Brainstorming is a mental technique which offers a valuable way of exploring potential goals or of supporting goals you’ve already established. With brainstorming, you give free flight to your ideas. Let ideas flow without judging them and you will generate many times the ideas produced through the normal reasoning process. After you’ve generated many ideas, you can go back to evaluate their usefulness.

Brainstorming is a valuable way of exploring your goals because when ideas flow freely, many more ideas, as well as more novel ideas, are generated.

Here are guidelines for brainstorming:

1. Suspend all judgement. This is a time to remove your internal censor. Nothing is unimportant, too silly, or too wild to include when brainstorming.

2. Think quantity, not quality. The more ideas you generate, the better the chances are of hitting upon something new and useful.

3. Extrapolate and cross-fertilize. No matter how nonsensical it may seem, take your ideas to the Nth degree. Combine ideas in unusual ways to stimulate new ideas.

4. Evaluate later. Do not close your mind to any suggestions. An idea that seemed ridiculous yesterday may be ingenious tomorrow.

Brainstorming Mechanics

To brainstorm, find a time when you will not be distracted. Sit comfortably with a pencil and paper, or a pocket dictator. Then form a question or a problem to be handled. Make your question specific, such as, “How can I increase my level of fitness and achieve my target weight?” Once you’ve aired the question, immediately begin jotting down or recording your ideas. Record the first thing that comes to your mind. Do not judge your responses or you’ll short-change the process. You can fill in the details of your notes later.

If you’re writing, make notes in brief phrases to save time. If you’re dictating allow yourself full sentences but then quickly go back to your brainstorming mode so that other ideas may follow.

After you have finished, review your notes. Examine all the possibilities. Discard unusable ideas only at the end. Continue to suspend all judgment during this exercise. Often wild and crazy ideas, when put together or altered slightly, turn out to be your most novel, effective solutions. So let yourself go. You may feel a little silly writing down some of the ideas. That’s normal!

Applied to Your Goals

Accoring to Dr. Tony Alessandra, a champion goal-setter, and author and speaker on the subject, when thinking of goals, divide your life in seven main categories: mental, physical, family, social, spiritual, career, and financial. Brainstorm each category using the guidelines above. Allow about two minutes per category, using one page per category–hence seven pages in all. Again, shoot for quantity and let your imagination take over!

Once you’ve finished, review what you’ve written (or dictated) and add anything you might have forgotten or that now seems appropriate.

And the Three Winners Are…

When you’re satisfied with your responses, look them over and circle the one idea under each category that stands out as being most important. Never mind what others might think of your choice. Circling one idea per page allows you to see your goals in black and white, on paper, where they show up best.

Whether or not there is repetition among your seven circled “semi-finalists” from the seven groups is unimportant. Now the drum roll please… examine the seven goals, and, disregarding which group they came from, choose the three that are the most pressing to you. Write those three on a separate sheet of paper with the title, “My Three Most Important Goals.” These represent the most important goals in your life at this time, and undoubtedly merit commensurate time and attention. But, hold on! A balanced approach to life works best.

The Important Runners-up Include…

As valuable as it is to isolate your most precious goals, it is equally important to remain cognizant of your other goals.

As an example, here is a list which one sales representative compiled:

• Mental Goals: Stop worrying so much about money and success; improve my memory of names; increase my vocabulary proficiency;broaden my knowledge.
• Physical Goals: Eat less junk food; do stress reduction exercises every night; floss teeth every night; maintain an ideal weight.
• Family Goals: Call Mom and Dad once a week; spend ten minutes daily with my spouse and each child.
• Social Goals: Go to weekly Rotary Club meetings; socialize with more salespeople and exchange ideas.
• Spiritual Goals: Go to church once every two weeks; be more helpful to people every day.
• Career Goals: Make three more sales per week; earn a Masters Degree in marketing.
• Financial Goals: Own my own home; purchase a sports car; provide for an ample retirement fund by the time I’m 55 years old.

An Unnecessary Exercise

Have you ever encountered the suggestion to pretend you only have six months to live? Supposedly, then you would live your life on a higher plane. What’s really important would emerge. Secondary goals would drop by the wayside. You’d spend more time with loved ones. You’d engage in activities that you truly enjoyed doing.

It’s not a good recommendation for someone in a normal situation because it’s simply not realistic. If you had only six months to live, you might quit your job. You might sell your house and use that money to travel the world. You might say good-bye to a lot of people. These are activities that would get you in deep doo-doo if you had another 30 years to live after spending all you money, selling your house, and so on.

What value can you draw from this exercise? Someday, you will have only six months to live. If you treat each day as precious now, you’re likely to live more fully, more vibrantly. That is certainly a worthwhile goal.

You may find it useful to write your own obituary (yes, you read that correctly). Then you can benefit from the general principle of starting at the end of something, in this case your life, and working back to ensure that you accomplish what you seek to accomplish according to certain time lines.

By brainstorming and imagining what you would like to accomplish in your life, you can set goals for yourself and then move into action! You’ll be amazed at what you can accomplish!