Hey! I don’t about you, but I am still full from Thanksgiving. I reckon I will be waddling around for another week before everything is digested. This got me to thinking. We have only one month left in the year, and then we are in a completely new decade. Now I have done this 4 times already and this will make my 5th decade to visit.
With each decade, though I have found more reason for myself to focus on goals for each and every year. This year is no different, and I want to encourage you to start thinking of what goals you want to accomplish. Did you even have goals last year? Did you accomplish them or did they fade out? SO yeah goals, what did you accomplish last year? Did you accomplish anything? Perhaps you like to have let life lead you and you just enjoy each day as if it was a brand new world. That is cool if that is the case but if you want more from life then floating isn’t going to get you there.
Think of people who are lost at sea. Their raft may finally land on an island but it is never going to be Hawaii. The island they are more likely going to land on is a deserted island that may have food and even less likely have fresh water. If you want to travel to Hawaii then you have to make plans. Those plans have deadlines and conditions for being considered complete. Often you have to exercise a bit of discipline to be able to save enough. Now I know a few people who thought it was restricting their freedom because they couldn’t live free under discipline. Yet who is actually able to live a less restricted life, the person who can’t travel, or the person enjoying drinks on the beaches of Hawaii?
Plan Your Goals Now
The biggest problem that causes people to fail at their goals setting is to not plan. They wait until New Year’s Eve and make a snap goal like I’m going to lose this stomach or I’m going to go to the gym. They enter the goal without any idea as to how they are going to accomplish this pie in the sky goal. There is a saying that fits this perfectly
Failing to plan is planning to fail
H. K. Williams
So you want to actually want to plan if you are serious about getting out of the rut you are in.
Goals work for almost everything. Do you want to lose weight? Set a goal. You want a deeper connection with your wife. You can set a goal. Maybe you want to get a promotion or start a new business. Again A goal will help you get there. Why? Because you are making plans and organizing a strategy on achieving the goals you set. You are being proactive and taking massive action and that is more than 90% of the people on earth ever do. They just float around in life and then wonder why they can’t ever accomplish their dreams. That is because they do even try. Unlike you, you are going to try. I feel it.
SMART goals
Ok, just a quick review of what a SMART goal is. This helps you make your goals because you are structuring your goals for success. SMART is an acronym that stands for
Specific
Saying I want to lose weight is excessively general. Get specific. You want to lose 50 pounds. Drop 2 pant sizes. Maybe run a marathon. These all have very specific objectives. Saying you are going to lose weight could be 5 pounds could be 5 ounces. You don’t know are you getting closer to your goal or are you straying away from your goal? You can’t tell unless you are specific.
Measurable
Again this is to help you know where you are in the grand scheme of your ambition. If you can see that, your goal is getting closer then you are more likely to get frustrated and say screw it. Most goals are abandoned because they don’t know if they are making progress.
Attainable
If you have never made a million dollars before can you make a million? In reality, yes you can. Is it likely? No. There is a mindset that you have to have to be able to even contemplate having a million dollars in your bank account. If you don’t have the mindset you won’t believe you are worthy of that money and so you will sabotage your efforts. So is making a million dollars attainable? Not really.
Are you going to be able to 300 pounds in 12 months? Yeah, but it isn’t actually attainable unless you are willing to take the drastic efforts similar to what Angus Barberi did where he fasted till he was at his desired weight. That plan and determination lasted 382 days. Maybe if you are active enough. It took Angus over a year to lose 196 and he didn’t eat.
In other words, make your goals realistic and possible to reach. Losing 300 pounds in a year is attainable with surgery but not by diet alone.
Relevant
If you want to get a promotion then putting all your energy into reading, all of the fantasy books in the library probably not that relevant. Look at your overall objective and make your goals relevant to them. If your zone of genius is in podcasting, then trying to learn animal husbandry probably isn’t going to do you any good. So keep your goals relevant.
Time bound
A goal with no deadline is just a dream. You have to put an end date on it. This will let you know how much time you have. People work better with a time limit. There is a law called Parkinson’s law which is state as
Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion
So look at vacation, how much work do you get done right before you leave for vacation? The answer is a lot. Why, because you have a short amount of time to get a job done. Therefore, you are much more efficient with your work when there is a deadline.
If you want more information, I have a few blog posts about goals and setting goals for success.
See your Goal
Once you have planned your goals, it isn’t only going to do you any good to just stop there. You need to visualize your goals. What will it be like to start your own business? How will you act? Will you approach problems differently? How will that objective feel? Say you want to have a new car. How would that car look? What is the upholstery like? How does that feel into your fingers? Does it smell good? How does that car sound? Do you have a mean exhaust on it? How will that new car make you think? Approach all the different angles you can think of as you are visualizing your success.
Once you visualize yourself with the success of reaching your goal talk and act like you have achieved that goal. Talk about the car you are getting like you already have it. Think of how you would talk and act if you were.
The reason you want to do this is that you want to make sure you have the right mindset. The more aligned with the proper mindset the better chance you have to reach that mindset without getting in your own way.
So what goals do you want to accomplish? How are you going to achieve those goals? Get a notebook and start making plans as to how you are going to reach your dreams and aspirations.
My Goal Book
I am going to be doing the popular 12-week goal system this coming year. The 12-week system was first brought to my attention with the John Lee Dumas Freedom Journal. I then heard about the 12 week year* and from here I learned that you can make overarching goals and if you break these goals up into four sections, you can turn large goals into more manageable goals. Then break those goals into weekly or daily sprints where all you focus on is making progress on that part of your goal.
Therefore, I am making my own goal journal that will be based upon the 12-week year with a few other details that should be able to help me. You can follow along if you like or you can make yours up however you believe you need these items for having the best chance for success.
How I am setting my journal up.
First off, I am setting the success journal up so that it has three different sections. These sections are different points for making sure that you have the right mindset. You don’t want to find that you have a scarcity mindset keeping you from achieving your goals so I have it so that you focus on the important items. Like how grateful you are and having affirmations. You also will have a place to review your goals each day. Doing so will help you keep your focus on the task. If you don’t keep those goals close to you, it is easy to forget what you want to do. Then you lose your why and
Affirmations
I have talked before about how affirmations help you with your mindset. I am a firm believer that having affirmations that you believe are true can help you stay on track. Many times throughout the year you will have people who just either by their nature or out of love for you will poo-poo your dream. This is one reason why we often find ourselves in the very position of unrest that we are often in. Be it an uncle who laughed at our idea, because they tried your idea, failed once and never tried again, or a friend who doesn’t want to see you get hurt. There are people who will send us down to scarcity city if we don’t have certain guardrails in place.
Those guardrails are your daily affirmations. They help reaffirm your intentions and your drive. With that, you want to ensure that you have some affirmations that you read every day so you can keep your direction your purpose and provide you with enough fuel to keep your drive to the finish line.
All goals
This is a list of your goals. Not just the large overarching goals. However, the small sub-goals that get you to the large goals are just as important, therefore don’t forget them. You want to be able to reread each goal each day. Be it in the morning as you are getting up or right before you go to bed. You want to keep your goals and objectives fresh in your mind.
This also helps you see where you are in the progress overall. You can see you have 9 more weeks of a good hard push and your goal or sub-goal will be completed. Listing out all your sub-goals also helps you plan how you are going to attack your target because you will have each step laid out for you to see step by step. This shows you that you have planned and again set your mindset towards success.
Therefore, how I will have mine set out is I will have a one-year-long goal that will be broken down into four subparts. Those four parts will then be broken down into 12 weekly sprints.
I will also have four other goals that I will be achieving for each quarter. These will be full goals that are again broken down into 12-week sprints
The main journal part
Now for the main journal part will be a page for the three following sections the Wakeup section which is filled out in the morning. The Journal part, which describes what I was able to complete and not able to complete. Then rounding everything up with my daily review which happens at the end of the day.
The Wakeup
There are two parts to the wakeup section. The first is to ensure you keep an attitude of gratitude. This is important for those times when you are working hard on your goal. You are going to fail and if you are not grateful for the opportunity to at least try you will give up, and giving up is the true form of failure. Therefore I recommend that you list 3 things you are grateful for. Make them different each day. That way you really stretch your gratitude chops.
Once you have what you are grateful for wrote down then list out your daily objectives. You can cheat a bit here and write these down the night before. So just, make a to-do list of what you want to get done to reach your goals. So maybe if you want to lose weight so you may have three tasks for the day. No sugar, walk for a minimum of 15 minutes, and 3 servings of vegetables. If you get that done YAY!
Then give yourself a reward for completing the list. Say if you like to have a cigar on the porch with some of your good whiskey then that is your reward. Then again, if you are easily distracted and want to play games then maybe PlayStation is open to you after you get your list done. Just make sure you give yourself a bit of an atta-boy
The Journal
Here you describe what you did for the day that contributed to the completion of your goals. Use as much or little of the space provided. Yet make sure you look at your day and at least answer the following review questions. The Special Forces have something very similar. This is often called an after-action review. This is great to make sure you are on the right path. In fact, you can ask yourself these questions anytime you finish a task or you have an event in your life. Say you have an argument with your wife. You can do an after-action review. This will help you own your dirt. That way you won’t be tempted to take the victim approach. You take responsibility for your actions and you know where you went wrong and where you
The Review
At the end of the day, ask yourself these questions
- What did I accomplish?
- What did I not accomplish?
- What did I learn?
- How can I improve on this next time?
- What was the big win for the day?
This question allows you to think over the day of the event and allows you to improve on your process. Each time, you will often have the same task to do. Therefore why not make it the most efficient you possibly can. The best way you can do that is to review what you did. Where did you go wrong? How can you correct it? How can you make it better?
Therefore, that is my plan for next year. Are you going to use this system? If so, let me know if I have enough people who are interested I will make a Facebook group for us to all help each other out, because that is the last element for building a plan is to find a way that you are being held accountable. Now some people are able to hold themselves accountable. I for one am not, I can talk myself out of a lot so I need people who don’t mind putting a boot in my butt to keep me going. A mastermind does that. If you can find a good mastermind to help, you awesome use that group to its fullest. If you need a group, I have a mastermind group of men who are here to help each other out. That group is called the Conclave of Men. You can sign up and join the group if you want to.
If you need help with setting up your goals, I can also help coach you in finding the best goals that will push you to find your excellence.
