Design & Achieve Your Goals with Creative Thinking
Step 11: Using Your Imagination
At the very beginning of this project, you used your imagination to envision having achieved your goal. That was great, but now you have to put that dream aside if you want to succeed!
You see, research has shown that when people imagine having achieved their goals they feel some of the satisfaction of having really done so. As a result, they become less motivated to actually work on achieving the goal. You do not want that to happen, do you?
Nevertheless, you do need to use your imagination to succeed. But rather than thinking about having achieved your goal, think about the tasks you need to do today or tomorrow (if you have finished today’s tasks). Imagine what you will have to do, how you will do it and, if you are worried about any aspect of the day’s tasks, think about what you will do if something goes wrong.
By focusing your imagination on your day’s tasks, it becomes much more likely that you will complete those tasks, rather than simply dream about your goal. That, in turn, makes it far more likely you will achieve your goal.
However, if you ever feel demotivated and wonder why you are struggling to do all of these tasks that you’ve assigned to yourself, then you should return to your dream of having accomplished your goal. Think again about how it will feel. Then think about all that you have accomplished so far and how much closer you are to your dream.
Once you have done this, and feel the motivation returning, you need to put the big dream away for safe keeping and think about the day’s tasks again. Now you should find them a lot easier to embark upon.
Action
Every day, think about the tasks you have to perform for the day. How will you do them. What do you need to do. What will you do if something does not work out. Is there anything that worries you? Why? What would make you less worried?
Once you have accomplished the day’s tasks, you can think about the next day’s tasks.
Continue to Step 12 (last step)
I will publish the 12 step Designer Goals process over the next few days. Here are the steps we will do together.
- Introduction (This page!)
- Acknowledge personal responsibility.
- Define your goal or ambition.
- Question your goal.
- Reframe your goal.
- Imagine achieving your goal.
- Identify subgoals you need to take to live that dream.
- Build ideas for achieving subgoals.
- Putting it all together
- Build to-do and don’t-do lists
- Using your imagination
- Get started!
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