Goals

It’s a new year in front of us, a fresh start. This is like the ultimate, “Let’s start on Monday” situation. But you see, the problem we run into with our New Year’s Resolutions is the process is flawed.

We don’t have a process for achieving. Success is a formula that can be duplicated, there is a process for how to make it happen.

I want to share what I have learned over the last 10+ years, and what many of my mentors have used to spark a change for the better in our lives, and create an environment to make the new way of living stick.

It is a process, but if done consistently, you WILL reach your goals this year and beyond.

Back in my early 20’s, I used the process of success to reach my goals, and have been using this process for over 10 years now.

Through my teens, and into my 20’s, I was what you call… A punk. Lol. But really, I was just a lost depressed youth, that was struggling to find what life meant to him.

I was struggling to find my way in life, I had lost a sense of the all-important priorities. I was slacking in school, I was getting into a lot of trouble, I changed schoolwork for drugs and alcohol at a young age. This led to me dropping out of high school, and eventually a major depression state.

I thought I was figuring it all out, but, in reality, I was just making my situation worse. I was lost and didn’t know where to go.

It wasn’t until Veteran’s Day, of 2009, that my life came to a crossroad. All of my bad decisions had caught up to me. I was facing some legal repercussions for all of my addictions, and it became the crossroads that saved my life.

At that point, it was time to make a decision. Follow this path, and who knows where I will end up, maybe dead or in jail, like many of the “friends” I had during that time, or, make a DECISION to change my path.

That leads us to the first step in our 8 steps to creating success, making the DECISION.

Step 1: Decision

I love this quote by Tony Robbins, “It is in the moment of decision, that your destiny is shaped.” It takes a decision to start the process of reaching your goals.

In this personal story, I remember it vividly, when I made the decision. It was a cold and snowy day in February, I hadn’t slept in days. I walked outside, sat in the driveway, in the snow, and just balled my eyes out. I was in a dark place, a place that forced me to make a decision. Now, sometimes we are forced to make a decision like I had to, but we can make this decision on our own with-out a tragedy too, we just have to add that emotion to it. The emotional attachment is what helps in the decision-making process.

I was very emotionally charged, that this is not what the way I wanted to live my life.

But where do I go from here?

That leads us to step 2:

Step 2: Creating a vision.

It was in my moment of decision, that I had to create the new vision, the new version of myself that I needed to be.

I prayed for the first time in a long time, I didn’t know where else to go. I had not felt happiness in so long, I knew I needed to find that inner happiness. I started to soul search, find out what was it that made me happy.

I was always active growing up, my family and I loved playing sports. It was always an outlet for me, and I have fallen away from that. A couple days later, I was watching a college basketball game, and it went into triple overtime, tons of fun and excitement, I was jumping up and down, creating all types of emotion. It was at the end of that game, that it hit me, I was happiest in my life when I was active, when I was playing sports and doing the things I loved.

That was when I created my vision, I made the decision to go back and get my GED, and go on try to play college basketball. The vision was created.

But, it isn’t just about the vision, you must add emotion to the vision, the thoughts and goals we have, need to be driven by powerful emotional attachment, or the motivation will only go for so long.

After I knew what I wanted to do, I sat down and wrote out my goal…. This is step 3.

Step 3: Write out your goal

I started to read on how to achieve things, and became obsessed with the topic of, essentially, personal development. I found all of these research topics on goals, and how you have over a 40% higher chance in achieving your goals when you write them out.

There is a certain way to write out your goals, and I’ll share that with you here.

When writing out your goals, over the years, I have added and tweaked this, but here is what I have found to be the best strategy:

In depth video on the process: https://youtu.be/xlHTqmkFRiQ

Deadline of the goal. Create the timeline, or specific day that this goal will be accomplished by.
Stated in Present Tense with "I Am" Statements.
Explain why it is we want to reach that goal, what is your “Why”, your emotional driver to help you stick to it.
How would we feel, and how would our life be different, if we were living with this newly achieved goal.
Label 1-3 action items to live by as our new standards of living that we implement daily in order to achieve the goal.
Sign the goal. This is your commitment to yourself.
Make sure the goal is a SMART goal (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time Oriented)
Make sure it is written down, and placed somewhere you can see daily.

Example: On 12/31/2020 (Deadline Date), I am, 25% body fat (Goal Stated in Present Tense), because it gives me the energy, and endurance to run around with my children so they can have a fulfilling and fun life (Your Why). I feel accomplished as a great parent if I did this (How I would feel as if living now), I am doing this by, 1. Getting to RAW Fitness 4x per week at 6 am on M/W/F 2. Eating real Whole Foods 80% of the time, all through the week, but letting go for dinner on the weekends. 3. Managing my stress by getting into my bed by 10 am every night to get more sleep (Actionable steps with the how, when, and where)

Signature: ____________

Most importantly, is to have a vision of where you are trying to go, be patient, and focus on the process, and not the outcome.

Step 4: Creating your PowerList.

These are the 1-3 things you will do every day, that you stated while writing out your goals.

If you see in the example above, it was 1. Getting 4 workouts a week. 2. Eating whole foods 80% of the time. 3. Managing stress.

As you can see, those where not just written out, but those were also written a certain way:

All of these items were written with this in mind:

Exact action item. What exactly are you going to do.
Specific times this will be accomplished daily
Specific location you will do this.

The more specific you are in telling your mind, what it is you will do, this creates the roadmap for implementation. So, make sure to add these 3 things to writing out your action items.

These are the things that are to become your new standards of living, they are non-negotiable. One way to look at it is, what would the person you are trying to become act like? Would they be doing these things regularly; I am sure they would. In that case, it is our duty to start doing them now. Because that is just who we are now.

For me during my transformation, mine where:

Working out daily
Reading daily
Eating whole foods, majority of the time
Using a distraction method to help quite smoking cigarettes

Those became some of the standards I lived by, these became “who I was”, simply by making the decision, and having a vision of where I wanted to go. But it wasn’t just that, I had the emotional attachment to that vision that helped me get out of bed on the days I didn’t feel like it.

Step 5: See Your Goal Daily.

The next step is to see your goal every day. What I mean by this, is to start to visualize yourself living out that goal as if you are already there. Make it as real as possible, add all of your senses to the visualization. Then you can create a vision board (see above image), a board with all of your goals on it, and put it somewhere you will see it daily.

This article, isn’t about the science of the subconscious, but what this does, is starts to tell your subconscious what it is you want in life. Your subconscious is where all of your actions occur from, so your subconscious will start to seek out strategies and opportunities that align with your beliefs, or your new goals. Since it sees it every day, it will start to believe that this new goal is the way of life and seek out how to accomplish it, even when you aren’t consciously doing so.

I wish I had a picture of my vision board during this time, but I can’t find them anymore, but a majority of the things happened on my board. I remember one thing I put on my board was to become an Academic All-American. Mind you, this was a former drug addict, that didn’t play basketball competitively at a high level, and didn’t even have a high school diploma, that was creating this vision board. Yet, despite that, in my junior season, I reached that goal.

The next step is to be done in line with step 5.

Step 6: Affirm it daily

Creating powerful affirmations, or statements, in the form of “I Am” are a powerful way to make the new beliefs stick.

Things like…

“I am confident”

“I am beautiful”

“I am comfortable in my own skin”

“I am successful”

“I am deserving of love”

Are just some examples to use.

Step 7, is simple, yet so difficult…

Step 7: Be Patient

Many times, we get so caught up on the outcome, that we overestimate how long a goal will take to acquire in the short term, yet underestimate in the long term.

When I was finishing out my career in college, playing basketball, I started to get into the personal training industry during college. I had a dream of opening up my own facility. I had a vision, I started this goal setting process exactly, and within 8 years, I was up and running because I continuously focused on the process of improving my craft, and not just the outcome. If I only focused on having the business, I wouldn’t have developed the necessary skills to be successful along the way. Now, I didn't accomplish my goals right away, never, it takes time, effort, and patience, but as long as we can focus on the process, it will all work out.

Warren Buffet once said..."Games are won by players who focus on the playing field, not by those that whose eyes are glued to the scoreboard."

I love this quote, and it is so powerful. We get so focused on the outcomes of our goals, instead of focusing in on the process. We here at RAW, really try and preach to focus on the process, and set process goals, and not just outcome goals. If we consistently focus on, and do the process, the outcomes will always follow. Sometimes right away, sometimes in the future, but they will follow.

This leads us to the final step...

Step 8: Get some accountability

I hired and had people in place to hold me accountable. I hired a trainer, even as a trainer, to hold me accountable for my workouts. I later hired a business coach, to help hold me accountable to my goals and the process to get there. See it is a coach’s job to not only help you with reaching the outcome you want, but to help keep you in line with the process of how to get there.

You can do that too, we would love to jump on a quick complimentary call to see how we can help you achieve your goals this time around. Just click the button below to schedule your strategy call

Click Here To Schedule Your Quick Call

It's your turn!