What is your purpose for today? What do you hope to achieve today? How does it fit with your bigger objectives? What is your purpose for the next hour? How does that fit with your bigger objectives? How are you doing, so far, today in doing what you had decided to prioritize for today? What can you stop doing now - or avoid doing later today - that has nothing to do with your purpose(s) for today? Or, perhaps we should mention the unmentionable: do you have a deliberate consciously decided purpose for today at all?

I've been spending a lot of time over the last couple of weeks, talking to clients about their goals and objectives. Cognitive psychology tells us that we need to know why we're doing what we're doing and, at it's most basic, we have to know why we got out of bed this morning! You need goals - goals for business, goals for career, goals for fitness (physical and mental!), goals for life!

The problem with the normal way of goal-setting is that we attach ourselves to a "must have" outcome - and anything to which we give power to make us "happy", we give power to make us unhappy too, should the desired outcome not come about or should we start questioning when it is going to come about. The problem with the way we've traditionally been taught to set our goals is that they must be specific. NO! They must be emotional, exciting, touchy-feely... they must appeal to the child within and, as developmental psychology tells us, the child within really is a child... of about three years old!

So, our goals must not focus on the mechanics, the specifics or, I would suggest, the material (more about that in a later Ezine!). The problem is, however, once we begin to get all emotional, we begin to realize that, for everything we want to achieve, there are, by definition, things we don't want to achieve. For every choice we make, there is something we choose not to have. For every change we make in our lives, we move away from what we currently have and what we currently have might be OK!

Now, you and I know that "OK" is not good enough - we're here to live our lives and live them to the full. But the normal everyday mind is OK with OK and, choosing to move away from OK brings with it loss. Yes, with all change comes loss and the prospect of loss of any kind thrusts us into the unknown and the unknown is not the safe kind of place - however just OK that might be - with which we've become comfortable.

• Purposefully focus - it doesn't come naturally, we're actually "wired" to not focus
• Set goals in a way that energizes your subconscious into focused effortless action
• Make your very best decisions and solve problems with ease - your brain can do this effortlessly
• Banish stress - we're ordinarily "wired" to be stressed