Achieving goals is predictable, if you believe the words of best-selling business and self-help author and presenter Brian Tracy.

It’s a tantalising thought, particularly for those of us to who view success as a miracle. But to Tracy’s mind, success is nothing more than following a recipe that has been tried, tested and proved by other successful people who have gone before you. “A very learned man called Kop Kopmeyer developed 1000 principles of success and I asked him which of these is the most important of all. His answer was to use proven success methods from others, instead of trying to make up the ‘success recipe’ yourself,” he says.

Shift Your Mindset

Tracy’s first step to success is to reorientate your life and your thinking so that you can clear a space to make the changes necessary for success:

  1. Make new choices and decisions. We are where we are because of the decisions and choices we have made in the past. If you want to change where you are, you need to make new choices and importantly, stop making old ones.
  2. Reorientate yourself towards positive people. Change is even more difficult to achieve if you are surrounded by negative people or those who don’t want you to change. Associate with positive, helpful people and avoid those who are negative.
  3. Trust in the laws of attraction. You are more likely to attract people and circumstances that are in harmony with your own thinking, so give yourself time to become the person you want to be, and changes will follow.

Achieve Your Goals

Now, Tracy says, you need to focus on your goals:

  1. Write down your goals. Doing so has been proven to increase your chance of achieving them ten times.
  2. Structure your major goal as a question. For example: “How can I close 200 new deals in the next six months?”
  3. Write down twenty possible answers to the question. This kind of ‘mindstorming’, as Tracy refers to it, forces you to dig deep for answers. “Sometimes it’s the twentieth and most obvious answer that provides the breakthrough, but we often overlook those ones,” he says.
  4. Formulate tasks. Break the goal down into as many small parts as you can and start with one task.

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