at the end of our lives in retrospect, we WONT be saying I should have spent more time at work.
We do not want to put more time in to achieve the same results. We don’t live to work, we work to live. With the addition of the Y generation in to the workforce and the Four-Hour work week phenomena, society itself is experiencing a major shift, trending toward working less and playing more. People are tired of being held hostage on the job and are demanding work life balance. IT all starts with a simple decision.
Today, make a decision to focus on what’s most important to you – and over the next few weeks – we will discuss ways to – Start Living your dream by working smarter….not harder.
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The Road to Attaining Your Goals…
2/2011
What can make the most impact on your life? Start goal setting!
Goal setting for most people often takes place at the end of the calendar year. It not only provides a good time to reflect on what was accomplished during the year in our personal and professional lives, it also allows us the chance to think about starting off the new year with a clean slate full of fresh and exciting opportunities.
If you are like most people in looking back at the results, you may have had the best intentions but once you have taken stock in where you are today verses a year ago; there is a good chance that your life did not change measurably in any one direction. You might have a little more or a little less money, you may have gained a little more or lost a little more weight, but all in all, even with visions of grandeur, you stayed relatively about the same. If you take the past year’s results and multiply them by 50, there is a good chance that that is pretty much where you will find yourself 50 years later.
Don’t feel bad. Most people are in the same boat. The reason? Most do not understand the true commitment and the process required to make life impacting changes and attaining goals. So how to do people really make massive changes in their lives to insure they reach their desired state of business, living and life? Let’s look at what the research says on how people attain goals.
In “Building a Practically Useful Theory of Goals Setting and Task Motivation,” Gary Latham from the University of Toronto and Edwin Locke from the University of Maryland summarize a 35-year study of empirical research on goal setting theory. Much of their research has been focused on goal setting in business in hopes of finding out what works and what doesn’t. Here is what they found:
• The highest level of success was with moderate to difficult goals
• The most difficult goals produced the most effort, but did not equate to the highest level of attainment
• Self-efficacy was critical in goal attainment (believing they could achieve it)
• Feedback on progress was critical to success (How am I doing?)
• The more specific the goal – the higher level of achievement
• The level of importance of the goal affected the outcome
What this means to us is that based on this historical data, goal attainment has several key components that can be clearly defined and used to form a process that will increase our chances of achieving our goals.
Word of caution: change is hard. If it were simple, everyone would be living the life of their dreams. Success takes personal sacrifice. It takes the ability to overcome adversity. It takes an enormous amount of REAL discipline. That’s right... discipline. Success doesn’t care if you were not hugged enough as a child or if you grew up on the right street. Success and goal attainment are about taking full responsibility for where you are in life and your ability to do whatever it takes to make the desired change. If you are willing to put your personal baggage and self doubt on the back burner, read on, you may have an opportunity for REAL change and the true potential of living.