Photo by Scramblejam

There are many different aspects involved in setting and keeping goals, and in building positive new habits - one of the most important I think is having some visible way to track your progress.

Our chosen goals and desired changes can often become lost in the myriad demands on our time, and without a consistent system for openly monitoring our day-to-day progress, we are restricting our ability to successfully stick to a our plans.

Whilst there are lots of possibilities for intelligently tracking progress towards an objective - weight charts for the dieters, savings graphs for financially astute - I regularly tackle goals that warrant tracking a daily or few-times-a-week occurrence.

If you’re trying to give up smoking, manage your spending, meditate daily or visit the gym 3 times a week - an invaluable tool to help you establish your habit is a visual tracker that allows you to cross-off/mark/star the days when you have successfully achieved your aim.

Over the last few years, I have experimented with various different systems for monitoring my daily habit changes - Joes Goals is a very popular online system, and is completely free; I’ve also tried the Goal Pro software, which I didn’t get on so well with. My preferred type of tool is a tangible paper-based system - I’ve toyed with the Ben Franklin Hack from Zen Habits and have created more than a few different versions of my own tracker worksheet.

Once I began to play around with these systems, discovering what worked and what sucked - I was able to figure out what my ideal solution was going to do for me, and how it needed to work. Eventually my system evolved into the tracker I use now, every single day, and which I highly recommend.

Daily Habit Tracking with the Compact Calendar Hack

The Compact Calendar is a visual calendar planning system, invented by Dave Seah (a very clever chap). His original idea was to use the Calendar for planning in meetings - enabling users to visually map out blocks of work and to plan resources. I originally downloaded the calendar to do just this, but found I hadn’t really needed to use them as intended - the printed copies I had were hanging around unused.

It was then I realized that the simplicity and elegance of the Compact Calendar layout lent itself wonderfully to a Daily Progress Tracking system - I could mark the days with a sticker, a square, circle or whatever (or some complicated notation system) and I had a huge space on the right to add notes, ideas, mini-mind-maps, feedback and comments where needed.

I started with playing with the system the next day, and found it had everything I needed, and was so simple and easy-to-use that it just worked.

Now, for every new change I am trying to make, or new goal I am trying to reach, I create a Compact Calendar Daily Tracker - I write a motivating title for my goal, write down the important notes and caveats which are relevant to my goal (visit gym for at least 30 minutes, don’t buy chocolate, drink lots of water) and I’m done - My goal is set, the rules are laid out and I have a customized daily tracker where I can mark my progress as I go.

As far as tracking your goals is concerned, it doesn’t get much easier.

Notes and Suggestions

• This tracker system works really well for well-thought-out, objective goals, where you can be damn sure about whether you achieved it or not. I know exactly whether I got up on time or not, or if I ate chocolate or not - make sure the criteria for a successful tick are crystal clear.
• If you’re starting a tracker part-way through the year, you can minimize the negative impact of a big blank unsuccessful space at the start of the year by coloring it in, outlining it or writing over the top of it.
• Don’t be put off by the visual impact of a whole year on one page - if you’re tackling a 30-day challenge or tackling a short-term goal just draw an outline round the designated time period and forget about the rest.
• There are no rules for using this system really - You can write whatever you want on the right, and fill-in the boxes on the left in whatever way floats your boat at the time.
• Get creative! - Use your worksheet as a chance to get really creative and fun. Achieving your goals is supposed to be a challenging, but enjoyable process - make filling in your worksheet enjoyable too! Use bright colours, squares, squiggles, mini-diagrams, sketches of yourself… Whatever works!

Habit Tracker Gallery

Below are some scanned worksheets that I have been working on since the beginning of the year, showing progress towards some of my current goals.

Blank tracker Worksheet	Blogging Worksheet 2008	Exercise Worksheet 2008

Photo by Go Climb A Rock

Many of us who choose to pursue personal growth have “be more successful” or some such derivative, down as one of their chosen objectives for the future. For years I myself had “success” down as one of my guiding values in life. Despite holding myself to this value as best I could, I never really felt I was making headway…

In addition, a lot of people use the broad labels of “successful” and “not successful” in reference to themselves or others, without ever having a clear definition of what success is.

To many people, the concept of success is very much like that of enlightenment - it sounds fantastic; is something obtained at cost by a fortunate few; and is something we all feel we should want, but don’t really understand fully.

Don’t get me wrong… The pursuit of success - a commitment to excellence, and to achieving the things you have set out do to - is a noble aim, and is a path that we should all try to follow in a conscious way. However, by changing the way you view success, it stops being a dream that you hope to achieve in the future, and becomes something amazing you can experience now, and every day henceforth.

Success and Social Conditioning

Most of our common definitions of success are handed to us by society - by the people around us and the prevailing social culture and values. Success might be having a great looking partner; success might be having a lovely place to live; success might be having lots of money - we all have our own criteria that we use to define this most nebulous of concepts. Sadly, the one of the main themes in people’s understanding of success is that “success” means having more of something than most other people - be it money, confidence, results or possessions.

If you take some time to dig beneath the surface of how most people understand success, you begin to find out more about what success really means. Most definitions that people hold to are not “success” or “successful” in and of themselves - they are all just situations.

Situations are combinations of circumstances - the aggregate of biological, psychological, and sociocultural factors acting on an individual or group. A situation is exactly the same for all the people observing it - it’s a tangible, measurable event.

What happens with most of us, me included, is that we turn a situation into a definition of success by comparing that situation to one that is more or less desirable. If the comparison is positive, we see our situation as successful - negative, and it’s unsuccessful.

Social conditioning has most of us believing that success is all about the positive or negative comparison of situations, which is ultimately about “having” - if you “have” a more positive situation than others, you are “successful”. If other people “have” more than you, then they are deemed “successful”.

Success as an Experience

As we start to cut through the social haze around how we define success, it becomes clearer that success is about the perceived intrinsic value of situations, belongings and people - it is not the extrinsic value, as viewed from the outside. Therefore, how you view success, and whether you feel you are successful or not is completely dependent on your unique point of view - the positive or negative comparison from your perspective. When you consider your comparison subjectively, real feelings of success are directly related to the experience of having these things, and is in no way determined by the value of the things themselves.

This is the key to changing the way we think:

If we define success as an experience - not a situation - then it becomes possible to start succeeding much more easily.

We all experience things every single day; some are simply existing behavioral patterns replaying themselves over and over; some are new things that have only just begun. Though you can’t magically change the things that you “have” - money doesn’t appear from nowhere, new possessions don’t just spring from the ground - you can very easily change what you’re experiencing, simply by changing your point of view.

Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our point of view.-
Obi Wan Kenobi

Success Mastery

Success Mastery is about changing the way you define success - changing the way you see things, and what you do, in order to feel more successful every single day - genuine success then comes from living your life the way you wish to, to the best of your abilities - and not from simply having lots of cool “stuff”.

Over the coming few weeks, I am going to be sharing a number of different strategies and techniques for helping you feel more successful. In the meantime, to help you get started straight away with this technique, you first need to work on your point of view.

The initial major change to make is the way you see the things going on in your life - ideally, the actions and activities you engage in daily will enable you to feel successful.

True success comes from living your life the way you want to, and from expressing the best of yourself.

If the things you’re doing at the moment don’t give you any margin for experiencing success, then starting thinking about the things you could be doing - the small changes that you could make, which will help you feel successful.

• Are you polite and courteous to the people around you? Well done! You’re a success!
• Are you as organized as you need to be in your life? Congratulations, you’re a success!
• Do you enjoy quality time with friends and family? Wow, you’re a success!
• Are you in a good relationship? Hallelujah, you’re a success!
• Could you eat a little better? That would make you a success!
• What about if you gave blood? You would be a success!
• Are you happy with the way you look? Damn, you’re a super-hot success!

Not only is this change surprisingly easy once you get started, it can even be fun! Spend some time going through all the areas of your life - look at all the things you currently do, and all the small but meaningful changes you could make - and see what you can start feeling successful about!

Here are some areas where you could experiment with changing your perspective, and start experiencing more success:

• Your Blog - Do you see blogging success as being in the Technorati Top 100? Or enjoying a steady stream of AdSense income? Why not see success as running a useful blog, with regularly updated content that offers something of value to people?
• Your health - Do you imagine health-success as being a muscle-bound Adonis? Or maybe a slinky sylph-like siren? Try a different definition - being healthy enough to keep up with your kids; eating a bit better every day; choosing positive hobbies to keep fit.
• Your Job - Is your “success” measured annually in your hoped-for payrise? Would you be better off seeing success as being part of keeping the company running? As a facilitator for the success for the business as a whole?
• Your Family - Is the “success” of your family measured by the size of your house, or your choice of holiday destination? Or is it by the happiness and well-being of the people in it?
• Your Purpose - Is your life purpose only going to be successful in years to come? Why not feel incredible about living it now? Trust me, even knowing it is quite an accomplishment!

The power of this approach lies in it’s simplicity and ease-of-use, and the fact that it can bring about great changes in life experience, almost as soon as you start trying.

If there are areas in your life where you are putting in the effort, but aren’t getting the results you think you should - try changing your perspective, to see if you can find a new path of success for yourself.

Make sure to check back soon for some exciting new strategies to help you feel abundant and successful now.