Personal development

Nov

2020

What you focus on expands! Intentional Goal Setting Series (3/3)

Are you setting goals which make their achievement inevitable?

If you’ve been following thus far, you’ve set ludicrous goals for yourself, you’ve made your goals SMART, and broken them down to a one year playlist for a monumental year! Take a minute to celebrate your accomplishments thus far! Those who simply write out their goals are 39.5% more likely to achieve them. Those who add accountability increase that likelihood by 76.7%. Are you focusing on the right things when you set your goals?

Where do we begin? At this point, you have seven really big goals in front of you. I strongly encourage you not to attempt undertaking all seven at the same time. How do you gain even more perspective on what the time commitments of these goals will be and ensure that you are in the high-achieving group of goal-getters?

Just Two

Your next year is a marathon. You have twelve months in which to become the person you need to be to achieve your goals and realize success and transformation, unlike any you have achieved before. As you review your goals, look for those which will have domino effects in your life. If you see one which will make another goal easier or unnecessary, move it up the list. Find the goal which above all others will have the largest ripple and move it to the top. This is your one thing!

Next, pick a second goal which will have another effect in another area of your life. If you picked a job or business goal for your first, pick an area of your personal life to complement your first. Finance is the wild card on the board and is the conduit between your business life and your personal life. If you picked finances first, pick your next priority in either area.

Go Small

Remember the clarifying question from installment two, which took your someday goal all the way to your one year goal? We are going to continue zooming in with our microscope to go smaller. Using your one Thing, ask yourself…

“What must I accomplish in this month to achieve my one year goal?”

When you write your answer, use the name of the month for which you are writing your goal. If your one year goal was to sign 48 contracts, your one month might read: “In December 2020, I must sign four contracts.” We’re not done yet! Go smaller still…

“What must I accomplish in this week to achieve my one month goal?”

Write your weekly goal as you did your monthly goal: “This week, I must sign one contract.” As you get into relationship with your goals and develop a daily habit of reviewing them, you will keep your goals with your planner and ask yourself each day:

“What must I accomplish today to achieve my one week goal?”

You must earn the right to add more goals!

Once you have mastered the process of accomplishing your first goals you can consider adding more goals to the mix. Don’t rush into it too quickly. Even if you only accomplished these two goals this year, you’d be a massive success when compared to the majority of your peers.

Once you’ve developed success habits which make your goal accomplishment inevitable, you’ll know. You will be making steady progress toward your goals and still wanting more. If you are feeling overwhelmed or maxed out, it is not the right time. You will know when you’ve earned the right to add one more goal to the mix.

You’re bound to let yourself off easy

Coaches and accountability partners will help you accomplish the goals you've set!

Self-accountability is a myth. How many times have you felt in control of your impulses when you passed over the tempting dessert options a restaurant, only to go home and indulge on junk food to reward yourself for being good? Willpower is not on will call!

Whether you hire a coach or find an accountability partner, an objective outsider can easily tell if you did or did not do what you said was important to you. Set yourself up for maximum success and join the group achieving their goals 76.7% more often than those who do not.

Take Action!

1. Pick your top personal and business goals (2 max, 1 per area)
2. Continue goal-setting to the now.

One year > One Month > One Week > Today

3. Use the 411 to track your goal achievement. Download yours HERE
4. Enlist support! Hire a coach or get an accountability partner.
5. Share this with a friend who could use help achieving their goals.

Prior post:

<– Your future in focus! Intentional Goal Setting Series (2/3)

Nov

2020

Your future in focus! Intentional Goal Setting Series (2/3)

Welcome back! If you missed us last week, we were being “unrealistic” about our goals. If you missed that one, go check it out now and get an idea of how your future self will live and how your higher self will be. Once you’ve set your moonshot goals, how will you get there? Today I’ll share with you a simple two part process to bring your biggest dreams into focus and to make their achievement inevitable.

Step 1 – Make your goals SMART!

The simple test to determine how likely you are to achieve your goals is to ask “how will I know when I’ve achieved it?” If the finish line can’t be seen or isn’t clear, how will we know what must be done to cross it? Make sure your goals can check each one of these requirements:

Specific – What specifically are you looking to accomplish. Simply saying you want to, say, “get stronger” violates a few of these rules; the first being it does not state specifically the strength you are looking to achieve. Is it physical? mental? just your legs?

Measurable – At what time can you check the box signifying your accomplishment of your goal? Being “financially independent” is a common goal I hear and it fails the test. With an extremely modest lifestyle and a country with a low cost of living, someone could technically be financially independent on $100,000, if invested properly. Conversely, if you plan to be financially independent, living a lavish life in Southern California, that number will likely have extra zeros.

Attainable – I know, I know! I told you to be unrealistic. I should have known you’d put time travel as your financial goal, so you could go back and bet on sporting events, like in Back to the Future 2. Your goal needs to be within the realm of human capability, which still gives you a lot of latitude, because we are amazing machines!

Relevant – It must support the life you want to live. Fortunately, since we are starting with our highest level of goals, your goals are all relevant to the life you want to live, unless you picked a goal to support someone else’s priorities. Relevancy will come into play in the next step as we go small with our goals. If your goal in your finances is to pay off your debt and your smaller goal includes investing, while this is a great thing to do, it is not directly relevant to your debt elimination goal.

Time Bound – Every time we set a goal, from here on out, we must have clarity on when we will achieve them. If we incorporate the other four elements, we could end up with a goal like: “to save $1 Million in my 401k for retirement.” It is specific, measurable, attainable, and relevant, however it doesn’t state if this is a goals I want to achieve in the next ten years or the next fifty!

Step 2 – Goal setting to the Now!

Remember those big scary Someday Goals you set? Remember how insurmountable and out of reach they may have felt? Now we’ve made them SMART, so they are a little clearer and more in focus, yet they are still big!

Goal setting to the now is where we systematically reverse engineer your goal to build a staircase to lead you to the moon where your goal’s achievement lies! The process is simple and empowering! Using it will help you realize that you can accomplish your biggest goals and dreams.

You start with your Someday goal and set a 5 year milestone using the clarifying question:

“What must I accomplish in the next 5 years to achieve my someday goal?”

If your highest level goal is less than 5 years away, it may be that you did not dream as large as you could have. Nevertheless, we’ll find your next goal container, ahead. Stop at this 5 year mark and write your SMART goal in the first-person present tense and anchor them in relevance. For example:

“It is 12/31/2025 and I have generated $500k of passive income for the 2026 calendar year so I can spend five days each week with my family and on my hobbies and only work on things which excite me.”

Ensure the milestone will support the future goal, which it will, so long as it really is SMART! Then we’ll repeat the process for the next year by asking:

“What must I accomplish in the next 1 year to achieve my 5 year goal?”

Now you will have your 1 year milestone to measure your progress toward your five year goal. It will look something like this:

“It is 12/31/2021 and I have generated $100k of passive income for the 2022 calendar year so I can spend my weekends and every evening with my family and on my hobbies.”

Take Action!

1. Goal set to the now. Take all of your Someday Goals down to 5 and 1 Year Goals.
2. Rewrite your goals so that they are SMART and write them in the first person present format.
3. Anchor your goals with relevance and highlight what accomplishing your goals will do for you.

Congratulations! You now have a one year action plan which will lead you ever closer to living the life of your dreams. If you enjoyed this process, check back next week as we build out a schedule for success for you to live your entire upcoming year by. Win your day, win your life!

Prior post:

<— (1/3) You need to be “unrealistic”

(3/3) What you focus on expands! —>