The Key To Personal Success And Achieving Your Goals By Goal Mapping Coach Lizzy Wood

I’m Lizzy, a single mum to Theo, a goal mapping coach and full-time B2B marketer.  Despite a long career in the corporate world within operational and marketing roles, I’ve always had a passion and felt a greater purpose for helping others. It’s been a dream of mine to be become a coach for nearly 15 years, but until recently, I never quite found the belief system to go and make it happen.  

Shortly after I became a single mum and at a time when I was struggling with my mental health, I discovered goal mapping. The learning I’ve gained from attending workshops and some of the courses run by the founder of Goal Mapping, Brian Mayne has really been a life changing experience. It’s not only helped me move from a place of fear to a positive mindset but enabled me to finally develop a belief system, that has empowered me to both dream and achieve my goals.  In 2020, I embarked on my journey to finally become a coach, becoming both a certified goal mapping coach and most recently a facilitator.  Today my passion and sense of purpose for helping others is burning more than ever, along with sharing my experience and learning to help others benefit from goal mapping. 

“To be the architect of a great life, you must first envisage, and then create a great plan.”

Brian Mayne, Founder Goal Mapping.

Having goals particularly in business is important, they allow us to get clear on what we want to achieve and can provide us with a structure to develop a plan of action that we need to take in order to achieve them. They can also be our guide in times of change or when we go into overwhelm. 

One way or another we all set goals, but something that many of us don’t often think about, is our approach or the methodology behind goal setting.  And as a result, some of us will be successful in achieving our goals and some of us won’t.  

If I was to ask you about your approach when setting goals, I am sure many of you would tell me you utilise to some degree the SMART acronym Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time bound. 

What I’m going to share with you today is a different approach to goal setting, one that aligns more with laws of manifestation and two of the reasons why the approach, certainly in my experience works much better than the traditional SMART approach.

Goal mapping was founded in 1995 by Brian Mayne. Having worked in personal development for many years teaching learnings from the likes of Anthony Robbins and Stephen Covey, Brian often wondered why some people were so much more successful than others in achieving their goals. This burning question inspired him to research and develop the goal mapping system, that today has been utilised by over 5 million people including businesses such as Microsoft, Sky, BT and John Lewis. 

It’s all in the mind!

There is a great quote from Henry Ford “Whether you think you can or your think you can’t your probably right.”

Your belief system from the outset will play a huge role in firstly how big you set your goals and secondly your approach to achieving them, particularly when it comes to overcoming any obstacles that get in your way.  

A belief is essentially our automatic way of thinking, it’s been programmed over time, often through experience or from things we’ve been told (including ourselves). Sometimes that belief system will be positive and an enabler for our goals and other times negative and self-limiting.

The great news is, we all have the power to re-set our belief system and unlock our true potential. We just need to make a conscious effort to send our sub-conscious mind clear and positive commands/goals. 

You see our sub-conscious mind wants to help us achieve our goals, it’s actually programmed to act on the goal or command we send it from our conscious mind. Where things often fall down however, is that the command we send it from our conscious mind, isn’t clear enough for our subconscious to decipher what we actually want.  And when the commands aren’t clear, both our conscious and subconscious mind will revert to our current belief system to help them interrupt what we want. 

With this in mind, within goal mapping the approach to both setting and writing our goals are centred around the best way to send our sub-conscious mind those clear and positive commands, so that it supports it to achieve our desired action.

These things include:

• Dreaming and developing a possibility consciousness 

• Understanding the importance of a positive mindset and believing in our goals

• Writing our goals in a positive and present tense like affirmations

• Activating our whole brain using words and pictures 

• Performing a ritual that enables us to regularly connect with our mind and send those positive commands, reprogramming and strengthening our belief system. 

Whole brain activation 

Just like there are two parts to our mind, there are also two parts to our brain, the left is very logical and thinks in words and is analytical and the right side is highly creative, thinks in pictures and is very visual. When our whole brain is activated, we’re performing at our best. We can strategise and develop a plan of action with our left side and be creative and generate ideas with our right side. When they are wiring and firing together you truly are performing at your best.

To help activate our whole brain and make those clear conscious commands to our subconscious, goal mapping uses both words and pictures to form our goals.  

In the 1980’s/1990’s it was popular to write your goals over and over again as a way of re-programming our subconscious mind. Today vision boards are hugely popular.  Goal mapping simply combines the two.

We visualise what achieving our dreams will look and feel like, as well as writing them down.

Not only does this help our subconscious mind be really clear on what we want, it strengthens are belief and desire to achieve our goals.   It also helps us develop a positive mindset, releasing the happy chemical serotonin that in turn gets our brain cells connecting and helps activate our whole brain, to become our best selves. Pretty powerful outcomes hey! 

Re-thinking your approach to setting goals

If you have ever had a negative outcome when goal setting, I’d like you to think about your approach to both setting and achieving those goals, taking into account the methodologies I’ve shared with you above. 

What was your belief system at the time? 

How clear were your goals when you wrote them?  What language were you using? Was it positive or negative?  How clear was the command to your subconscious mind? 

How much time did you really give to the whole process and how much did you really connect with your goals? Did you visualise for example what achieving those goals would look and feel like? Did you consider why achieving those goals were important to you or who or what within you was needed to help you achieve them? 

Addressing your belief system, thinking more positively and developing possibility consciousness, together with learning how to set your goals and send positive and clear commands to your subconscious will have unbelievable results. 

Remember the words of Henry Ford, “if you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re probably right”. 

To find out more about goal mapping you can follow Lizzy on Instagram @practical_strategist or visit www.goalmapping.com 

We are also lucky enough to have Lizzy and her expertise on the last session of every Wellbeing Workshop, where we plan for our futures using the mind mapping technique that Lizzy has talked about in this blog. Find out more about the Wellbeing Workshops and how to sign up here.