Dreams will remain dreams until they are released from the inside out, in writing. Then, and only then can we move on towards setting goals. Setting goals is not just the setting of a goal, but following the steps in the formula towards setting goals.

If you have already written all of your life dreams of what you want to be, do or have, congratulate yourself. That is a major accomplishment towards setting goals.

The next step towards setting goals is to reduce your list of life dreams to the most important dreams that you would like to realize. To do that, pretend you were just told that you had six months to live.

Based on only six months left to live, underline or highlight the life dreams that are most important to you. These will reflect your true values and bring out the most important of all dreams. This too needs to be done before setting goals.

Setting goals for every dream listed would be a lifetime of work. This exercise is meant to reduce the dreams to the most important dreams that you would like to realize. With this short list, we can then move on to the next step towards setting goals.

Next, we need to group, categorize and prioritize our dreams, before we set goals. You will probably note that there are few dreams that can be placed under one category heading. For example, I found that most of my dreams fell under the following categories: Family, financial, career, personal development, travel and business.

You may have other categories as well such as music, hobbies, religion, education, etc.
The main thing is this step towards goal setting is to group all like dreams together under one category. This exercise should be done before you can set goals.

The next step towards setting goals is to prioritize each of the dreams in the category. For example, I prioritized all of my dreams relating to family as follows - build a house, have children, graduate from university, married, grandchildren, etc.
Do the same within each of your categories, ranking them in order of priority or in chronological order. This is getting your closer towards the effective setting of goals.

Next, look at your categorized list and all of your top priorities. Which dream stands out most, that will get your started on your journey. Whatever it is, this is were you start setting goals.

In my case, it was under the career category. If I got a national marketing job, it will satisfy my career dream. That in turn would satisfy a financial dream, which in turn would make a family dream a reality - a house. That career would also satisfy my travel need of seeing Canada from coast to coast, on expenses, before visiting other countries and the job could provide me with the personal development training that I was looking for.

Now that I have identified the most important dream, I moved onto setting goals to accomplish that dream. Over time, it all fell into place, and it all started with a dream, that became the first step towards living the life of my dreams.

The bottom line - The process of having dreams in writing, grouped, categorized and prioritized are a significant part of the process towards setting goals that will become a reality.

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