If you browse the personal development section of your local bookstore, you’ll see a wide variety of books and audio programs about goal setting. Most hold out the idea that if you were only to seriously follow a goal-setting program, your life would be wonderful and rich, and you’d get everything you wanted.

But you also have friends or acquaintances who tell you, “I tried that—it doesn’t work!”

They’re wrong.

Goal-setting does work, if you understand what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. That’s something that many, if not most, of the books don’t bother to explain. Why does goal-setting work? Let’s examine that a little bit. First, the mechanics of goal-setting in a nutshell:

• decide what you want to do, have, or be
• believe that it will happen
• focus on the goal in some form or fashion periodically

That’s it. That’s all there is to it.

If you were to analyze how your mind works, you would realize that you are setting goals for yourself continually, every moment of the day. What will I eat? What am I going to do next? What do I need to get done today? Your mind answers the question, and just like that, a goal is set. You focus on it, you accomplish it, and you go on to your next goal.

The biggest problem folks have with goal-setting programs is that they don’t control the process as well as they could. They lose track of the most important step: focus on what you want in some form or fashion periodically. Keeping yourself focused on your goals is the most vital ingredient in the achievement recipe.

Decide what it is you want

For a lot of people, this is a difficult thing to do. Understand that what you want today may well not be what you want tomorrow. As you travel through your life experience, your desires will change with your experience. Make it easy on yourself if you need to; start with the little things. Set a goal to eat a little bit less for breakfast. Your larger goal is to lose weight, but your immediate goal is to cut down on the amount of food you take in.

Believe you can have it

An important part of reaching your goals is believing that you can. Sometimes it takes a while for you to train your mind that you can do, be, or have whatever it is you want. You have to come to a place of knowing without a doubt that whatever you can concieve and believe, you can achieve. Until you are able to do that effectively, your mind will fight you. You’ll not be able to come to a level of commitment because you don’t really believe that it can and will happen. That in itself is a killer. So start small if you need to. As you begin to accomplish your smaller goals, you’re also training your mind to believe that you can accomplish whatever it is you set out to accomplish. Don’t get caught up just yet on setting the larger goals for your life until you can train your mind to believe in them.

Focus upon it

Depending on the time frame you’ve decided on to achieve your goal, you’ll want to do this at least daily. For some goals, you might want to do it even hourly. The important thing is that you do it, and do it effectively. You must put yourself in the place of already having accomplished your goal. See yourself as already being the way you want to be, enjoying the possession of what it is you might want, or doing what you want to do.

How you do this is so very important. Say, for instance, that your goal is to change the outside color of your house. To do that, it’ll have to be painted. The focus you should have is that of seeing your home already dressed in its new color. Hold a vision of driving up to your house, riding, or walking up to it, and seeing it as you want it to look. Don’t hold a vision of you painting your house, unless your goal is to be a house painter. Focus always and only on the end result.

Set aside a time daily to focus on the goals you’ve set. To help you do that, turn your goals into something tangible you can focus on. Take a picture of the home you want, the car you want, the money you want. Put the picture somewhere you can see it easily. Get to a quiet place in your mind first; clear your mind of the clutter of your day-to-day existence. This is your time. Know within yourself that whatever you’re about to bring into your mind, you can have. Believe that you can have it; believe that you deserve it. Then, focus on your picture. Travel into your imagination, putting yourself in the place of already having the money you want, or the car you want, the business you want. In your mind, enjoy having it. What would you be doing, feeling, smelling, touching, tasting, seeing? Make it real. Enjoy yourself driving your new car. See your hands on the steering wheel, feel the vibrations through the seat and steering wheel (unless you’re envisioning a Mercedes—they don’t vibrate). Step on the accelerator, feel the rush! Do, in your mind, the things that you’d do while living a $250,000 a year lifestyle, or having to turn away business because you have as much as you want.

Spend some time in this place. Then, gently, with your feelings of having it now, come back to your life, refreshed with knowledge that you will have, do, or be what you want. Be excited knowing that what you focus on, you will manifest.

And, when things seem to be not going the way you want them to, take a few minutes to revitalize yourself by focusing on your goals.

Thoughts become things.

That’s why goal setting works.