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Let's face it, we're often full of enthusiasm when we're dreaming about what we want to achieve, but gradually the feeling fades and we're left back at the start - dreaming.

Goals fail because not enough thought and effort goes into achieving them. Setting the goal is only part of the journey, you must put in a conscious and consistent effort into burning the goal into your mind.

Thankfully, there's plenty you can do to improve your chances of turning your dreams into reality.

Many factors go into creating an effective goal, and it's something I'll be writing about in more depth in the future. Here are a few key points:

• Be specific - The more specific the goal, the better. "Exercise more" is not specific, but "Exercise every Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning before work for twenty minutes" is much better. Doesn't that sound less like a dream and more like a plan?
• Set a date - As plenty of people have said, "a goal without a deadline is just a dream". Giving yourself a reasonable deadline can help stop the "I'll start it tomorrow" syndrome that can creep up on you. A deadline promotes action, and helps you prioritise your tasks. Would your boss ever give you a big project to be completed "whenever"? Didn't think so.
• Commit to paper - It sounds simple, but it's a step some people can miss. Write your goals down. This not acts as a form of commitment, but it stops you from forgetting them too!

Once you've got your goals, you need to plan how you'll achieve them. This process is really down to personal preference, but a good start is to write down the first concrete action you can take toward achieving your goal. If you like to think further ahead, you can write down the next three steps, or a more detailed plan for anything complex. It's really a case of finding out what works best for you. Don't be afraid to experiment with different methods until you find something that works.

Mind-mapping can be a great help at the planning stage, and it's often beneficial to write down as many ideas as you can at this stage. Always go for quantity, and never throw out an idea when you're mind mapping. The important part is to create a safe environment for your creativity, so you don't want to stifle it by throwing out ideas at an early stage. Some ideas that sound bad may even turn out to be useful once you've had time to think about them. Once you've got all your ideas, you can start to review them and put them into a coherent plan.

As an example, if I had a goal of increasing traffic to my blog I'd want to get as many ideas as possible, and then create an easy to follow plan in small steps that I could complete every day. This might include posting on certain days, contributing to relevant forums on a daily basis etc.

If you're stuck at this part, don't worry. Solutions have a habit of appearing when you're least expecting them, so as long as you're constantly reviewing your goal (as covered in the next section), you'll do fine. Just make sure you have some paper handy for when the answer arrives!

Once your goals are committed to paper and planned out, you need to make sure you review them on a regular basis. Reading and re-writing your goals helps to galvanise them, and creates the drive and momentum that will push you to achieving them. Read your goals every morning and every night, and review them every week.

Do what works for you. Write your goals on an index card and carry them around, record them to a tape and play it whilst driving to work, write them on a huge poster and stick it to the ceiling above your bed! The important thing is to really hammer them into your brain. Goals that get forgotten don't get achieved, so make sure you're regularly topping yourself up.

Don't be afraid to tweak things if they're not going as well as you'd like. Modify plans as regularly as you need to, because even if things are going well, you will almost certainly learn new things that will help you achieve your goals even faster.

To summarise - if you want to achieve your goals, use the following methods:

• Set Excellent Goals - Write down your goals, and make them as specific as possible. Give yourself a deadline to help you prioritise your actions.
• Plan how you'll achieve them - Once you've written your goals down, make a plan as to how you'll achieve them.
• Review your goals regularly - Review your goals and plans as regularly as required. Burn them into your subconscious!

This post was written for the ProBlogger "Blog Goals - Group Writing Project". You can read all about other people's goals, and a whole host of other goal related information. Be inspired!

I wish all contributors all the best with achieving their goals!

As the tag line suggests, I want to improve myself every day. I also want to improve the day of anyone who reads this blog.

I love to learn, and I've realised that blogging is a great platform to learn from. Not only can it help you interact with intelligent people who share your passions, but it helps you improve yourself as you start to learn your own capabilities.

A lot of people with blogs want to be heard. I want to say something worth hearing. Sharing what I learn is a big part of this goal, and as blogging is also a good learning platform, the odds for achieving this are stacked in my favour.

I have plenty more goals, but these are the core ideas that I'm building the site around.

I'll be updating some of my older articles from the Sodaware blog to publish on this site, but for the next few months I'll be focussing on adding new, interesting content.

When I first started using the PCEO, I was a little unsure of what activities to use, so a lot of the points are similar to Dave's original system. Looking over them, you can see they're divided into four major sections:

• "Visible" work – The high scoring activities are all visible work. "Concrete Project Work" can cover anything on a project, from documentation to coding some fancy particles.
• Things of value – The next scoring band concentrated on things that are of value to other people, such as sharing source code or writing an article for the blog. It also covered business/personal development work, such as writing goals or creating something that helps with business work.
• "Smaller" business tasks – "Concrete business work" covered most business tasks, such as tweaking the website, doing accounts or anything else not covered higher up the chain.
• Contribution – I do volunteer work for the Scout Association, and I felt planning activities for that deserved rewarding on the PCEO chart. "Misc. Contribution" covers helping other people on forums or newsgroups.

There aren't any radical changes, but I think the small tweaks I made will have a positive effect. I was quite happy with the original scoring, but I felt it had a few weaknesses which I've tried to address:

• Promoting volunteer work – I removed the somewhat redundant "Project Proposal", and promoted volunteer work into its place, because I felt that I was neglecting this area a little.
• "Strengthening/Creating relationships" – Going back to Dave's version, I liked the section on relationships. It's all too easy to overlook the important relationships in our lives, whether they're business or personal. Again, that's a weakness in my original system that I wanted to address.
• Other tweaks – I changed the focus on a few items slightly. "Site promotion" went to "business promotion", and "publishable code" went to "publishable resource". This gave it a broader scope, and means there is a reward for sharing any resource of use, such as a template.

So that's my PCEO scoring system in all its glory. If you're just getting started with the Printable CEO, it can be difficult to work out a way of scoring your activities, but hopefully seeing my version will inspire you to create something cool.

External Articles: David Seah - The Printable CEO

My "experiment" was to use positive affirmations on a daily basis, to see if they made a difference in my life. The initial idea was to repeat my affirmations once in the morning when I woke up, and then again at night just before I went to bed. I started with six affirmations, most of which were inspired by content on bmindful.com.

The first week went well, but I noticed something of a slow down in week two. I tweaked my affirmations to make them shorter and easier to remember, and I also increased my exposure to them by carrying them around on a small card in my wallet. I found the article "Creating Effective Affirmations" at bmindful particularly useful when rewriting my affirmations.

As I touched on in But I Can't!, sometimes I will mentally talk myself out of a situation through a negative self voice. I've found that using daily positive affirmations has stopped me from using this negative voice, and I've often found myself overriding my negativity with my new affirmations.

It's refreshing to be in a situation that would normally cause anxiety, and to hear your "inner voice" repeating positive affirmations instead of negative ones, and needless to say it makes a difference to mood and productivity. I found that shorter affirmations worked best, so I modified my original six accordingly. I also found that more focussed affirmations worked better, so I kept each affirmation focussed on a single subject. The increased exposure was also quite effective, especially as some affirmations tend to stick better than others.

Undoubtedly, yes. I'm sticking with these affirmations for the foreseeable future. Whilst they haven't completely transformed my life, they've made a noticeable improvement. As with everything I do, I'll continue tweaking my system to get the best results.

If you're thinking of using positive affirmations in your life, I can highly recommend "bmindful.com". It has a selection of well written articles about affirmations, and also has a list of affirmations that you can add to your own custom list.

I still get a positive boost when reading them in the morning, and they're still helping me through sticky situations.

I'm still surprised by just how effective they can be at times, and I often find myself repeating my affirmations if I'm feeling low. They don't completely remove the negativity, but they certainly make a difference.

Although I look at my affirmations twice a day, they're still not as ingrained as I'd like them to be. There are still times when they don't seem to work, and I think this problem could be solved by exposing myself to my affirmations more often.

Some affirmations are working much better than others, and I've found that short, simple and focused ones work much better for me.

I've got six affirmations, which I'm going to tweak slightly. A few are a little too verbose, and some overlap a little in their intent. I'm also going to increase the regularity at which I read them, and make a small card to carry around with me.

So far this experience has been quite eye-opening. I always suspected affirmations would have a positive effect, but I never got around to trying them out. The results I'm getting so far are certainly encouraging, and I'm hoping these tweaks will improve my performance.