ONEof the greatest opportunities conferred by the silly season we have entered now is the opportunity to think. The soft music, the goodwill messages of Christmas and the great outdoors create a fertile ambiance for productive thinking.

As Zimbabweans, it is important that we make a transition from just an educated community to a ‘thinking and doing’ community. It is also a good time to reflect on goals and resolutions we set for ourselves for the concluding 2010. How many of us met the goals we put out in 2010? How many of us missed them? By what percentage did we miss them?

If we missed them big time, it is a good window to realistically look why they were not achieved without apportioning blame. Planning is an attempt to drag the future back into the present.

I like going out to explore the natural wild and jog my thinking juices, but I was not brought up in this generation of ‘ubheka unyoni’ (bird watching) which my children are growing up in. When I pass through the woods and see the kaleidoscope of multi-coloured birds, I still secretly dream of my old ‘rekeni’ or ‘ndande’ (catapult) used in the years yonder and how we would bring the silly bird down to supplement our protein needs.

Another wonderful thinking space that I personally enjoy is the open water. When I cast out my fishing line deep into the expanse water, I can let my mind go to town and while waiting for the gentle tag. Even in these circumstances, old habits die hard.

My son does not always understand why everyone else takes a picture when the big one is finally caught before sending it back into the water. We always take with us a wire cage where the big one is trapped for the rest of the day until it makes an appointment with our dinner table. But I digress from thinking and goals.

Many people who have been successful in their field of endeavor generally do so by deliberately planning to be successful. We will not achieve our financial goals without developing our own personal GPS to steer us towards them.

Setting Financial Goals, helps you express your desires more explicitly and in a way that can be easily converted into numbers. Changing words into numbers, helps you convert your goal statements into a string of numbers that describes what is happening or what you want to happen in your financial life. Being able to express your goals is the first step to accomplishing them. It is deliberate planning that converts financial desires into financial reality.

The holiday period is a time to control our wandering minds and focus them on productive pursuits without the added stress of daily living. John Kehoe says: “Weak and scattered thoughts are weak and scattered forces. Strong and concentrated thoughts are strong and concentrated forces.”

Donald Trump says if you decide to think, you might as well think big for apparently it takes the same effort to think small as it does to dream big. Milton Kamwendo of Innov8 The Motivation Company in Harare likes to talk about setting ‘big hairy audacious goals’. When we were much younger, we were taught that goals had to be SMART meaning they had to be specific, measurable and unambiguous, attainable and sensitive, relevant and easy to collect, and of course time-bound. Financial goals will guide you to determine where your money will go and what it will do there.

In our financial life, each one of us should have short-term goals, medium-term goals and long-term goals. One way to ensure long term consistency is to make your short-term goals build into your medium-term goals and your medium-term goals build into your long-term goals. To help audit your thinking and implementation process, it is necessary to write them down, then break each goal into smaller discreet goals that aid in the implementation.

Setting financial goals always begins with the end in mind. They say if you want your money to work for your goal, then you need to tell it what to do. Typically, many of us will have more goals than there are financial resources available for reaching them.Once they are on paper, then it is essential to prioritise them -- allocating a budget in the process. Identify the specific actions or tasks that you would need to take to reach the goal.

For example, you may want to purchase a R1,000,000 ($146,000) house as your main goal for 2011. To achieve that goal, you would like to raise a 10% deposit in 2011 so that the bank can provide you with the balance of 90% to complete the purchase. If you set yourself a goal to achieve this in a 10-month period, then it means every month you must find R10,000 for that purpose. This gives you 10 milestones to celebrate and helps keep you on track so you don't get overwhelmed by the big picture. Just concentrate on getting through that one month as quickly as possible.

Many of us enjoy making money and liberally spending it, but saving can help you reach many of your financial goals. Compound interest helps you reach your goals faster.

Financial leverage is about using good debt to achieve your financial goals. Trying to use your own money to achieve all your financial goals limits your impact. Financial leverage allows you to achieve more with less effort. Our world of work has primed most of us to seek job security, rather than financial freedom. Your employer is not responsible for your financial goals and ultimately your financial freedom, you are.

Financial goals will not be fulfilled without motivation, commitment and discipline. A financial goal, like an idea, only accrues value when you go beyond talking about it to act upon it.