We hear all the time people complaining about their lack of power. “I cannot change anything at my job” or “I cannot change my personal relations” or “I cannot improve my business relations”. When you start thinking about some situation, never start with “no” or “cannot”. The “No”, stops your mind from finding solutions. If you want to be able to search for a solution, you should rephrase from “I cannot do this or that” to “How can I do this or that?”

What helps us achieve our goals is determination and perseverance. The determination when following a purpose has to be proportional with the difficulty of achieving that purpose. You have to keep thinking about where you want to get and keep visualizing yourself getting there. If the determination is strong enough than you’ll be able to keep pushing until you get where you want.

I’m sure you know Spencer Johnson’s “Who moved my cheese? ” This great story teaches us how to deal with change. If we know how to deal with change, we will be able to improve all the aspects in our lives, both career or business and personal lives. Let’s divide the discussion into achieving personal goals and achieving business or career goals.

Achieving personal goals

Personal goals might mean buying a house, or buying a car, or loosing weight, or meeting someone. A great question from “Who moved my cheese?” that stuck in my mind was: “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” Most of us feel fear when dealing with new things or new situations. That’s because NEW brakes our balance. Or so we think. If we succeed in getting over that fear, we’re one step closer to achieving our goal. That fear makes us think like “I cannot afford buying that new house because I don’t have enough money”, “I cannot loose weight or I cannot meet someone because I’m too busy”, and so on. If we remove the fear, if we remove the NO, we will be able to think about our goal like this: “What can I do to buy that house”, “How can I make time to meet someone”. When we think like this, we’re on the right track to finding solutions. So when dealing with something new or when we want to change something in our lives, we should start looking for ways to achieve our goals instead of looking for excuses why we cannot achieve them.

Achieving business or career goals

I have experience in trying to change something in a big company. Big companies have slow processes and are not receptive to change. It doesn’t matter if the change is good or bad for the company, changes are never welcomed in big companies. It might be because there are too many management layers and your idea might be lost along the way; or it might be because there’s already in place something that does not work as it should; it’s pretty hard to make changes in a big company (unless you’re a CEO or you own that company ).

What you need to do is break the change into small steps. Start by changing something at your team level, then show to other teams what that change did for your team and for your project, and so on. Little by little, you’ll be able to do changes, but you’ll have to be patient and only take one small step at a time. And if the change is done little by little, you have a better chance to make a difference into the company. For example, in Romania most of the big companies are multi-national companies. I have written the article about Corporate Blogging for one such company, in order to make them understand what can blogging be used for. They need something to improve the communication between departments, teams, HR and employees, management and employees, so blogging seemed like a good solution. But because blogging is only at it’s beginnings in Romania, pretty few people know what it is and how it can be used. So I had to take little steps and explain one person at a time what it is and how can the company use it. With patience and one-to-one discussions, I managed to make them understand the benefits.

This is just a simple example, the idea is that you’ll be able to do changes in most of the companies, if you take little steps. If it doesn’t work, you should try another approach. Not all companies can be changed, but most of them are receptive to change if the approach is right.

How do I find the power to achieve my goals

You’re goals have to be very important to you. If they aren’t, you won’t achieve them. You should always believe in your goals and always have the confidence that you can achieve them. Never mind what the others say, you should never loose focus. For example if you want to start a startup and you think you have a brilliant idea, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Keep working on your idea, make it materialize and you’ll eventually get where you want.