by Roger Seip
There are lots of ways to approach your goals, and I encourage you to explore lots of them. The approach we're going to take here is designed specifically to work within the parameters of what your brain can easily focus on. This is what I do with my own goals and it's what I have my coaching clients do with theirs. So this approach is not theory. It's not just some experiment that we cooked up. Believe me, I've done the experimenting myself! I've found that when I execute this particular method of approaching my goals, I accomplish what I aim for, usually faster than the time frame I give myself. If I ever find that I've missed a target, I can nearly always trace it back to how I didn't really do what you're about to do. This process is designed to give you a clear picture of what will be your most impactful goals to move toward right now. And if you do this right, strong positive motivation becomes a natural outgrowth of the process.
Step 1—Narrow It Down
Write down the five or six most important things you want to accomplish in the next 90 days. Why five or six, and why 90 days? The key here at this stage is to narrow it down. Narrow the time frame, and narrow the number of items on the list. Why?
It's five or six goals because we've learned that your conscious mind simply doesn't deal well with too much information. It can only focus easily on a few things at a time. Now there is certainly a time and a place for what's called dream building, where you remove all limits on your thinking and on time and just go crazy thinking the biggest thoughts you can. That exercise is incredibly valuable for stretching your thinking and expanding your mind, which is not what we're doing here.
So get out a calendar and determine the next logical breakpoint that's about 90 days away. End of a quarter is ideal, and end of a month is fine, too. If your endpoint is 80 days or a hundred. that's fine; just make it about 90 days. Why is this important? That's about the amount of time that a human being can stay highly focused on one major objective without hitting the reset button and still see real progress.
Think about it; there's a reason why nearly every diet or exercise program is about 90 days in length. The wildly popular P90X fitness series is a great example. The P stands for Power and the X stands for Xtreme, which is mostly just marketing. But there's a ton of good science in the 90. The 90 stands for 90 days, and there's a pretty specific reason for this. It isn't P10X because you just can't see much progress in 10 days. At the same time it's not P300X because nobody can stay on track for that long all at one stretch. Why do you think that Wall Street places such high importance on quarterly financial reports for companies? Because that's about the right amount of time for an organization to make significant changes without losing focus. For anything significant, much less than 90 days is just too short to see any real progress, and much more than 90 is just too far out to see clearly.
Look at the next 90 days, and then number your paper 1 to 6. Not 7 or 10—just 6. You are going to write down the five or six most important goals you want to reach in that 90-day time frame. Now consider all the areas of your life—professional, financial, physical health, mental/emotional, family, and community—and make your list somewhat well rounded. Again, narrow it down; that's the key here. Anyone watching this likely has lots of things they want to accomplish. I'm guessing about you that you probably tend to try to do too much rather than too little, so you'll most likely benefit from allowing yourself no more than six spots to fill. It's totally okay if you can only come up with five, but do yourself a favor—limit yourself to a maximum of six items.
Now as you're writing out the handful of most important goals over the next 90 days, let's just review what makes a goal effective. In the last chapter we spent time on five characteristics that should be present in your goals, but I'll review them briefly here as well.
1. What you're writing should be meaningful to you. These objectives are no one's but yours, so make sure you get down what you really want to accomplish.
2. What you're writing should be specific and measurable. We're talking about a 90-day program with a very clear end point, so don't just write down “boost income,” “lose weight,” or “save some money.” Be clear with yourself: What are you specifically intending to accomplish between now and 90 days from now? Specifically, how much money do you intend to make or save? Specifically, How much weight do you intend to take off? Specifically, how many miles will you run? Specifically, how much will you sell? I do not care what the numbers or the specifics are, but it is critically important that you make it specific. If you neglect this, you miss out on most of the power in this process.
3. What you're writing does need to be the right size for you—big enough to be a challenge for you, but small enough that you genuinely believe you can accomplish it. Keep in mind, you've only got about three months for this before hitting the reset button. So size the goals appropriately. In doing this exercise, you may have to make a choice between “Should I think a little too big and stretch myself?” versus “Should I err on the side of safety?” How you handle that depends on your experience and your track record. If you are accustomed to automatically hitting your most important goals or if you're just a little bored, then go big. If you're doing this for the first time, then I would maybe err on the side of smaller.
4. This may go without saying, but what you are writing needs to be written down. Seriously, don't do you or me the disservice of just passively reading this all the way through and doing nothing with it. I didn't say think about what you want to accomplish in the next 90 days, I said write it down. I assure you that it is a much different level of experience when you get your eyes, hands, and brain working in concert to crystallize your goals. So for the last time: Do this with pen and paper, not just with your brain.
5. What you're writing will be re-viewed, so be honest with yourself and create some targets that will be fun for you to hit. Once you've got this base, we're going to design a whole program for self-accountability and programming, so understand that you will be developing a relationship with these goals.
Enough description—time to get going. Get your pen and paper out and write down your five or six most important goals for the next 90 to100 days. Take as long as you need to do this, and then come back.
Step 2—Identify the Keystone
Next, you're going to identify which of these is your “keystone goal.” You may say, “What are you talking about? What the heck is a keystone goal?” Which is great, because it's likely that you've never looked at your goals this way.
Your keystone goal is the one goal that, by focusing intensely on its accomplishment, you support the majority of your other goals.
As you look at the handful of goals you wrote down, you likely notice that many of them are connected, and you may even realize that some are in competition with each other. But I've found that, in nearly every case, you'll see one of your goals from which, if you go after it hard, you'll likely get all the results you're looking for. I don't want to overcomplicate this. You may already know which one it is for you. It's actually quite common that when someone does what you've done thus far, one of the goals they write down just leaps off the page and rings in their brain, “Hey! Make me happen!” If you know now which one that is, just put a star by that one on your paper before you read the rest of this chapter.
If a keystone goal doesn't jump right out at you, that's all right too. I've had lots of times where I had to work out what my keystone would be, where the heaviest focus belonged. So again, what you're looking for is one of your goals that will most likely get you all of them. This can happen a few different ways. In some cases, your keystone goal will actually create the others as a byproduct, almost automatically. In other cases, your keystone goal will require the accomplishment of other goals as a stepping-stone or support mechanism. And in still other cases, your keystone goal may have such an impact on your life that you simply gain the power, confidence, and energy to knock down any wall you come up against. I'll give you an example.
Recently, I sat down
to figure out what I really wanted to get out of the last 100 days of the year. I came up with the following:
1. Personal sales of $_____._____.
2. Personal income of $_____._____.
3. Pay off $_____ of debt.
4. Run 220 miles and strength train 35 times.
5. Meditate at least 50 times.
6. Take 14 days of guilt free, unplugged time off.
Those were the biggest ones. Notice that these are all very specific and easy to measure. I knew that I needed to boil this down into one goal that I became kind of obsessed with. There is technically no correct answer; none of these goals was better or worse than any of the others. It was just up to me to figure out where my most intent focus would pay the biggest dividends. Can you guess which one I chose? Well, I picked the sales goal. The number itself would not be helpful to know, but here's the thinking behind it. Hitting the sales goal would effectively create the income and the debt payoff automatically. Being on track for those would also allow for the vacation time nicely. What's the connection with the workouts and the meditating? I just knew that being on track with my physical, mental, and spiritual health is what would provide the energy and focus necessary. So they all work together. By consciously focusing on one keystone goal with all these connections, the subconscious actually goes to work on all of them, making them much more likely. You see?
So your next step is to do the same with your goals—determine which of yours is the key to all of them. If you don't have one of them starred already, take the time to decide which of your goals is going to be your keystone. And if you're a little baffled by this step, get in touch with me directly. Make sure you feel good about this one before moving on.
Step 3—Solidify the Why
Now that you've got one objective to focus your mind on, it's time to answer the most important question of all: Why? More specifically, why is the accomplishment of this goal important to you? Here again, you may have the answer in a flash of intuition. Sometimes the stars line up and you just feel it. You're murmuring, “I don't need to over-think this. I have simply never been this stoked about my life and I am ready to go!” If that's going on, fantastic! Just take a moment and write down what you're thinking as an anchor.
If you don't have the bolt of lightning working for you, try these questions to stimulate your thinking:
Why do I want to accomplish this?
What will the accomplishment of this goal give me or do for me?
How will I feel when I make this goal a reality? Confident? Excited? Peaceful? Pumped? Solid?
How will pursuing this goal make me better or stronger? How will it require me to grow?
When I get this result, what will I be able to do then?
When it comes to Why, there is no such thing as a wrong answer, and the more answers you have the better. Take some time with your pen and paper and answer the Why question for yourself.
Step 4—Make It Visual
Your next step for heightening your focus and tuning up your mind is to make it visual. So far, everything we've done has involved your making plans. Most people never even get this far in thinking about goals, so you're already way ahead, but there's much more you can do to accelerate your progress. Your subconscious mind has literally billions of times the horsepower of your conscious mind. Additionally, it thinks and operates much differently than the conscious mind. As we discussed, one big key to unlocking the subconscious is to understand that it thinks in pictures. Where your conscious mind actually thinks coherent, linear, sequential thoughts (that actually sound like sentences in your mind), your subconscious essentially just sees pictures and moves powerfully toward them.
So to turn that on, give your brain something to see! Give it some pictures to work with. Sometimes I've had my clients put their visuals into a notebook or three ring binder. Sometimes I have them make a vision board where they can see all of their images at one time in their workspace. Lots of my clients will put visuals of their goals on index cards along with affirmations. There are tons of ways to make your goals visual—experiment to find what works for you.
Step 5—Create Supporting Rituals
Step 5 in the process of heightening your focus is to create some rituals. When I say rituals I don't mean like chanting or sacrificing a goat. All I mean here is that you're going to consciously establish some automatic behavior patterns that anchor to and center on your goals. Please understand I am not just making this up. There are three books I've read over the years that have really hammered this step home for me. They are:
1. The Power of Full Engagement, by James E. Loehr and Tony Schwartz
2. Get Out of Your Own Way, by Robert K. Cooper
3. The Answer, by John Assaraf and Murray Smith
The first two really helped me understand the science of habits, and the third gave me a lot of the step-by-step program that is currently working well for me and my clients.
Are you aware that the vast majority of your thoughts are habitual? Dr. Deepak Chopra says that over 99 percent of the thoughts we have today are the exact same thoughts we had yesterday, and 99 percent of the thoughts we'll have tomorrow are the exact same thoughts we're having today. Since our thoughts essentially create our actions, this means that a lot of what we do—in our work, for our health, in our finances—we do habitually. It's automatic. Think about it: From the time you wake up in the morning until the time you get out the door to go to work, how often does your morning look essentially the same? Feet hit the ground, stumble out of bed, brush the teeth, shave, shower, coffee, get dressed, breakfast (maybe), more coffee, check the e-mail, more coffee, wake the kids, make their lunch, more coffee, out the door. Pay attention for a few mornings, and you might be surprised at how similar one day is to the next. So you already have these automatic behavior patterns; what I'll encourage you to do is to be conscious of them for a time and then establish a new habit pattern in their place, specifically at two times of the day.
The first is right away, immediately when you wake up in the morning. The first hour—specifically the first few moments—of your day is a very powerful time for programming your mind for success. The reason is that during that time your brain is transitioning from a sleeping state to a waking state, and your brain waves are configured in such a way that your subconscious mind is exceptionally receptive to the “thought seeds” that are planted.
Have you ever noticed how the first moments of your day seem to set the tone for the rest of it? Have you ever woken up on the wrong side of the bed? Pay attention, and you'll start to see the practical connections between a powerful start to the day and a powerful rest of the day. Most of us waste this window of opportunity on a bunch of stress or just semi-conscious fogginess. Many successful people purposefully use that first portion of the day as a way of tuning their mind for a heightened focus on their goals and dreams. It's true, you can make a decision to wake up on the right side of bed every day, and reap the rewards of starting the day right.
Chapter 17 of Train Your Brain for Success is entirely devoted to what we call the Power Hour, a daily energy management practice. If you'd like the complete rundown right now, feel free to jump to Chapter 17. The basics, however, are that I'll teach you a specific 15-step process that my clients and I use to create an undefeated mentality every day.
You may not want to adopt my specific 15 steps, which is fine. Maybe you don't like push-ups, or you prefer tea over coffee, or you have different videos that you like, or you only want to do 6 steps rather than 15. The vast majority of the world does zero steps. The point is to create your own conscious programming habits for the first hour of the day and stick to them diligently for 30 days. It will take that long to begin to rewire your brain, and by then you will be almost addicted to your Power Hour. It becomes fun!
The second time to be aware of your programming is the last few moments of your day. For many of the same reasons that the first hour is important, so are the last few minutes before
drifting off. You brain experiences that transitional phase at the end of the day as well as at the beginning. What I encourage here is not nearly as complex as the Power Hour, but just as conscious. Sometime during the last hour of your day, just take a moment and re-view your goals and some affirmations, and then take a moment to express gratitude for anything positive that happened during the day. As a bonus, this is also a great time to think through your Daily Big Six (see Chapter 12) and lay out your most important objectives for the following day. You will key your thoughts for a restful night of sleep, very pleasant dreams, and a ton of energy the next morning.
A little programming goes a long way.
So there you have it—five specific steps that we know from experience will give you the kind of mental focus that top achievement requires. If you'll get started on them immediately and make them part of your daily and weekly routines, you cannot help but see improved results.
Reinforcement and Bonuses: This chapter has been Memory Optimized™ for your benefit. For your brief lesson and some great bonuses, visit www.planetfreedom.com/trainyourbrain with the access code in the About the Author section. Enjoy!
Chapter 9
Overcoming Barriers
Anytime you try to get from point A to point B, stuff happens that can get you off track or slow you down, right? I have two young children, and it seems like anytime we try to go anywhere, stuff comes up immediately!