“Visualization is one of the most powerful means of achieving personal goals.” 
-Harvey Mackay
See to Achieve
Plato refers to thinking as the talking of the soul with itself. Yet one of the problems we have with these “conversations” is their transient nature. Our greatest ideas and strong moments in life can be fleeting and overlooked in our daily routines. This can leave us in a bit of a rut: always busy with life but never accomplishing or following through on our long-term goals. But that’s where your digital Brain can help…
Use your Brain to connect all your key goals and objectives for 2014 together. You can even relate them to other ideas and categories for a complete view of your life.
Adding your New Resolutions to Your Brain
We all need a place for ourselves, a place to work, a place to rest, but most importantly a place to think. You can make that place for thinking and translating your goals into action in your Brain. It’s easier than you might think. All you have to do is get started with a conscious effort by translating your goals and desires into something concrete that you can build upon. Here you can think about your objectives and be continually reinforced with your own ideas. By returning to this area of your digital Brain habitually, you train yourself and focus your own mental energy on the things that are truly important to you. These simple, subtle actions can lead to small changes that add up over time and can be the difference between achieving your goals and just dreaming about them.
Creating resolutions in our Brains helps make them tangible and actionable and at the same time helps us to think deeper to understand ourselves through our visual Thoughts. Your goals can be embedded in their relevant area. For instance, if your goal is to retire at 60 that goal can be organized under your Finances area in your Brain. Or you can even create a specific area for “Personal Growth” or “2014 Resolutions” right at the top of your Brain. All your key goals for the year should be linked there.
Under each goal or New Year resolution, you need to break it down and segment your desired achievement into manageable tasks. For instance, “Living to be 100” is a very concrete goal but unless you define key steps and milestones to get there, it’s just a pipe dream. Under this Thought you might include key research on longevity and health as well as key action oriented Thoughts that will help you achieve your goal such as nutrition, exercise and stress management.
TheBrain’s outline view enables you to see all necessary steps for your goal.
Deciding on the Best Path or Action Item to Reach Your Goal
Once you have added child Thoughts for key steps to achieve your goals you can use Thought Types with colors and icons to highlight the best ideas. Use Thought Tags to further clarify and evaluate potential projects.
Tagging Thoughts as a follow up to your brainstorming session helps clarify the practicalities of your ideas.
In the above screenshot once all ideas for the company’s “Business Expansion” were captured, Thought Types are used to signify a primary attribute of an idea. In this case, something that is a “Greenlighted project” (Thoughts in geen) or a “Hot topic” (Thoughts in orange with flame icon) has generated much debate is identified with a Thought Type.
Often the ideas generated aren’t necessarily a clear “yeah or nay” so you can create Tags that will highlight the feasibility of each idea. In the example above there are Thought Tags for “Cost” and “Timeframe” because these are key factors on executing these ideas.
By categorizing and further classifying ideas, unconscious reasons why something is a good or bad idea becomes more concrete, and an objective criterion for making decisions can be readily identified and implemented.
Integrating all Resources and Tracking Your Ideas
Sometimes we know exactly what needs to be done but we just need a place to stay inspired and track our progress. With TheBrain you can drag and drop all relevant files and web pages. So if you need to track how many miles you run each week and how you feel after your run, create a Thought for this. Attach a spreadsheet or use TheBrain’s Notes to keep your fitness log.
Furthermore dragging and dropping sources of inspiration that you read about on the web will enable you to recalibrate and reenergize yourself when you need an extra nudge. This might include key leaders in your industry, pictures of desired results or reference links for your project.
Reminders and Monitoring Your Progress
Goal maintenance is key to success and your Brain can help you stay on top of things. Setup action oriented Thoughts that demand your attention periodically. For example, if your goal is losing weight, add additional Thoughts on number of steps walked or an exercise log that you update each week. You can use TheBrain’s Notes built-in time stamp to record your key metrics. You can also setup Thoughts and reminders in your Brain for periodic reviews so when you get busy with other stuff your goal is never forgotten. I suggest you setup weekly reminders with TheBrain’s built-in calendar. The reminder Thought ideally should lead to some action you need to take, even if it’s just a journal entry in TheBrain’s Notes. If your goal is more elusive, like taking your business global, your weekly action item can be more research oriented, like finding three new web articles on your goal. In this way, your knowledgebase grows to serve your resolution and you in turn will use this newly acquired knowledge to meet your goals.
New Feature in TheBrain 8!
To track your thinking and activities, click on the clock next to the search box in TheBrain 8. This will give you a time based view of your Thoughts so you can track where you are spending your time.
Now…with all your Thoughts, Tags, Types and reminders you will be poised for achievement. So Happy New Year and Happy Planning in your Brain!
