Posts filed under 'Goals'
We’ve all heard the quote (often mis-attributed to Dr. W. Edwards Deming) that…”you can’t manage what you don’t measure.”
When working on reaching your goals (you do set SMART goals right?) you have to monitor and measure your progress so you know when you’ve achieved your goal, but you need to do more than just measuring to truly manage your goals.
I can use myself as a perfect example. In February I set a very aggressive weight loss goal for myself. I really launched in and tackled changing my eating and exercise habits to support my weight loss goal. And for 4 months I really rocked my goal. I was trending ahead of my weekly estimates and was getting much healthier.
I was not only measuring everything, but I was really incorporating those measurements into my entire being. I tracked calories, what I ate, how much I weighed, the amount I drank, how much exercise I finished. I measured everything to the Nth degree and really thought and reflected on it every day. I held my goal in mind and kept it very “bright”.
But as happens to so many of us, when things got really busy at work and at home, I slipped. I had a small accident that prevented me from working out for a few weeks. I stopped really focusing on my goal and just set myself on auto-pilot, keeping track of things, but not doing anything with the data.
The first thing to go was tracking all of my calories, fats, carbs, and protein, I was just tracking the food - barely. I still weighted myself every morning and wrote the results down, but I wasn’t plugging the numbers in my Excel spreadsheet and really watching how my weight was trending.
I knew at a glance I wasn’t really gaining any weight, but I wasn’t losing any either. That would be great - being stable - but I hadn’t reached my goal weight yet.
So I just sort of floated along on auto-pilot for a few months. I was still measuring a lot of variables, but because I wasn’t holding my goal right at the top of my conscious thoughts like I had been when I first started, I wasn’t making any solid progress.
Once I brought my goal back to the front of my thoughts - and kept it there - I started to make new progress towards it.
This is true for any goal. If you’re not pursuing the outcome, measuring your actions along the way, and focusing on the goal and keeping it big and bright in your mind you’ll eventually lose your forward progress to reaching the goal.
At best you’ll float along - making some progress in places, losing it in others - until one of three things happens:
- you give up on your goal
- you achieve some of your goal, but not to the level you really want
- you redefine your goal and re-energize yourself to really achieve it!
Reaching your goals isn’t just a matter of setting them. You have to measure your progress towards them and keep the outcome held firmly in mind.
Failing to measure your progress means you have to rely on luck to reach your desired outcome. Failing to keep your goal in mind means you’re just going through the motions when you measure your progress.
The two go hand-in-hand in reaching your goals to the full extent you’ve set for them!
November 8th, 2007
Most people think there are three S’s in the word “success”, but that’s not true, there are really four S’s in the word “success.”
These four S’s are:
- Set it
- Share it
- Start it
- Stick to it
Okay, I should admit something, these are really the four S’s in goals, but when you achieve your goals you move towards success. Let’s look at these 4 S’s in a little more detail.
Set it
All success starts with a goal. You have to know what you want, and have a plan to get there in order to be successful. This might be something as simple as “make 10 cold calls today” or as difficult as “double my salary in 12 months.”
Both have one thing in common, until you SET the goal, you won’t begin to make any real progress towards achieving your goal.
Last year I had a goal to increase my income by 35% in 2006 - I knew what I wanted my end result to be and I knew that I would have to make some changed to accomplish this. Once I set my goal, I began to work on it and by the end of 2005 I had already increased my income in 2006 by 19% - a pretty good way towards my full goal before 2006 had even started!
Share it
When you’re working towards a goal, you need to let other people know about it - you need to share your goal. But take care to share it with people who will build you up and help you be successful; you don’t want any negative people dragging down your spirits as you work towards your goals.
I have a friend with whom I share a lot of my goals. He is an excellent resource for keeping me accountable to myself. If I share a goal (or even a “want”) with him - even in passing - he’ll keep asking me about it and my progress on achieving my goal. I’m not even sure he realizes he’s so great at goal-accountability, but he is. I’ve accomplished goals before simply because he kept me on track by regularly asking me about my progress.
Find someone who you can share your goal with and who will be excited, positive and share in your success with you!
Start it
You’ve got to take action before you’ll ever achieve results. This step is simply taking the first action towards achieving your goals. This is also the step where many people falter. A lot of people feel like they can’t take action until they’re 100% ready or until they’ve got 100% of the information needed - these become stumbling blocks to getting started.
I’ve always said (and many more famous authors have said it before) that massive action towards your goal will often win over intricate detail. But any action is better than planning yourself to death. Follow the formula of; Ready, Fire, Aim!
About a year ago I decided I wanted to do more with my photography. Instead of hemming and hawing about whether or not I could do it, I jumped in and found some friends who wanted work done - with the understanding that I was (yet) a “pro.” If you’re a pro photographer reading this, you’re skin is probably crawling, but after a few assignments from friends I landed some assignments from people I knew who weren’t friends. That has led to some work by people I didn’t know at all.
If I hadn’t started doing it, I would probably still be sitting around dreaming about making money from my hobby instead of actually making a little money from my hobby!
Stick to it
When you make your actions towards reaching your goals habitual, you are almost guaranteed of reaching your goals. This is hard because sticking to a goal requires a personal commitment and will power - until it’s an ingrained habit you have to constantly condition yourself to stick with it.
This can be easy if you have a huge amount of passion and motivation or it can be more difficult if you’ve not worked yourself up for tackling the goal. If you make sticking to your goals a habit, eventually the behaviors you stick to in order to reach your goals will become habits.
This web site is a good example of this; I had to stick to a commitment of writing articles before I knew if anyone would actually visit the site and read them. I couldn’t write one or two articles and then sit back and way for readers to show up and demand more to read. I had to act like I had a base of readers right from the outset and stick with regularly writing articles. I can tell you that the first weeks were very nerve wracking, I would look at my logs from the week and there would be entire days where I might have one or two visitors (or worse, a day with no visitors). I would worry that my articles weren’t resonating with readers, and I would wonder if the site would be a total flop!
In the end, persistence and sticking with it paid off; today I have an ever growing base of readers and every week my logs show an increase in visits and page views. The site still has a long way to go before my own personal goals for traffic levels will be met, but sticking with it will be key to getting there.
When you combine all of these steps, and follow them as outlined you create a set of behaviors and habits, and an environment for yourself where success is much more likely to be the result. All to often people set goals and don’t have a plan in place to assure they reach their desired outcome. These 4 S’s of “success” are the framework you need.
The next time you spell “success”, make sure it has 4 S’s!
February 18th, 2006
Sure, you’re one bad, goal-setting, success-wielding, achievement-oriented mutha’ - but after you’ve conquered a goal and basked in the glow of success what do you do?
Do you keep an achievement cheat-sheet? Do you keep your “success resume” up to date on a regular basis? If you’re like most people, I’m willing to wager that answer will be, “no.”
It’s easy to get into the habit of setting and achieving goals - that’s the first part of the recipe of success. Accurately recording your achievements when they’re fresh in your mind is the second part of the recipe of success.
It’s easy to let your accomplishments slip by after you’ve enjoyed that “I did it!” moment; when asked what you accomplished last year or the year before you have to spend precious time creating your list, remembering the details, the impact and the results. This isn’t an efficient way to spend your time!
I admit I used to be this way. I’ve been “into” goal setting and personal achievement for a long time, but I never kept my success resume up to date. When I owned my own company, a resume and corporate overview was often one of the first things clients would ask for as we started a relationship.
Every time a client asked for this I had to dust off my last copy, review it, add to it any personal or business accomplishments and then present it to my client. Depending on how long it had been since I last used my success resume, it could take a not insignificant amount of time to get it up to date.
When I sold my business I kicked around as a “consultant” for a while before finally deciding I should get a “real job.” I was in for a shock; I hadn’t bothered to update my resume in a long time - about two years - and pulling it together turned into an all day affair! After this, I decided I needed to keep a current accomplishment cheat-sheet and keep my resume updated much more frequently.
Here’s the process I used to get everything under control:
1) Choose your tools
You will need either a nice notebook or journal that you can dedicate to recording your achievements, or a computer with a word processing application. I prefer the computer for this because I can generally type much faster than I can write.
2) Layout the document
Create a document and name it something creative like “2006 Accomplishments”. Then add four pages and at the top of each page write, Q1 2006, Q2 2006, Q3 2006, Q4 2006. You’re going to track your accomplishments by quarter.
3) Play catch up
If you’re just starting this process the chances are good you’ve not started a new year fresh and ready to go (unless you’re reading this article in January, and then you are starting a new year fresh and ready to go). Spend time outlining all of your major accomplishments for the year so far. At this point just a sentence is good, but get them all captured and try to allocate them to the quarter in which they were accomplished.
4) Stay current
Once you’ve started your accomplishment list you have to stay current; review it and update it (if needed) at least monthly. The entire point is to capture your accomplishments in only a few minutes, while the details are still fresh in your mind. If you stay on top of recording your accomplishments as they happen it will only take you moments to record them. This will save you much time compared to an end-of-year review, plus you’ll be able to capture much more detail and specific fact and figures without having to dig back through your records come December (or worse, the next year!).
5) Update your resume quarterly
You have a list of accomplishments and you’re staying current and keeping your list updated. Now you need to sit down at the beginning of each quarter and translate your accomplishments into your resume. Make sure that the responsibilities you have listed on your resume match your responsibilities on your achievement cheat-sheet. Drop from your resume projects with less impressive outcomes for projects with more impressive outcomes. This is your chance to really make yourself shine.
Once I followed the five steps above I realized that I spent less overall time tending my resume, and I didn’t have that “panicky” feeling of knowing it wasn’t in tip-top shape when asked for it. I knew it was no more than three months out of date, and it had been recently updated with my most impressive and high-impact accomplishments.
You don’ t need to write pages and pages for each accomplishment; you simply need to distill the major elements from the accomplishment down into a sentence or two, with pertinent facts and figures. You want to create expanded bullet points which will eventually make it to your resume or your annual review if you work for a company.
Here is a sample from my 2005 major accomplishment file:
1) Negotiated the purchase of a 16kVA APC Symmetra LX UPS (extended run version) for $10,450 (down from $15,700).
2) Designed company ID badge & created specification for the data and format of company’s ID program to be C-TPAT compliant. Resulting badges & ideas were adopted by US Customs & Border Patrol as recommended guidelines for small businesses looking to certify & comply with C-TPAT requirements.
3) Worked with web design and e-commerce company to implement a new e-commerce engine for company’s online sales. The company’s online sales (Jan – July) were $#.# million and the new e-commerce enabled site was negotiated for $#,### including custom pricing functionality to handle unique per-customer, per-product pricing requirements. R.O.I. on project was calculated at 4.2 weeks based on the company’s YTD (Jan – July) online sales.
4) Read 28 books in 2005 including 16 directly related to self improvement, success or development (goal was 3 books on development per quarter). Books were: January: Split Second, Leadership 101, Attitude 101, As a Man Thinketh, The Doomsday Conspiracy. February: Steal This Book, Babylon Rising, Goal Setting 101. March: Man’s Search for Meaning, Made in America, My Story. April: The Fountainhead. May: The Taking. June: How to Become CEO, It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want To Be, The Fred Factor, Getting Things Done. July: Speaker For The Dead, Xenocide. August: Shadow of the Giant, 1776, Children of the Mind, The Time Trap, Managing for Dummies, How to Talk to Anyone (92 Little Tricks for Big Success in Relationships). November: Rich Dad’s Before You Quit Your Job. December: 101 Great Answers to the Toughest Interview Questions, 301 Management Ideas, Ready for Anything.
I have also found that keeping a written record of accomplishments is an excellent tool to justify requests for raises or bonus programs if you work for an employer. In our modern society we’re only usually as good as our last project - the “what-have-you-done-for-me-lately?” factor. It’s easy for employers to conveniently “forget” about important achievements and contributions, but it’s very difficult to argue with facts and figures.
If you keep your achievement cheat-sheet up to date, you’ll be armed when you ask for a raise or a bonus. You can layout exactly what your accomplishments have been, and you’ll have ammunition that your employer likely will not.
If you’ve also kept your resume up to date you’ll be ready to move on if your requests for a deserved raise fall on deaf ears time and time again.
If you’re self-employed, keeping an achievement cheat-sheet and keeping your professional or company resume up to date is vital too. These days clients are asking to see more and more detailed information from the vendors they use. If you have a professional resume ready-to-go it will give you a definite advantage over your competitors in your market-space.
I urge you to start today; spend the time to get your achievement cheat-sheet caught up and then spend the (minimal) on-going time to keep it current. The rewards will be well worth it!
January 29th, 2006
Don’t review your goals on a regular basis? If so, don’t expect to achieve them.
Most people - once they actually get started - enjoy the process of goal setting. When done properly it’s fun, self-reinforcing, and allows you to dream big. The hardest thing is get people started actually writing their goals, but once they’ve started - watch out! - most people can fill pages and pages with goals.
And that’s super, it really is, but how many of you write out wonderfully detailed and thought out goals - goals so real you can taste and feel and see them - and then stick them in a drawer, never to see the light of day again?
Can I get a show of hands? Yep, I’m raising my hand too; I’ve been guilty of spending time on the “fun” part of goal setting (the actual “setting” of goals) and then skimping on the regular review of my goals.
And you know what? I find I don’t usually achieve those goals, or if I do it’s at a level much lower than it should be. So why do we do this to ourselves?
Our brains are amazing works of biology and engineering. When we ask our brain for an idea it’s like that take-a-number dispenser at the license branch, always ready to spit one out. Our brain is also muscle-like; the more we use it the stronger it gets. As we strengthen our imagination, we get stronger and stronger ideas.
So when we set goals our brain has a grand time. It revels in the good feelings that really visualizing our dreams, wants, and achievements create. When you visualize a goal using NLP (think, Tony Robbins) you are flooding your brain with signals that it likes. You are literally creating a reality in your brain that it doesn’t know isn’t real…yet.
But once your goals are written that sense of excitement and pleasure passes. It may last a day or a week, but eventually it passes. This is why you see 5,000 people in the gym on January 1st, but by the 7th the gym is empty again. That sense of excitement, motivation, and action has become routine and our brain is off to find something else to give it those pleasurable feelings again.
It’s difficult to keep a goal in your mind and keep it vivid enough to continually build this sense of excitement every day. This is why a written goal is so important.
You spend the time and energy creating a goal and you capture it while you’re brain is energized and excited. Once the goal is captured, there isn’t any room for improvisation when you come back to the goal at a later date. You’ve done all the hard work and now you can immediately put your brain back into that excited state by reviewing and re-visualizing your goal.
It’s this review process that keeps your brain (and yourself) stimulated and excited. It should consist of a daily review of your goals. Actually, it should be a several-times-a-day review of your goals.
Some people advocate reading your goals every morning when you get up, and again every night before you go to bed. I don’t have the discipline to do that - I’m not a morning person and by bedtime I’m ready to hit the sack. So here are some easy ways that I make sure I keep my goals available for daily review:
1) Keep your goals with you always.
One thing I find very helpful is to keep my key goals with me - I write them on a blank business card and keep it in my wallet. I see them as I put cash or receipts in my wallet - usually at least two or three times a day. The trick here is not to hide the card down in a credit-card slot - make it so you can’t miss it when you’re in the main part of your wallet.
2) Keep your goals present in your environment.
I have a cork-board that - when I’m sitting at my desk - fills my field of vision when I look to the right. I keep a single 8.5″ x 11″ sheet of paper with my goals tacked up so it’s the first thing I see on the board. I find that I look at this all day long.
3) Keep your goals present where you can’t possibly miss them during the course of a day.
I’ve also been known to write my goals on “Post-It” notes and stick them to the bathroom mirror. I see them every morning when I get ready for the day and every night when I get ready for bed. I’ve found that putting material goals on the bathroom mirror is helpful; I write a blurb on a “Post-It” note and clip a small picture from a catalog or magazine and add it. The image is usually more powerful than the words when I’m getting ready for work - and I can visualize my goals while relaxing in a hot shower. Now that’s a powerful way to reinforce your goals, the pleasure of a hot shower beating down on your while you get yourself excited and motivated by mentally reviewing and re-visualizing your goals!
4) Keep reminders in interesting and unusual places to shake up your patterns.
Finally I have written at the top of my white-board on my office at work; “Have you reviewed your goals today?” in bright, blue marker. Every time I look up to see who has come into my office I see my white-board. Every time I look to the left I see it. I’ve got myself covered if I look to the left or to the right!
As you begin to regularly review your goals a curious thing will start to happen; your perspective of your goals and yourself will change. You’ll start to notice that working on your goals just seems to happen; you find time to squeeze in a little more effort here and there.
It isn’t magic, it’s the power of you. You’ve given a command to your brain, you’ve made it “real” as far as your brain knows, and you’re regularly reviewing your goal. Your brain can’t help but make progress on your goal, it’s what it does.
As you start to achieve your goals and set new goals, you’ll naturally start to raise the bar on your new goals. You will experience growth!
After you go through this cycle a few times, the regular review of your goals will start to become a habit and it will be easier to remember to do (and actually do). As you grow and develop, you’ll find that your goal setting and goal review process becomes a feedback loop. This feedback loop creates even more growth and development.
Your growth and potential are only limited by yourself and your imagination…and the constant review of your goals that brings you constant growth of yourself!
January 25th, 2006
Are you a high-wage earner and a big spender? Do you have a “consume” lifestyle? Do you have a lot of material high-status symbols?
If you answered yes to these questions you might be an under-accumulator of wealth (a U.A.W.) and not a prodigious-accumulator of wealth (a P.A.W.). So how do you know if you’re a P.A.W. or a U.A.W., and if you find yourself in the U.A.W. group what can you do about it?
These are questions posed and answered in the book “The Millionaire Next Door” by Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko.
To answer this question for yourself - “Am I a U.A.W. or a P.A.W.?” - here is a simple rule of thumb you can use:
- Write down your total pre-tax income, including any investment dividends or assets that produce income.
- Take this number and multiply it by your age.
- Take the total and divide it by 10.
For example; a 41 year old executive who earns $103,000 would end up with an answer of “41 x 103,000 = 4,223,000 / 10 = 422,300″
This number is roughly what your net-worth should be for your age and income. We should expect our executive to have a net-worth of roughly $422,300.00. If our executive’s net-worth was significantly less than this number, he would be a U.A.W. - an under-accumulator of wealth. If our executive’s net-worth was more than double this number, he would be a P.A.W. - a prodigious-accumulator or wealth.
How do you measure up?
I must admit that I was shocked when I ran the numbers for myself - I knew I wouldn’t call myself “financially independent,” but I wouldn’t have figured that I would be as far below the target to be on my way to financial independence as I was.
Stanley and Danko define financial independence as the ability to live on ones wealth - our net-worth - for ten or more years.
I suspect that we all want financial independence - it’s many people’s “ultimate life goal”, but most of us don’t plan for and work towards this end. The authors argue that the biggest culprit that prevents people from achieving their goal of financial independence is living a high-consumption lifestyle.
I know I certainly do! I’m a “stuff” freak - I love my gadgets and electronic gizmos. My wife and I enjoy a very comfortable lifestyle that includes almost any consumer item within reason. We eat at restaurants quite often. We’re living the high-consumption lifestyle and are not on track to achieve financial independence without making some changes to the way we work, earn, save and build wealth.
The keys to achieving financial independence are four-fold:
1) Live on less than you earn. The majority of individuals with a net-worth of over a million dollars save and invest - on average - 15% of their pre-tax income. This requires giving up some of a consumption-based lifestyle for one of saving and investing.
2) Budget, budget, budget. About 83% of millionaire households create a budget for their income and expenses, conversely only about 16% of non-millionaire households create a budget.
3) Invest in what you know. Everyone is knowledgeable about specific subject matter; take advantage of this knowledge when looking for investments!
4) Seek professional advice. Realize when you’re not the most qualified to create an action plan to achieve your goals. Millionaires seek out professional help from tax accountants, CPAs, and financial planners far more than non-millionaires.
None of these keys is new or sensational information; you and I already know this! But seeing all of the steps laid out and presented in “The Millionaire Next Door” is very helpful. It breaks the problem of “how do I get started and what do I do?” down into manageable chunks; this helps prevent the getting-overwhelmed-factor.
I know that as I move down the list I can put a check mark in the “I don’t do that” column next to each of the four keys above. Just like many people, when my income increases, my spending increases. I was living comfortably on a lesser amount prior to my income increasing, so why didn’t the increase go directly into investments and savings? The mentality of a U.A.W. is to consume more as his means go up; this is the habit that needs to be broken.
“The Millionaire Next Door” will help you change your thinking about high net-worth individuals as well as give some good advice to help you change your habits. It’s shaken me up and forced me to look at how I earn and how I consume.
In addition, “The Millionaire Next Door” is filled with insightful and interesting information about high net-worth individuals. Did you know that the average millionaire spent an average of $267 on his watch and less than $600 on his most expensive suit?
Did you know that the average millionaire is more likely to hold a Sears or J.C. Penny credit card than an American Express card?
Did you know that 80% of all individuals with a net-worth of one million or more dollars built their wealth in a single generation? Only 20% of millionaires received their money through inheritance.
I highly recommend you pickup this book and spend time reading it. It’s well written, and refreshing because it doesn’t promise you “riches in 3 easy steps.” It’s good, solid advice.
January 23rd, 2006
Anthony Robbins - former king of the infomercial - has some free tools available on his web site to help you get started setting your goals for the new year. You can visit his web site for more details.
He is offering a free workbook in PDF format, “7 Steps to a Fulfilling 2006″
The seven steps he outlines are:
- Get Clear.
- Get Certain.
- Get Excited.
- Get Focused.
- Get Committed.
- Get Momentum.
- Get Smart.
Also available is an audio program (MP3) called “The Power of Clarity” with a PDF workbook that accompanies the audio program.
If you’re new to Tony’s approach his material is based on the principal of neuro linguistic programming (NLP for short). NLP is the study of how people interact with the world (visually, aurally through sound and hearing, or through touch and feel). Tony’s approach to improvement employs NLP to tie all three together to get you to not only visualize your desired outcome, but also hear and feel it as well.
If you pick up any of Tony’s books or have a chance to listen to his audio program you’ll see more how NLP works.
For today go grab the materials on his web site and start getting your goals together for 2006!
Have a prosperous 2006!
January 3rd, 2006
There is a fancy sounding term I like; reticular activator. You have one, I have one, everyone has one. It’s a little part of your brain that focuses in on the things you tell your mind to pay attention to. It’s your mind’s filtering mechanism. When you consciously (or subconsciously) think about things, it’s your reticular activator that filters out examples of what you’re thinking about and brings them to the front of your conscious.
If you’re thinking about buying a new car and you’re really drooling over a new VW Beetle, you’ll very likely notice them everywhere you go. If you just bought a new leather jacket you really wanted, you’ll very likely notice everyone else seems to be wearing leather jackets too.
If you’re sitting at home reading in your living room, you’re probably aware that your kids are playing with the dog, that you wife is in the kitchen and that the TV is on in the den, but you’re not really focusing on any of these inputs - they’re filtered out. Though if your daughter falls and starts crying you’ll be instantly aware of it.
This is your reticular activator at work. It can not only help filter in, but it can filter out as well. If you understand how it works, you can use literally use what you think about to shape yourself.
Years ago there was a sign hanging in the computer lab of my high school; it read “Garbage In, Garbage Out” and was there as a reminder that a computer was only as good or as “smart” as the person putting data into it.
We don’t think about it much, but our brain is really just an incredibly powerful computer running software we call our mind. If we ask the right questions we’ll rarely fail to get a good answer from our mind. If we input bad data, our mind will process it and produce bad results. We too can be the victims of “garbage in, garbage out.”
And this garbage will literally drag your personal performance into the trash (no pun intended).
How? When you put in bad data you mind starts to setup limiting beliefs. When someone tells you, “You can’t start your own business, you’re too young.” or you hear, “You can’t get a promotion, you don’t have a degree.” you’re getting garbage as an input. If you don’t use your reticular activator to focus on other, positive inputs your mind will happily work on processing the garbage.
Then it spits out a result - a limiting belief - and suddenly you believe you really can’t start a business because you’re too young!
So how do you use your reticular activator to focus on good inputs to your mind and eliminate bad inputs?
The first step is to start “feeding” your mind with positive material; information that will help you develop new skills or reinforce skills you already have. For me, the easiest way to “eat” this positive material is through books. Audio programs are a good way to bring positive and useful material into your routine. I usually alternate between talk radio (I’m an NPR junkie) and audio books when I’m in the car.
The second step is to be aware that people will feed you “garbage” without meaning to. You need to be aware that this negativity exists out there and be ready to stop listening to it when you notice it. Again, use your reticular activator to tune out negative inputs.
The third step is to create positive inputs and suggestions that you constantly review. There are a lot of books out there that will tell you to write your desires over and over or to use positive talk to achieve your goals. I don’t believe that either of these processes alone will cause you to succeed, but when used in conjunction with good (written) goal setting and the regular input of positive material these positive suggestions can help you enhance what your achievements already are telling you.
Using these tools, and being aware that your mind will readily work on any input you let your reticular activator focus on, you can “think” yourself into becoming what you have outlined in your goals and focused your mind towards.
January 3rd, 2006
How high do you place the “bar” when you set a goal for yourself? When you define the outcome you want to achieve for your goal, do you go ahead and use it, or do you raise it up?
If you’re not raising it up, you’re not getting the maximum benefit out of yourself when you work to achieve your goal.
My mentor used to challenge me with what she called the “rule of ten” when we talked about goal setting. Whatever outcome I had defined as the successful completion of a stated goal, she would challenge me to raise it by a factor of ten.
I know what you’re thinking, “That’s crazy, I’ll just set myself up to fail!” I thought the same thing when she first started pushing me to keep raising my expectations of myself and definitions of a success achievement of a goal…that is until I tried it and it started working!
You’re probably familiar with the S.M.A.R.T. method of goal setting; goals should be “S”pecific, “M”easurable, “A”ttainable, “R”ealistic, and “T”imely. When first challenged to set a goal and then raise your expectations by ten times, many people worry it violates the “realistic” test of a S.M.A.R.T. goal.
Please remember that “realistic” does not mean “easy.” Realistic means that the outcome is possible to achieve and is somehow within the grasp of your abilities even if at the time you set the goal you’re not quite sure how. A realistic goal should significantly challenge you without being impossible.
If you set a goal that’s too easy to achieve - what I call “gimme goals” - you won’t get the same satisfaction when you achieve the goal, and it tells your brain that you’re only capable of attaining “gimme goals.” It sets you up to create and reinforce limiting beliefs about yourself.
If you set a goal and then raise your expectation of the outcome by ten times, you set your subconscious mind up for a challenge that it’s really good at - figuring out how to deliver on your request. Your subconscious mind loves to do this, it’s what it’s built for, and it’s one of the things it does best. When you pose a really challenging question to your subconscious - and state it in a positive, non-limiting way - your subconscious will get to work trying to create an answer.
If your original goal is to write a book in twelve months, try raising the bar and setting the goal to write a book in a month and a half. How can you write a book in a month and a half? That’s the challenge you want to put your subconscious to work on. It’s certainly not impossible. You might - for example - devote an hour each morning and an hour each evening to writing. Over the course of a month and a half that would be 92 hours of writing - depending on your subject you could very well have a finished book on your hands.
I recently heard an interview on the radio with Neil Diamond. In the interview he recalled that one of his best known (and most requested) songs - Sweet Caroline - was written in about 40 minutes while he was eating breakfast before a studio gig. He had to have three songs to record and he only had two. Talk about setting the bar high!
If you set a goal to close $5000 in sales, what would you have to do to close $50,000 sales?
Years ago I was working on some proposals and I thought I would close about $3000 in sales. What did my mentor do? She challenged me to think about closing $30,000 in sales. By raising my bar, I opened myself to re-evaluate how I was handling the projects. I thought one client might want to spend maybe $1000 or $1500 on their project, but I had neglected to really sit down and listen to what they wanted. In one of our final meetings, I started asking some very open ended questions and listening!
It turns out that I had completely misunderstood their desires. They were looking for a prestige project to set them apart in their industry. I was busy trying to sell them a bare bones solution - get the “yes” and get out - and they wanted all the bells and whistles! In the final meeting I outlined all of the features they had talked about and they said, “Yes, that’s what we want!” I knew it would be a $12,000 project - not $1500. I balked a bit, not wanting to throw out what I thought was such a huge number. When I finally did, they didn’t bat an eye. They asked where they needed to sign to get started. You can bet I was on cloud nine as I walked out of that meeting!
Would I have gone back and really sought out what they wanted if I wasn’t being challenged to raise my bar? I don’t think I would have. It was a very uncomfortable thing for me to do at the time (I was way outside my comfort zone), but at the end of the day it couldn’t have been easier to actually get the project.
I didn’t make my ten-times goal overall, but I did with that client and I felt great about my achievement. Originally I was thinking I would close about $3000 in sales and I closed $12,000 on just one client by raising my bar. Did I close the whole $30,000? Nope. Was I thrilled to close $12,000? In light of my original $3000 goal you bet I was!
I want to challenge you to raise your bar. The next time you set a goal, try raising your expectations of a successful outcome by 10 times and see what happens. If you really put your mind to work on the goal, and open yourself to the new possibilities such a challenge can bring, you can be more successful than you initially thought possible; even when your first thought is, “How the heck am I doing to do this?”
December 28th, 2005
My primary goal in starting this web site was to create articles to help people and to share ideas about success, passion, personal development, purpose and goals. My primary goal was not to generate money from the web site or to make a quick buck. A secondary goal was to create a vehicle that provides passive income which would eventually provide for my time to write these articles.
Passive income - income that generates itself for you - is a very powerful path to wealth.
After working on this web site for less than a month I’ve finally earned my first dollar with the on-line advertising. Sure a dollar isn’t much - it won’t even buy a large coffee at Starbucks - but it’s income that my efforts here have generated. It is also income that will continue to be generated long after these articles have been written. Hopefully you get excellent value and insight from this web site - that’s my primary motivation - and in return I’m hoping that as traffic to this site grows it will generate more passive income to allow me to create more content.
Throughout life you have to be aware of how you can build passive income streams. You have to keep yourself open to the potential opportunities around you everywhere. You also have to be willing to pay the price required to create the income stream (in my case, creating articles to provide you value, and keeping in mind the primary goal of inspiring people).
I want to sincerely thank everyone that has read the site so far. My pledge to you will be to continue to write what I hope will be insightful, useful, inspiring articles covering topics like passion, productivity, goals, improvement, time management and more. I also hope I can help inspire you to seek out and successfully find your own passive income streams. Please keep reading, and I’ll keep writing!
December 24th, 2005
I found an excellent quote, when I read it my first thought was, “That’s exactly true!” I know several people who put themselves into the “loser” category exactly because of this behaviour.
“Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.”
–ARMONK, NY ( Aug. 8 )
How do you measure yourself? I’ve certainly been guilty of comparing my own successes to those of others. The times I did, I was never as happy with an accomplishment or an achievement as I was when I compared my successes against my goals.
It’s difficult not to be influenced by the success of people around us. It’s difficult to not try to use their achievements as a measuring stick for ourselves. But when we do that we set ourselves up for disappointment. No matter what you achieve, there will always be someone who achieves a little (or a lot) more.
So goal setting is extremely powerful not only for having a specific picture of the things you want to achieve, it also serves as your “yard stick” when it comes time to measure your success in achieving your goals.
This is why setting specific and measurable goals is so important. If you don’t have a specific idea of exactly what you want, and you don’t have a method of measuring it, you’ll never know if you succeeded in achieving your goal!
And if you don’t know if you achieved your goal, you’ll probably look to the success of people around you to see how you “stack up.”
And you know what? You won’t be happy with what you’ve achieved because you’re not using your own goals as the deciding factor of success, you’re using someone else’s goals as the deciding factor of success.
So make a commitment today to stop letting your sense of accomplishment be dimmed by comparing yourself to others. Make a commitment to set written goals and use those goals to measure your achievements!
December 9th, 2005
