Every time that you stand up today, take a couple of deep breaths and feel what it's like to be alive - what it's like to feel the air passing through your nostrils, what it feels like when your chest expands as your lungs fill.

In the ordinary course of events, you're going to have to breathe anyway - you might as well use the opportunity that that provides to get in touch with the reality of the moment. In getting in touch with that reality, you clear your mind, free it from the endless and useless subconscious banter that, otherwise, drags you into the all too-well-known of your own internal world.

I had an interesting chat with a shop assistant in a very well-known menswear shop a couple of weeks ago. He told me that his basic salary was below the minimum wage - but that that was alright because he worked on commission. Or, at least, he thought it was alright until he attended a motivational day with the company's CEO. In order to encourage the troops, the CEO had explained that they had it good - at least they had a basic salary! In other countries, their colleagues worked only on a 10% commission. My friend was earning 1%... "talk about motivation" he said "if you buy a £450 jacket, I wouldn't be able to buy a pint with the commission!"

Plenty of us have heard of Gerald Ratner - the owner and CEO of Ratners Jewellers who was unceremoniously removed by his Board having told an AGM what they'd had another year's bumper profits because they sold "total crap" - jewellery that was "cheaper than a... prawn sandwich but probably wouldn't last as long"!!!

You would think that, with such a shining example of stupidity, CEO's would be careful when they open their mouth... apparently not!

Over the last couple of weeks we've been exploring how our goals need to be framed within the broader 'happiness and peace of mind" context and how they need to provide us with direction but not impinge on the actual moment-to-moment doing... when we're doing, we should be just doing - that's how things get done!

Today, I want to explore how we might go about actually setting our goals. For most of us, with a normal education and with a normal perspective on how, for example, a business targets growth or how an individual 'looks forward' to something yet to be achieved, we haven't really been adequately equipped with a means of "setting our minds".

Generally, speaking, we look forward to the achievement of our objectives. We "see ourselves" somewhere different in five years time or plan what we will do to achieve what we want. This presents us with a serious problem because our subconscious, that intrinsic part of our mind that dictates our behaviour and, therefore, creates both our present and, consequently, future "reality", only understands the present tense - it, literally, cannot get its head around the concept of "tomorrow" or words like "will".

Let's take a practical example. Say you're afraid of public speaking. Every time you stand up to make a presentation you go numb. This self-sabotage is triggered by your snapshot learning - things that made a big enough impression on you, during your formative years, to the extent that you took a snapshot. If we stick with our example, the original snapshot that triggers the jitters might be of your whole school class laughing at you when you were five years old. The key thing is, though, when you get numb now, your subconscious is looking at that original snapshot... as if it's happening now. It doesn't know the difference.

So, to rearrange today's behaviour to coincide with your goals, you need to give your sunconscious a snapshot of what you want to achieve - what it would look like, feel like, sound like and even smell and taste like.

At present, your subconscious uses your five senses to attempt to make sense of today. The fact that it makes nonsense of today by looking at stuff learned decades ago is waht is getting in your way today. If you want to do today what will give you a brighter tomorrow, use those same five senses to describe to your subconscious mind what that bright tomorrow looks like... now.