You must see your goals clearly and specifically before you can set out for them. Hold them in your mind until they become second nature. Before you go to bed each night visualize yourself accomplishing your goal. Do the same while you brush your teeth or take a shower in the morning.

Goals are not dreamy, pie-in-the-sky ideals. They have everyday practical applications and they should be practical. Your goals should be:

1. Well-defined. You won’t know if you’ve reached them if you haven’t established exactly what they are.

2. Realistic. Not that you can’t be president some day, but shooting for state representative might be a wiser first step.

3. Exciting and meaningful to you. Otherwise, where will your motivation come from?

4. Locked into your mind. Always stay focused on what you want, and not on what you don’t want.

5. Acted upon. There is no sense in having a goal if you aren’t going to go after it.

How do you find your goals? We all have dreams of what we would like to be doing, what we would like to have, who we would like to be with. Think about your dreams. What goal would you go after if you knew you would not fail? If you had unlimited funds? If you had infinite wisdom and ability?

One of the most essential things you need to do for yourself is to choose a goal that is important to you. If you need to set goals for your career, find a job or profession that is important to you beyond the bills that it pays. It is vital to your growth as a person that your work is more than a job to you; that you have a higher purpose for doing what you do. Sometimes we get into career paths or relationships that are really not what we want and then we struggle to make them work. As a result, we become frustrated and confused. We feel that we are working to no good purpose.

A woman told me once that when she went in to work at a job that she despised, it was like a refrigerator falling on her shoulders as soon as she stepped inside the door. She knew that she had gone as far as she would ever go in that job, and it weighed heavily on her.

She was stuck in that job and it was stuck on her. They were paying her just enough to keep her from quitting and she was working just hard enough to keep from getting fired. If you find yourself in that pattern, you must change your thinking and your behavior; otherwise you will continue to carry the weight of mediocrity on your shoulders.