Don't let your mind run away with you. If you don't do something about it, of course, it will do just that. So, I suggest that, today, in a calm moment, go about becoming calmer - as calm as you can be. Take two or three minutes - when you don't need it - to calm down, clear your mind and breathe a few wonderful deep and real breaths. If you can get a hold of your mind when it doesn't matter, you'll get very good at being in full control when it does.

There are countless volumes, workshops, videos, conferences and God knows what on goal-setting, visualization, developing a vision, constructing Balanced Scorecards to measure your progress and, again, you name it, all manner of nonsense about how to go about achieving what you want to achieve. But how do you know what you want to achieve?

If we use our normal minds normally - if we try to imagine what we want to achieve from a conditioned way of thinking about goals and achievement - we'll always either under-set our goals and underachieve or, even worse, set the wrong goals for ourselves and struggle to achieve them. Either way, we'll always struggle - because none of the aforementioned courses or books will explain that your subconscious needs to expect what you want to happen. Without that subconscious expectation, everything will be an unnecessary struggle.

But an even bigger issue exists when it comes to goal-setting - an issue exemplified by the normal business planning process that is going on in all sorts of businesses all over the world as we speak. The "logic" of this exciting process, by which we set ourselves challenging goals goes something liek this: "Let's take this year's mediocrity and add ten percent and, hey presto, we've a challenging target"! If my workshop is called The Psychology of Success (which it is!), then this could be called The Psychology of Failure or, at the very least, The Psychology of Mediocrity. And it is everywhere you look.

Purposefully focused (mindful) people know different - not just becuase they've brought their mindfulness to bear on the effortless achievement of their goals but because that self-same mindfulness has coloured their goals or, truth be told, raised their goals from the mediocrity of normal thinking to something that the normal mind would never be able to fathom.

Purposeful mindfulness begets greater purpose which begets greater purposeful mindfulness - it's a recipe for efforltess success. So, as you envisage the goals that you'd like to achieve, cast off the normal shackles of mediocre thought, cast off the anchor of mindlessness that weighs so many down and give your mind the scope and time to let it tell you what your ideal goals should be. Artists call this inspiration, business people call it gut instinct. Doesn't matter what you call it, you've got it in abundance once you clear your mind.