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How to Set Goals like John Kennedy

Written on July 20, 2009 by George Krueger & Mary-Lynn Foster in Goals

moon_footprint "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed." ~ Neil Armstrong

Today we’re celebrating one of the biggest successes of all time. Forty years ago today, on July 20, 1969, three men – Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins – landed a spacecraft on the moon for the first time.

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They had launched their mission 4 days earlier, flying 203,000 miles to get there.

About six-and-a-half hours after they landed, with one-sixth of the people in the world tuned in to watch, Neil Armstrong descended down the ladder of the lunar space module. As he became the first person to walk on the surface of the moon, he uttered those famous words:

“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

We never get tired of hearing those words. It gives us goose bumps. They are so inspiring.

But we have to remember that it didn’t just happen. It began as a bigg goal over eight years before.

On May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy said:

“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.”

How to set goals like President Kennedy

President Kennedy’s goal was very well-stated. It was a SMART goal. SMART is an acronym for:

Specific
Measurable
Action-Oriented
Realistic
Time- and Resource-Constrained

Let’s look at each of these five components of a well-stated goal using President Kennedy’s goal as an example.

Specific
President Kennedy said that we were going to do two things:

land a man on the moon
return him safely to earth

You can’t get much more specific than that. In this case, it may be easier to think about what wouldn’t be specific. He could have said, “We’re going to land a man somewhere in space.” That’s not specific. He clearly articulated the destination.

Measurable
President Kennedy’s goal was clearly measurable. We would certainly know if a man had landed on the moon. We could certainly tell if he returned safely to earth.

Note, though, that landing on the moon and then not being able to get back safely would have meant the goal was not reached.

Let’s bring this point on being measurable safely back to earth. Here’s an example of a goal that is not measurable:

“I’m going to increase my income next year.”

What does that mean? If you increase it by $1, did you really accomplish what you set out to do? A well-stated goal would be:

“I’m going to increase my income by 5% next year.
“I’m going to increase my income by $2,000 next year.”

Now you’ll know if you accomplish what you set out to do.

Action-oriented
When President Kennedy called for this mission to send man to the moon [PDF], he made clear that it would take a tremendous commitment by the entire nation to reach this goal.

He called for innovation. He called for new money. He said it would take a concentrated effort for an extended period of time. But it would get done.

And get done it did. In a similar vein – with our personal goals or the goals we set for our businesses – we must commit to taking the necessary steps to achieve the goal.

Realistic
President Kennedy said, “I believe we have all the resources and talent necessary.”

Your goals can and should be bigg goals. They should stretch you beyond anything you’ve ever accomplished before. But they have to be realistic.

Otherwise, they don’t lead to bigg success. They only lead to discouragement.

Time- and Resource-constrained
This one’s easy. President Kennedy said we would accomplish this goal by the end of the decade. It was 1961. The goal was reached July 20, 1969.

He made it clear that resources would have to be diverted from other good causes if this goal was to be reached.

When you set your goals, be sure to give yourself a due date. When will you accomplish this goal? What resources will be required to do it? Do you have them?

Goal-setting is not goal-getting

John F. Kennedy was able to reduce all of this into a simple goal statement of 31 powerful words that set this course of events into action.

Because he wasn’t just a bigg goal-setter, he was a bigg goal-getter.

Setting goals is just the first step in that process. We have a great tool – the Bigg Goal-Getter’s Workbook – which takes you through the entire six step process to put goal-setting and goal-getting to work for you. It’s free when you subscribe to our free newsletter, The Bigg Success Weekly.

Just one final point:

Good goals have a reason behind them. They serve a bigger purpose. Every goal should lead you closer to the bigg success of which you dream. So we’ll close with John F. Kennedy himself explaining why sending a man to the moon was so important:

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

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(Image and quotes in today's post from NASA)

3 Comments

Believing is Seeing – Part 1

Written on May 28, 2009 by George Krueger & Mary-Lynn Foster in Personal Branding

We were thrilled to visit with Christine Kane on The Bigg Success Show today. Christine has sold over 100,000 CDs and her songs have been sung by a number of Nashville stars. She was recently featured in First magazine for her innovative strategies for taking life to the next level. If you listen to the show, you can hear part of her great song, “Right Outta Nowhere.”

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Hear George & Mary-Lynn talk with Christine Kane on The Bigg Success Show! Click the purple player to listen while you read: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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george We heard you perform live at SOBCon a couple of years ago and I have to tell you … you rocked the boat!

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christine_kane
Or the boat rocked me!

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george It was a little breezy in the Windy City that night.

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What is a vision board?

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marylynn One of my favorite girlie magazines is First magazine. So, when I saw your picture in the March 30 issue, I said to George, “Look, Christine is featured.” You were talking about how vision boards have helped you achieve your dreams. So, let’s start with, what is a vision board?

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christine_kane Vision boards got really popular after The Secret. I’ve been doing them forever. In the late 90s, a friend of mine was trying to change her career around. I was trying to uplevel my career in music. So the two of us and another friend did them. I ended up getting the house I put on my vision board. It was completely effortless. Then I noticed that, after my shows, I’d end up having a circle of women, and sometimes men, around me asking how to follow their dreams. So I started doing women’s retreats to answer that call. The first day we work on intention. The second day we look at what blocks our intention – the little patterns that come up. So by now they’re deeply connected with who they are, what they want and all their old patterns. After that, we do vision boards. We just take poster board and a huge stack of magazines – I have hundreds of them at these retreats. They grab photos that speak to them. Sometimes they speak to your soul and you don’t know why. Sometimes they are totally in alignment with what you want, like a new house or a new car. I tell them not to get uptight about it. You tend to know which image is right for you. I don’t give huge instructions because I think our creative side – that’s my songwriter side – knows where you’re going to put those images and how you’re going to lay out that board. I like to have people put a picture of themselves in the middle of it. Then you put that board above the desk in your office, your walk-in closet, in your bedroom behind the door. You just let those images be with you every day. The idea behind it is you’re welcoming in new images from a new paradigm that you want to create. That’s the power of our subconscious. As a creative person who has created a songwriting career out of nothing, I believe in the power of these kinds of tools. I don’t put everything on the idea of a vision board, but it’s one of the many ways that we can create better things in our life.

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Blocking out mental blocks

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marylynn Christine, let me go back to something you said early on – we have those “blocks.” As you were creating your vision board to help you take your career to a new level, what was a block that you recognized and what was something you put on your vision board to get past that block?

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christine_kane That’s a really great question. You have to take this to your own career. For my career, there’s a point where every songwriter, artist, or entrepreneur gets to where they have let the original people who showed them the ropes give them all the “here’s how it is in your business” or “here’s the only way you’ll be able to do it.” I had that and a lot of it was very negative. I was playing at bars. Sometimes I was at a festival playing on a rickety stand. I truly had this mindset that it was the best I could get. I was lucky to be an artist. I sat down by myself to do my vision board on New Year’s Day, which I do every year. Now this was not my first vision board; this was when I had been doing them and really got it. I pulled out the image of Celine Dion on stage in Vegas.

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marylynn
That was quite a stage!

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christine_kane It didn’t mean that I wanted to be Celine Dion because I don’t. It represented that I wanted to start playing on stages that are substantial, that didn’t smell like spilled beer, that weren’t a pile of wood thrown together for some make-shift festival that someone put on.

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marylynn
That weren’t rocking!

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christine_kane Exactly! If you’ve ever walked backstage at a great theater, you know what it feels like. You feel those spotlights come on. That image of her stage was the center of my vision board. Literally within six months of doing that board, I got an invitation from a ballet company. They had seen me at a showcase and fallen in love with my music. They choreographed a ballet to my songs. They wanted me to tour with them. The tour lasted for three years. From that point, I was on those stages. We were around the country at performing arts centers. Those spotlights. That strong sturdy stage. After that, a lot of the performing arts centers that I went to with the ballet company had me back as a solo artist. So my career literally did a u-turn. I got more money. I really got what it felt like to have imagined that thing on my board. It required that I get really deeply in touch with what that picture represented to me. It wasn’t just, “Hey I want to be Celine Dion and do cool things.” It was, “What does this stage mean to me?” It means no longer saying “yes” to anything that is less than this image. I really got what that felt like inside of my body.

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Don’t know what you want? Do you know what you don’t want?

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george That’s such a great story, Christine. This was part of the article from First magazine. And by the way, may I say that I’m man enough to read Mary-Lynn’s girlie magazine! One of the things that jumped out at me reading that, and now hearing it again, is that sometimes we get to what we want by, first, knowing what we don’t want.

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christine_kane Oh yeah. You know it’s funny – my retreats have become so popular that I created an online course and then it turned into a coaching program called The Uplevel Your Life Mastery Program. It’s a seven-week program. One of the exercises in the first week is about getting in touch with what you want. So many people say they don’t know what they want. So we start with writing down what they don’t want. That is a perfectly valid place to start. That’s what has to start turning around. That awareness that I didn’t want to play at places where people were drinking. That was my first thing.

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Learn more about Christine and download her free vision board e-book by visiting her site, christinekane.com. Also check back tomorrow when Christine tells us about the three kinds of vision boards.

Thanks so much for reading our post today. Until next time, here’s to your bigg success!

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(Image in today's post from Christine Kane)