Goal Setting

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening wherever you are!

In the last edition of The Unconscious Aspects of Success Newsletter, we looked at getting, and, particularly, maintaining motivation. I talked about the work a mentor of mine had done, in asking highly successful people how they stayed motivated, and I left you with the question of what was the one thing came up over and over again….

You all know this. “I set goals”. As I write this the Olympics have just finished, and I ma sure that ,like m, you heard the medal winners talking about how they had set them selves the goal, or set the vision of winning an Olympic medal, and dhow that had driven them forward, hour by hour, day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year.

I cannot be the first person you have ever heard that from. Any of you who have been in a results business, a performance business for more than two or three weeks, somebody will have mentioned to you that you should be writing your goals down over and over. When we think back to the Newsletter on “How your Mind works” that's an example, a perfect example of a subconscious programme installed by repetition.

Now, honestly, how many of you do it? How many of you write your goals down, ideally at least three, four times a week? Preferably every day, but within that 48 hours of getting motivated. We’ll be lucky if it’s any of you – the average is 2%,

You all have heard it, you all know about it, and yet only two out of a hundred do it. If you’re in the 2% - well done, you are well on the way to achieving those goals! If you are in the other 98%, why don’t you do it? It's simple, it's free, easy, you don't have to go to a course, you don't have to pay anybody. Why wouldn't you do it?

The most common reason? “I'm just too busy”. So, the top performers are telling you they're writing their goals down every day, for 3 or 4 minutes and you’re saying you are too busy!

How do you go about it? The most common way is to have long term, medium term and short term goals.

The long terms goals are where you dream – the house you want in 5-10 years, the car you want to drive, the amount of money you want in the bank. Medium term goals usually cover the next year to 18 months and reflect the first steps to achieving the long term goals, while short term goals are much more mundane and practical - here's what I want to achieve today, or this week.

This is using your brain the way it was built to be used. As I said in the “How your mind works” edition of this Newsletter, your brain loves identifying patterns and tracking them.

Once you give the brain an external focus, your performance rises dramatically, and it becomes very smooth.

Let’s compare that, to the daily activity of someone who does not have goals. In their head they may have a rough list of what they’d like to get done. They get to the office, they begin making phone calls, they have a spurt of activity and then they stop because they don't have anything written down, they're not following anything, they stop. They wonder “What should I do next?”. “Well, I could do this, or this, I think I'll go get a cup of coffee”. Then it's followed by another spurt of activity. Maybe they do paperwork, and they stop. “What should I do next?” At the end of the day, their day will have been a sequence of jerky activities interspersed with period where they are not achieving anything (apart from maybe topping up their caffeine levels), simply because their brain had nothing to track.

It is estimated the average person would get 20% or more done every day they have written goals that as opposed to days they do not. There's a lot of wasted time going on, and one of the reasons is most people have nothing to follow. That's why writing your goals down is important.

If you're not going to write them down,?a simple alternative,?every bit as effective, is?to hear your goals every day. Instead of writing them down where you can see them?and focus on them, hearing them.?Take the time to record them as a sound file on your smart phone.? Take maybe half an hour, if that, to write them down, hit record on the phone’s voice recorder and make a 3-4 minute audio file, repeating your goals at least three times.

At the end of that you'll have a sound file?with your voice repetitiously reminding you,?telling you what the goals are.?What gets things into your unconscious mind??Repetition. So play it at least once a day.?Maybe have it on while you're driving to work, or at the gym, or out for a run or a walk? Any five minute a day activity?where you can be listening to this?while you're doing something else.?

If you do that, every day for 30 days,?at the end of the 30 days,?if I were to come up to you and say,?what are your goals??You're not going to look up at the ceiling. You're not going to avoid my eyes.?There's going to be no pause.?You'll fire them right back at me.?

In fact, it has the same effect?as television commercials. That's how TV commercials work.?They don't play the commercial once or twice.?They'll take a commercial and they start playing it?over and over and over and over again?until you know every note unconsciously,?you can spit it out.

The advertisers know if they can get you looking at their product?and thinking about the commercial,?if they can focus the conscious and the unconscious?for as little as one second, but repeatedly,?the likelihood of you grabbing their product?over the competition goes right up.

In a recent course that I ran, I tried a experiment I took an old tv commercial and asked “what are twicicles as nicicles“ and about half the attendees (admittedly the older half of the audience) fired back “Ricicles”. Ricicles have not been sold anywhere in the world since 2017 – that’s the power that this has!

And that's how simple it can be to program yourself. Anything that you hear or do repetitiously?becomes internal and happens unconsciously very quickly.?That's a very powerful tool for you.?

So, writing your goals down is one way.?Hearing them is one way.? There's a third way of programming yourself.?Instead of hearing it or seeing it,?how about visualizing something repeatedly??Many very successful people, ad a lot of the Olympic medallists,?if you listen to some of their interviews, will often say things, something like this,?where when I began,?I didn't have a lot of money or fancy education.?I couldn’t afford the gear. I wasn't driving a beautiful car. I did not have alot going for me,?but what I had was a vision, a dream.

I could see myself doing it.?I would drive around in beat up old cars. It was all I could afford,?but I cut out pictures of Mercedes,?taped them on the dashboard. I always knew someday I'd have a Mercedes.?The house out there, my spouse and I,?we talked about what kind of home we were going to live in. We used to dream about it.?Well, we’ve got it.

If they haven’t written them down, or listened to the, but they have been laser focussed on them, they have by-passed their conscious mind. Essentially, they have hypnotised themselves. But visualisation and self hypnosis are topics for another day.

Before I sign off, I hear some of you saying “But I have a quarterly/ six-monthly or yearly review where I sit down perhaps my manager and at best agree, or at worst get told, my goals out for the next period.

That's great, but that's not going to keep you motivated. Most of you - if you even buy into the goals, because, if they’re set for you, you may not even feel like your goals - take that sheet of paper, put it in a drawer, and it's forgotten. Maybe you have review meetings. They're fine, and may provide a bit of motivation, even if it’s just to justify yourself, but that's way beyond the 48 hour window and not nearly repetitious enough.

It’s like exercise, if you do it over and over, you will get results.

Until next time

Website: www.donaldhamilton.co.uk

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Donald Hamilton | LinkedIn