Time For Reflection

As the holidays are upon us, most of us are immersed in the excitement and activities of the season. There’s always a lot to do at this time of year on top of all the usual things we need to get done in our business and personal lives. The daily to-do lists and the responsibilities of work and family leave little time for ourselves, let alone for reflection. When the holidays pass, we begin to turn our attention to ending one year and preparing for the start of another. This is the perfect time to reflect on what’s important in our lives and what we’d like to accomplish in the future.

Our reflection over the previous year may include a certain sense of accomplishment, some regrets and the desire to do things differently in the new year. In some cases, the memories of what happened in the past year are so overwhelmingly negative that we don’t bother setting goals for the new year. After all, what’s the point if we’re just setting ourselves up to be disappointed?

It doesn’t have to be this way, though. There are proven techniques that can help you improve your odds of accomplishing your goals. What’s the difference between those who seem to breeze through their day accomplishing everything they set out to do and those who seem to wonder where the time went at the end of the day? We all have the same number of hours each day. What’s the secret to accomplishing your daily and yearly goals?

Visualize Your Accomplishments

The first step is to clarify exactly what it is you want to accomplish. If you are fuzzy about what you want, you can’t home in on it. Your goal must be clear and specific. You must visualize and verbalize that goal in a way that will impassion you to achieve it.  It’s hard to get excited about the vague notion of generating passive income because there are no clear benchmarks or goals. But if you make your goal clear and specific, it becomes easier to visualize it. For example, you could say, “I will generate $200 a month in passive income so that it will cover my car payment.” This makes your goal very specific. When your goal is specific, you can more easily figure out ways to achieve it. You can’t achieve something that is vague and hazy because it has no meaning. When you talk about $200 in passive income, you can break it down into specific weekly and monthly goals.

You should work on visualizing what it looks like to make $200 a month in passive income. Literally, work on developing a mental movie of what life will look like once that goal is accomplished.  As Napoleon Hill would say, “Do you have a burning desire to accomplish this goal?” Without truly possessing a burning desire, without passion to make it happen, you may drift back into old patterns and behaviors that don’t support growth and that keep you plateaued in the same place you were at the beginning of last year.

Set Reasonable Goals and Stick to Them

Once you’ve determined that you have the passion, you should ask yourself if you have set a reasonable goal. If your goal was to make a million dollars in six months and you’ve only been able to make $1000 extra dollars a month so far, that’s not a reasonable goal. Maximize your chance for success by choosing the smallest meaningful goal. Once that goal is accomplished you can move the bar a little bit higher. Do you have the resources to achieve the goal? Have you set benchmarks along the way for accomplishment? Are the goals measurable? Do you have the determination and unwavering resolve to follow through on your plan?

Of course, things don’t always go according to plan, do they? Often things happen that sabotage our efforts. It may even feel like there are hidden forces that are trying to prevent us from getting ahead in life. This often happens when bad luck comes in a cycle. You may have several days in a row when everything goes wrong. The person who is truly passionate about achieving their goals will keep picking themselves up again. Eventually, the bad “luck” will end and good things will befall you. It pays to stand firm and strong.

Keep Doing Things That Support Your Goals

On any given day, we devote the most time to doing things that meet our needs and desires. You may be very willing to bring your child to after school soccer games, because you desire your child to be happy and healthy. If you want to accomplish new goals for passive income, you need to realize what meets your needs and desires so that you are eager to spend time figuring it out. If you are trying to generate $200/month in passive income but do not invest time, effort, and money to achieve it, you need to look at why you’re not investing those things. Remember, if the benefits you receive from your current behavior outweigh the benefits of making the change you desire, you will have a difficult time rationalizing the needed changes in your day. You may need to build in additional benefits to your plan that will keep you motivated.

Track Progress

Once you get started, make a habit of developing systems to track and measure your progress. Many people require a visual representation of their progress to provide incentive to continue moving forward. Visual incentives might be graphs or charts that show where you started and how much progress you’ve made. One great way to measure your progress with respect to passive income goals is determining what percentage of your monthly expenses are covered by my passive income. That one metric will help you to focus on increasing your passive income while keeping your expenses under control. Bear in mind that you will need to develop a single-minded focus toward reaching each benchmark. Avoid distractions that cause you to veer off your path toward your goals. Each day, set priorities and protect your time from things that deter you from achieving goals. Remember that something will come up every day that will tempt you away from your objectives. Being single-minded and focused will keep you on track.

Overcome Your Fears

The final thing that will be instrumental in achieving your goals is to overcome your fears. Everyone has fears. We all know how powerful that feeling can be. You may have a fear of heights, a fear of failure or even a fear of success. Your mind can play terrible tricks on you that keep you from reaching your goals. Fear is a natural and helpful emotion caused by the threat of danger, but it can also be an irrational emotion that doesn’t serve your goals. The source of your fear could be caused by a limiting belief. Fear is a threat response, but the threat may be real or perceived.  We know that fear as a threat response is beneficial as long as you consider it as an input to your actions instead of how you react. The typical reaction to threat response is fight or flight, but if we manage the fear we can respond the way we want to respond instead of responding instinctively. As an example, you are planning to sign your first offer on a rental property. You feel the anxiety and your mind is racing with all kinds of potentially negative scenarios. Your instinctual reaction is flight. That would mean moving away from the opportunity. But that doesn’t serve your goal for achieving passive income. Instead, if you recognize that the fear is coming from limiting beliefs you can conquer this fear by rationalizing or protecting yourself against each negative scenario.

How Limiting Beliefs Can Inhibit Your Goals

Limiting beliefs are programmed in your subconscious mind. These are the learned beliefs that we picked up from those close to us.  There is a great deal of evidence that shows the neural programming of our subconscious mind often gets in the way of us accomplishing our goals. You may have received these beliefs from your parents that money was the root of all evil, that people who succeed are dishonest, that investing is too risky, that you have bad luck, that you are not smart enough, and it takes money to make money. All those beliefs have formed neural pathways in our brains. This means that when certain neurons fire, they trigger the firing of other neurons in the same pathway, which makes it extremely difficult to consciously change our behavior. The good news is that there is a way to reprogram the neural pathways by recognizing those limiting beliefs and changing how you would normally behave.

Take Control Over Limiting Beliefs

By recognizing those limiting beliefs and changing our behavior, we have the ability to change this subconscious programming. As an example, when you are looking to generate passive income you might think subconsciously that if you bought and rented a house you would be a dishonest or evil person. Recognize that limiting belief and analyze why you are feeling this way.  For example, that belief might come from the fact that a friend was expelled from his apartment for not paying the rent and at that time you thought the landlord was mean and greedy. Think about this belief from your perspective as a potential investor. Speak with other people about your beliefs and realize that this belief is preventing you from achieving your goals. Create empowering beliefs instead of limiting ones. Replace limiting beliefs with empowering beliefs.

This is a lot to take in and it deserves some quiet time for reflection. But if you do take the time, either now or when the new year begins, you’ll start to notice some changes in the way you perceive opportunities. First, you’ll see that opportunities are not to be feared; they should be evaluated alongside the goals you’ve set for the coming year. Second, you’ll begin to recognize limiting beliefs when they appear in your daily life. As you practice replacing those limiting beliefs with empowering beliefs, it will get easier and easier. Finally, you’ll realize that it really is possible to generate passive income so every dollar you make isn’t tied to your time. Let’s make this new year your best year yet.

Start The Year With A Plan

I hope this information entices you to create a plan and set yourself for success in the new year.