jack canfield 7 secrets to attain your dreams

7 SecretSto attain your dreams

Jack Canfield, renowned author of Chicken Soup for the Soul and NY Times best seller The Success Principles, and featured teacher in the movie The Secret.

7 Secrets to Attain Your Dreams

2© 2005-2012 Professional Education Institute and Self Esteem Seminars, Inc All rights Reserved

7 Secrets to Attain Your DreamsDreaming is easy. Achieving your dreams…well, that’s a different story.

It’s no secret that people who live the life of their dreams know how to set goals and make their goals happen. While many think these goal achievers possess an innate super-power or simply live a charmed life, there are a few things that you can do to join their ranks.

Best of all, you can start with every one today!

Secret #1 – Write It DownOkay, the first one might not be a “secret” in the truest sense of the word, but it is on the list because hardly anyone actually does it! In fact, it has been estimated that only 3% of the population have written goals.

Writing down your goals forces you to get clear and committed to what you are setting out to do. While you may think you know what you’re after, taking a few minutes to put pen to paper and writing out what you desire takes your goals to a higher level. When you write, you put a certain degree of thought into evaluating the goal you’re pursuing and ordering the goal’s steps. The act of writing—and not the actual words on the paper—helps you to more firmly cement your ideas in your mind and increase your ability to recognize the opportunities that appear while you work on your goals.

So go ahead and join the 3% that actually have written goals.

Secret #2 – Align Your GoalsHave you ever driven a car when its wheels were out of alignment? Depending on the severity of the mis-alignment, you either drift slowly to one side or are pulled forcefully off the road. In either case, extra energy must consistently be exerted to stay on course not to mention the unnecessary wear-and-tear to the car.

When your goals don’t complement or support each other, it is like driving a car that is out of alignment. You have forces pulling you in different directions. For example, say you have a goal to start your own business and one to improve your relationship with your 12-year old son. Each goal is admirable, but the opportunity for each one to pull against the other exists.

Starting your business will involve long hours and require you to jump on any opportunity the moment it presents itself. In order to improve your relationship with your son, you will need to spend more time with him, but your time is at a premium as the business gets up and running. Also, planned activities with your son run the risk of being cancelled at the last minute because of a golden business opportu-nity that comes your way.

All of this isn’t to say that you have to choose one goal or the other, but to realize that your goals don’t exist in a vacuum. Once you’ve written your list of goals, take a moment to think how pursuing each one could impact the others. Then think creatively as to how you can align the goals to complement each other. Who knows, maybe your son would love to work alongside you at your business.



Secret #3 – Set Performance Goals to Reach Your Outcome GoalsAn outcome goal is a vision you want to make a reality. It is the house on the hill, the corner office, the vacation at the posh resort. All of these things can be motivating and help you create a laser-like focus for your life, but they don’t kick you in the pants and hold you accountable the way a performance goal does.

Performance goals are a commitment to yourself to do something and to do it consistently until you reach your vision. Best of all, chances are someone has already figured out what it takes to achieve your vision. In other words, the gal that already has the corner office, she is either doing or has done what you need to do to get there. Do you need to make 40 cold calls per week? Do you need to make 5 presenta-tions a month? These are performance goals. By setting performance goals, you can answer definitively “yes” or “no” as to whether you met your objective and that kind of accountability is priceless.

Secret #4 – Embrace FailureYour goals mean a lot to you otherwise you wouldn’t have set them in the first place. You want to make them happen and it’s for that reason alone many of us get scared of making a mistake.

Here’s the secret: Every mistake contains a valuable lesson in helping you achieve your goals more ef-ficiently and effectively than if you were able to do everything perfectly the first time.

By embracing failure, you free yourself up to a whole world of “what-if-I-tried-this” thinking. Things that were once “I can’t do that” become “How could I do that?” and your creative juices begin to flow.

Failure helps you learn to adapt, course correct, and persevere. Those three things alone will help de-velop your goal achieving abilities.

Secret #5 – Stop SnowballingLet’s be honest. Have you ever been on a diet, eaten something you shouldn’t have, and said, “I’ve already cheated. I knew I couldn’t do this. I might as well go all in.” Before you know it, that one cookie has morphed into an entire sleeve of Oreos and then later that day, you find yourself at a fast-food drive-thru on the way home from work.

Almost everyone backslides from time-to-time when moving towards a goal. The secret is to stop it in its tracks and get back to what you’re supposed to be doing immediately.

Sure, you should have been writing your book for the last hour instead of surfing the Internet, but that doesn’t mean the day is lost and you might as well play Farmville for the rest of the afternoon. Stop it as soon as it starts and get back on track.

Secret #6 – Create “If-Then” PlansAchieving your goals would be so much easier if you had a crystal ball and knew what the future held. You would be able to set the perfect goal and nothing would throw you off your game. Unfortunately, “life happens.”



Sometimes you achieve goals sooner than you anticipated. Sometimes you dive head-first into a goal only to realize that it isn’t what you actually wanted. Sometimes nothing seems to go your way. Having “if-then” plans allows you to account for the unknown while still holding yourself accountable to your performance.

By establishing criteria that you must meet or circumstances that need to come to pass, you create branches in your goal pathway that allow you and the goal to be more flexible and resilient in the face of the unknown. This flexibility is what keeps you from throwing in the towel when things don’t unfold the way you anticipated.

Secret #7 – Make Goal Setting and Achieving a Way of LifeSetting and achieving goals isn’t something you do from time to time or on New Year’s Eve. It’s a mindset. It’s a way of living your life. It’s something inside that pushes you to be your best self.

The truth is this: If you don’t make goal setting a way of life none of the previous secrets will produce the results you want. And you can’t make goal setting a part of your success DNA without diligently ap-plying the previous secrets. They work hand-in-hand—over time—to transform you from someone that just sets goals into someone that achieves them.

The Bottom LineSome of these secrets may come easier to you than others. In fact, you may be doing some of them al-ready without realizing it. The power however lies in doing all of them together. Together, all of the above secrets will create a synergy that will super-charge your goal achievement.

jack canfield 7 secrets to attain your dreams

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