At the beginning of the year, there's often an orgy of goal setting. People get into a collective frenzy about setting personal and professional goals.

Traditional goal setting often doesn't work because we are not in vibrational harmony with our goals. The feelings we have about our goals aren't aligned with our thoughts. So we often effort and take too much action before we've properly aligned our feelings and beliefs.

Here are 4 Steps to Inspired Goal Setting.

1. Know why you want the goal

Many of us to becoming specific about our goals way too early. We haven't felt the essence of why we want what we want. We really need to feel our desire about our goals.

What is it we really want; more time to spend with loved ones, space, a sense of aliveness, pleasure, joy. If we don't know why we want what we want, then all the action in the world won't make any difference.

You could also call it the Vision Thing. To have a bigger vision regarding our lives puts goal setting in context and makes them far easier to achieve. If your goal is a "have to" "must" or an "ought to", then it aint gonna happen. You joined that gym because you "had to" lose weight and how often did you go?

2. Gain clarity about your desire

Haven't you already done that? Well, partially. You can only set personal and professional goals for yourself. If your desire isn't there, then it aint happening:.)

If your goals aren't crafted with your true desires in mind, then they'll go unfulfilled and/or self sabotage is often the result. It's important to be excited by the possibilities that working towards your goal will bring.

Also, cultural and social expectations often shape our goals as to what we think we can have as opposed to what we actually want - so need to gain clarity about what is truly your desire and what belongs to other people.

You'll never be able to do enough to satisfy other people, so stick to satisfying yourself.

3. The Specification

Once you've ramped up your desire and feelings about the goal, here is where the SMART model (S = Specific, M= Measurable A= Action orientated R= Realistic, T= Time based) comes in. Write down your specification in rich feeling detail and then............

4. ............. Let Go

That's right. Let go of your judgements, your timing of when it should happen, your attachment to the outcome looking the way you think it ought to look.

Letting go means that you stop efforting and yearning and waiting. This frees you up so that you are not wedded or attached to a specific outcome, but let the Universe deliver.

From here you start to use your intuition and take inspired action. Inspired action is effortless. You take action from a place of feeling good.

It opens you up to receiving ideas, opportunities and different kinds of assistance. You may find yourself drawn to call someone, or someone contacts you out of the blue. For some reason you take a different route to work and you see something that gives you an idea.

You do less as more comes to you. You stop "having" to do things and end up effortlessly achieving your goals.

And if you don't achieve your goal(s)..........................

Reframe it - maybe the Universe was telling you that this wasn't the right path and was leading you to something better, even though you didn't always see it at the the time. Hasn't that often happened in your experience?

Follow the above process and you'll find yourself achieving your goals with much more ease and joy.

Julie Plenty helps creatively self employed people prosper by using the Law of Attraction, because they ARE their business. For more self empowerment and Law of Attraction articles, and to sign up for her Life Design newsletter, visit:

http://www.self-empowerment-zone.com