This article describes how creating a goal or target can help you to succeed in life. Setting targets has among other things helped me to quit smoking cigarettes. I hope you enjoy reading my article.

I do not personally work in this industry; I actually provide a one-way link building service, advice about egg donation and I work part-time for a front doors company.

As for goals; one example I clearly remember from one such book, described a survey that had been carried out for schoolchildren who were in their final year of high school. The main question the people who commissioned the survey were interested in was about where the children wanted to be in five years time and what they wanted to be doing, for example in their business life.

It goes without saying that the majority of kids at this age are rather un-mature and only five of the answers ended up being considered as a proper target for the future. After a period of 5 years the 100 children who had been originally questioned in the survey were re-contacted and were asked to complete in a further survey. The results were quite staggering as the five children who had set a goal for the future had a higher combined net worth than the other ninety five added together. Money of course is not everything in life, however for me this showed, that is if you believe everything that you read, that you are more likely to be a success in life if you set yourself a goal.

I then worked through the areas of my life that I was less than impressed with. At that age, I smoked around fifteen cigarettes a day. This was something I quite enjoyed but which I knew was not healthy for me and something which also cost me a lot of money.

I set myself small targets, I would firstly reduce my intake to only ten a day and after two weeks reduce it down to five. I would then try to totally stop smoking after around a month.

This sounded so simple, however proved to be quite difficult. I was determined to stick to my goals and kept thinking of all of the benefits of quitting smoking. I am happy to say I was successful in my quest to stop smoking, even though it did take rather longer than one month.

How many times have you attempted to stop smoking but have failed to do so? Yes I thought so – not good is it? No doubt – like many of the people who read this article I tried, and failed, numerous times to quit smoking before eventually managing to find a top quality stop smoking technique that worked for me.

I am speech therapy coach; I basically sell budget package holidays to achieve fluency. I am also involved with other projects including offering affordable external doors and providing training for foster carers.

As for my attempts to stop smoking; or my failed attempts. I would at times do quiet well before falling off the wagon, or is this saying solely in? Well who cares at the end of the day? I am confident that you understand what I mean here.

I would then have a voice in my head, what I call “my demons”, who would speak to me and would say something along the lines of:

“You are doing really well, why don’t you have just one cigarette for old times sake? You sure deserve it. Just smoking that one cigarette is normal; there is no reason that you will go back to smoking twenty a day.”

Now I have no idea why but for someone reason I would listen to this voice and would have that “one” cigarette. This of course was just wrong and this one cigarette would, without a doubt, always lead me to going back to my old bad habits.

So how did I eventually learn to stop smoking? Well a friend of mine, Tony, advised that I needed to focus on two things at the same time, not just quitting the fags. He stated that when you just concentrate on attempting to stop smoking your whole focus and thought process is always on “smoking”. He suggested that I should attempt to lose weight at the same time, this way I could be battling two fronts at the same time and would be therefore not just solely thinking of cigarettes all of the time.

I decided to give it a go and it worked like a dream. I now feel like I could run a marathon!