Achieving Bigger Goals for a Better Life

November 25, 2023

Asoka Jinadasa

These six keys to achieving bigger goals for a better life will guide you from wherever you are in life to the pinnacle of success and fulfillment.

You can do that irrespective of your age, gender, education, experience, or background—simply by unleashing your vast innate human potential. Just the way you learned to walk and talk without a teacher and had the amazing ability to use a smartphone long before you could read.

Here are your six keys to achieving bigger goals for a better life.

1. Create an empowering mindset

In his pioneering book, Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill said that we can achieve any goal if we continue thinking of that goal.

However, if we keep thinking that we can’t achieve a goal, our subconscious mind will make sure we will not—to save us the pain of trying and failing as we fear.

This simple principle underlies the six keys to achieving bigger goals for a better life. So you need to plant in your mind full details of the ambitious outcome you seek, support it with positive emotion, feed it with untiring effort, and remove the weeds of doubt that occasionally appear.

No matter where you are, you are nowhere compared to where you can go.
Bob Proctor – bestselling author, speaker, coach

**2. Aim for unrealistic goals**

Surprisingly, goals that seem unrealistic are easier to achieve than goals that seem more realistic!

That is because realistic goals are uninspiring. These will only fuel you up to the first or second challenge, after which you will tend to give up. If the potential payoff is average, so would be your commitment and effort.

“You need to set realistic goals” is one of the dumbest ideas I have ever encountered.
Vishen Lakhiani – entrepreneur, author, motivational speaker

The six keys to achieving bigger goals for a better life are for manifesting unrealistic goals called BHAGs: Bold, Hair-raising, Audacious Goals (pronounced bee-hags).

Selecting such spine-tingling goals at the edge of reality will inspire you to stretch yourself to achieve them—despite some doubt that they may be beyond your reach!

Therefore, the starting point for applying the six keys to achieving bigger goals for a better life is aiming for BHAGs. For example, starting your own business, if you have been only dreaming about it for years.

Aiming for almost unattainable goals will be exciting enough to produce a burst of adrenaline. You will need that burst of energy to overcome the inevitable challenges and trials that will arise when you start applying the six keys to achieving bigger goals for a better life.

3. Align both minds with your goals

Here is the neuroscientific key to reaching challenging goals:
your conscious mind sets goals;
your subconscious mind blocks them or helps you achieve them.

For example, like the captain of a ship, your conscious mind sets goals and gives orders to achieve them. If the orders are clear, do not contradict stored beliefs, and pose no threat to the ship, your subconscious mind will take them literally and obey them using the full power of the ship.

Therefore, any open or hidden conflict between your conscious and subconscious minds will block the achievement of any goal.

This explains why a superficial understanding of the Law of Attraction will not help you achieve your ambitious goals.

This important law was first presented in Buddhist philosophy.

All that we are is the result of what we have thought.
Gautama Buddha

More than 2,500 years later, quantum physics (at the subatomic particle level) has scientifically proved that the universe is an energy field (though it appears solid to our senses) and that we have the power to influence it with our thoughts.

That means, every one of us has the potential to achieve the highest level of success achieved by any human who ever lived—simply by awakening and focusing our almost unlimited power of thought

Here is how you conscious and subconscious minds collectively determine your ability to set and achieve any goal.
Our external communication link, which helps us get what we want from the universal quantum energy field, functions only through our subconscious mind.
Copyright © 2023 Asoka JInadasa

How our conscious and subconscious mind collectively influence the setting and achievement of goals for success and a better life

There are two important mechanisms at work here.

First, your goal must be crystal clear. Imagine you go to a restaurant and order something to eat. A waiter cannot take your order because there is no such thing on the menu.
Similarly, if you want a promotion, you must be clear about all the details, such as what position, what responsibilities, what team, what office, and what salary.

Second, your conscious and subconscious minds must both agree on reaching any goal. In the earlier example, imagine you order something that is bad for you from a waiter who is a friend. To safeguard you, he (subconscious mind) will make sure it does not go to the kitchen (universal quantum energy field).

Similarly, in the earlier example, if you want to get promoted but don’t think you are good enough, your conscious mind will block your efforts. Even if the conscious mind agrees, if the subconscious mind feels that you are not good enough, or getting promoted will disrupt your family life, it will invisibly block your efforts to get promoted.

Your inability to reach an attainable goal, despite your best efforts, would often be due to a conflict between your conscious and subconscious minds.

Your conscious mind should weigh the pros and cons carefully before deciding on a clearly defined goal (as explained in Item 4 below). Before you start making a determined effort to reach it, you should make sure your subconscious mind supports it.

A typical indication of a subconscious block would be your inability to imagine in detail the outcome of your goal, or your lack of enthusiasm when thinking about it.

Here is a simple way to eliminate any such invisible subconscioius obstacle.

Reexamine your goal to check if there is an unseen downside you have not considered. If not, and you feel confident to go ahead, mentally experience and enjoy the desired outcome a few times each day using all your senses—as if already achieved (very important!).

That will gradually overwrite any unjustifiable obstacle in your subconscious mind and align it with that goal set by your conscious mind.

When your conscious mind and subconscious mind are totally aligned on a goal, you open yourself to receiving insights and ideas through your intuitive intelligence, tempered with your rational expertise. These include flashes of inspiration and premonitions of danger.

The six keys to achieving bigger goals for a better life include this simple way to check the viability of any goal and clarify the path leading to it, before starting—instead of setting off and hoping for the best!

4. Use mental contrasting

Mental contrasting helps you identify what steps are needed to achieve a future goal, and if the outcome is worth the time, money, effort, and resources needed. It involves comparing and contrasting a desired future outcome, to your present situation.

Check if a goal is worth the effort before taking off, not after landing.
Felício Ferraz – award-winning coauthor of Flying Penguin second edition

This process requires flying with your mind to a future goal and fully examining its expected benefits. And then looking back to the current state to see what resources, actions, time, and money you need to invest to reach that goal.

You can then decide if that investment is worth the foreseeable benefits, when compared to benefits from other things you can do instead (the opportunity cost).

Mental contrasting involves three simple steps.

Imagine the achievement of a future goal in minute detail and feeling its benefits (e.g., becoming a successful public speaker).

Examine the current situation to see what you need to do (e.g., overcome shyness) and what resources to find (e.g., a speech coach).

Decide what you need to do reach your goal (e.g., pay for speech lessons, practice as needed, video the outcomes, make necessary improvements, apply for speaking assignments, select speaking opportunities, and use feedback to improve).

In the above example, to become a successful public speaker, you need to develop your self-esteem, self-confidence, and speechcraft. A high level of confidence in your ability to overcome your weaknesses would lead to increased effort and more success; a low level of confidence would lead to less effort and less success.

Mental contrasting can tempt you to aim for hair-raising goals you think are at the edge of your reach. The joy of achieving the exciting outcomes will inspire and motivate you to improve necessary attitudes, behaviors, knowledge, and skills.

Mental contrasting will help you decide with a high level of certainty which goals are worth the time, effort, resources, and possible sacrifices needed to achieve them (e.g., getting a professional qualification or a higher degree.)

Every battle is won or lost before it is ever fought.
Sun Tzu – Chinese general who wrote the Art of War

If the foreseeable benefits are high, you can attach a high level of importance to any ambitious goal. That will lead to increased effort and greater success—e.g., create a BHAG such as becoming a highly-paid world-class speaker.

Here are three guidelines that will help you achieve BHAGs.

Frame your goal clearly (what outcome?) within a specific time frame (by when?).

Focus on a transformational change (e.g., speaking like a professional), as opposed to an incremental change (e.g., speaking better than colleagues).

Anticipate inner satisfaction (the thrill of achieving a BHAG) rather than immediate external rewards (awards and popularity).

Mental contrasting will ensure that your personal resources (time, energy, money) are not wasted on goals you are passionate about but seem unrealistic (e.g., becoming an opera singer). And it will maximize your commitment to attaining exciting goals you consider barely reachable.

It also prevents you from reaching a difficult goal after a huge effort, only to realize that it was not worth that effort. You can apply this concept to almost everything you do—at home, work, and play.

This is like test-driving an expensive car to see if it is worth the large financial commitment needed to own and maintain it.

Mental contrasting is best supported by Implementation Intentions. This gives you a simple mechanism to preplan responses to future scenarios that can either help or hinder your efforts for achieving bigger goals for a better life.

5. Use implementation intentions

Mental contrasting enables you to identify the steps and effort needed to achieve a future goal, while implementation intentions in the form of, “If …………., then……………” statements enable you to preplan your responses to foreseeable obstacles and opportunities.

You do that by drawing on what you learned from past successes and failures. For example, “if I run short of money, then I will pawn my gold jewelry.”

This is like piloting a plane to a difficult destination without worrying, because you have preplanned your responses to typical headwinds, tailwinds, crosswinds, and bad weather that characterize your chosen flight path.

You can also use it to condition your mind to overcome attitudinal or behavioral issues. For example,” if I feel angry at someone, then I’ll take a deep breath to calm my mind before responding.”

This simple preplanning method eliminates stressful, last-minute decision-making to find urgent responses to foreseeable disruptive or supportive situations.

Implementation intentions can also help you get started toward a daunting goal. Preplanning conditions that identify when, where, and how you will start can make you three times more likely to succeed than by doing mental contrasting alone.

6. Use them in combination

Mental contrasting for goal-selection followed by “If …………., then……………” preplanning for foreseeable scenarios enables you to respond to opportunities and obstacles on your way to achieving BHAGs.

This combination also provides a simple way to manage warning signs about your progress toward a desired goal. You can do that by setting trigger levels you can use to decide either to change the goal or change your approach for achieving it.

For example, when considering buying a particular stock or commodity, you may decide beforehand, “if the price falls below 50, then I will buy.” To be on the safe side, you may also decide, “if the price falls 10% below my buying price, then I will sell.”

As you have seen, you can apply the six keys to achieving bigger goals for a better life in any area of activity—at home, work, or leisure. Even more important, your vast self-improvement during the process of aiming for BHAGs will be you real reward!

What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.
Henry David Thoreau

For detailed coverage of all six keys to achieving bigger goals for a better life, please read the eBook shown below.

If you found this article useful, please share it, and leave a comment below with your views and experience.

6 Keys to Achieving Bigger Goals for a Better Life