It’s time to set goals in preparation for the new year. If you’re like most people, you take whatever you accomplished this year and will increment it upward by X percent. But what if you had a way to dream bigger dreams for 2012, to set ambitious goals that would help you to get much closer to your ideal future? Here’s a simple, two-step visual method for doing just that:

1. Envision your ideal future state
2. Work backward from there to the present, “reverse engineering” the steps you need to take to get there

That’s it! Yes, it’s simple. But it works like a charm. Some of history’s greatest thinkers and business leaders have used this method to achieve phenomenal success: Henry Ford, who envisioned a car that would be inexpensive enough for the average working man to afford, or Steve Jobs, who envisioned “insanely great” products and then pushed his people and suppliers to extraordinary lengths to bring his ideas to life.

Like mind mapping, this goal-setting technique is non-linear. It forces your brain to leap out of its well-worn, comfortable, incremental paths of thinking and take a creative leap into the future. It forces you to ask yourself, “What could I accomplish or bring about if there were no limitations?” Once you know what the end goal is, you can work on identifying any barriers or limitations and making plans to eliminate or sidestep them.

So what are you waiting for? Dream big for 2012!

This diagram was created using SmartDraw 2012. To download the .SDR file used to create it, please click here.