How to Achieve Anything.

Here is a comprehensive formula to achieve whatever you want in life.

Most people struggle to achieve what they want from life, and there is good reason.

Life today is incredibly complex, overwhelming and full of strong reasons you cannot accomplish your dreams. Through books, media, interviews, mentors, experiences, clients, Google, and my years in Business as an Executive and Life Coach, connecting the dots – I have discovered the key elements, so have provided you a framework to help you achieve any goal you want.

 Apply these principles to your personal or business objectives to achieve your major life goals. If you like this, share this with others you think might benefit.

 You Have to do the Work.

There are no shortcuts, software, experts to hire, entitlement, or secret formulas. YOU are 100% responsible for achieving your goals, nobody else, so YOU have to be prepared to do the work needed. Success in achieving goals is not about big leaps, it is about the daily single-minded commitment and execution of 10,000 tiny steps on a single journey. Commit to doing something towards achieving your goal every day, no matter how small.

You can’t hire someone else to do the pushups for you. - Jim Rohn

Adversity, Challenges, Setbacks, Unforeseen Problems, Complexity, Fears & Doubts, Confusion, Busyness, Competing Priorities, Lack of Resources, Lack of Time, Lack of Skills or Experience, Feeling Overwhelmed, Health, Roadblocks, & Disappointments.

Adversity is a fact of life. You are not singled out as the person with all the problems. Every human on the planet experiences setbacks every day. Successful people look at adversity as a personal challenge to overcome. You should change your paradigm and perspective to embrace adversity as inevitable but important in your journey, a mechanism to hone your thinking and your skills that will get you to your finish line. It’s easy to give up, and often hard to keep going, but you will not achieve your goal or arrive at your destination if you give up along the way. If you are not willing to face significant adversity and overwhelming odds, bow out now. If you really are determined to achieve your goal, fasten your seat belt, make the decision, and get started now.

                   Never, Never Give Up (Nunquam, Nunquam, Deficere)

- Ashworth Family Motto for Over 500 Years

Determine a Clear Vision.

You must ensure you have a crystal clear vision. This is why most people do not achieve their goals – their vision is vague and unclear. The reason you need a clear vision to (1) ensure you have a clear and clarified destination, and (2) ensure your consistent clarity and motivation through the times of adversity.

Without a clear vision, you will give up or compromise on your goal when the going gets tough. You must be able to mentally fully experience your ultimate outcome – feel the emotions of achievement, smell it, taste it, experience it clearly in your mind. Write your vision down. Clarify it. Keep it to just one sentence. Practice telling other people with absolute confidence and sincerity (it does not matter what they say). If you are having a challenge clearly seeing your end goal, because of fear or doubt, here is an exercise. It’s a mental imagery exercise called the Miracle Result. “Imagine that tomorrow morning you wake up and suddenly find that a magical transformation, a miracle, has taken place! Your world is just as you would like it to be, you have overcome all your challenges, and you have actually achieved your goal. Describe what is different? What has changed? Describe your feelings and emotions. Describe your personal pride of achievement. Describe how different your life is now in all areas.” Having a clear and motivating vision will keep you focused, eliminate confusion on where you are going, and get you through the challenges.

If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there. – Lewis Carroll.

 You May Need to Rewire Your Brain

Neuroplasticity. Strap in for this one! You can actually change the way you think by rewiring your brain.

 Our brains and minds understand, learn, change, and master new skills, based on life experiences and our perceptions, especially in our younger years, but also throughout our lives. Our brain’s neural pathways are our structural mechanism for understanding and recalling our thoughts, understandings, feelings and drive to achieve. If we could lift the lid and peer into the brains of successful people; surgeons, artists, entrepreneurs, jet-fighter pilots, sports champions, writers, leaders, or others, we would see that exceptional performance and the ability to create success come from deliberate steps to mastery and disciplined consistent practice, that actually physically rewires our brain to enable achievement, previously unattainable by us. More than just deliberate practice, motivation, positive emotions, and visualization each play a part. 

The adult brain’s innate capacity for neuroplasticity can be achieved when we personally believe change to be important, rewarding, or crucial for success (or survival).  The physiology (structure & pathways) of our brain can be changed and constantly realigned daily in small deliberate ways, based on our will to change our perspectives, and our changing understandings of the world. You may be thinking incorrectly, because of your existing personal gremlins, assumptions, interpretations and limiting beliefs that are holding you back from achieving what you want.

To change your brains pathways, you must; (1) have a clear and succinct goal, (2) have single-minded focus and attention to mentally engage, (3) activate your brain (at mild to moderate levels of activation, the brain is in the optimal state to learn), (4) visualize clearly (thinking and doing are the same thing to the brain), (5) practice and repeat with deliberate practice (neurons that fire together wire together), and (6) extend yourself beyond your comfort zone (repeating the same task over and over again isn’t enough to improve. You must deliberately practice at the edge of your capability). It is complex, but it works. For more information, contact me.

Any man could, if he were so inclined, be the sculptor of his own brain.

 - Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Advice for a Young Investigator

 What You Think About, Is What You Will Become.

Further to the neuroplasticity science above, the more you think about something, the more it will become reality. This is because of several powerful and proven universal laws of quantum physics, neuroplasticity, biocentrism, the law of attraction, and others. You don’t need to be a quantum physicist to understand this concept, but here are a few key elements you should understand:

1.     The more you think about something, the more your brain’s neural pathways will adjust to create the thinking you need to achieve your goal.

2.     90% of our thinking is subconscious. Much of our thinking is on autopilot, often our core beliefs are unconsciously sabotaging our ability to achieve. Human’s process 11 million pieces of information per second in our subconscious brain, while we can only process 40 (!) pieces of information per second in our conscious brain. By consciously focusing on what you want to achieve, you bring your thinking into your consciousness, allowing you to use logic and analysis to create drive and the ability to overcome adversity on a daily basis.

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

- Albert Einstein

 Photo by Michael Liao on Unsplash

The Law of Universal Attraction

The Law of Universal Attraction states that you attract into your life those things, circumstances and conditions that correspond with the nature of your dominant, habitual thoughts and beliefs, both conscious and subconscious. Every area of your life, including your health, your finances and all of your relationships, are influenced by this great Universal Law that "like attracts like. The Science of the Law of Attraction concludes that the energy emitted from our thoughts literally has the ability, when focused, to affect energy, which like energy attracts like energy. I know this sounds kooky, but because of the basic principle of like energy attracting like energy, you attract to yourself that which you are in vibrational harmony with, not that which you long for or even deserve. Your dominant frequency is determined by your dominant mental attitude, which itself is determined by your habitual thoughts and beliefs. Simply put, a positive mental attitude attracts, manifests and creates the positive outcomes, experiences and circumstances we want (while a negative mental attitude attracts those conditions that we deem negative or unwanted).

When you desire something with total commitment and passion, so strong that you can almost taste your desire for a certain outcome, and you combine that with complete faith or belief in your ability to achieve it, you activate the universal mechanism by which you can get whatever you want.

You create your own universe as you go along. – Winston Churchill

 

Your Personal Values

The most successful people understand their personal values and make all major daily decisions aligned directly with their values. Those who are conflicted, stressed, exhausted, confused, and generally not able to achieve what they want, are those who are typically operating outside their personal values. If you would like to determine and understand your 5 top personal values, I have a tool on my website you can use. Download here.

When Your Values Are Clear to You, Decision Making Becomes Easier. – Roy Disney

 Photo by MI PHAM on Unsplash

You Are on a Journey.

Life is a journey, and the journey is just as important as the outcome. Accept that you will continue to develop your thinking and abilities throughout your life, and that your journey may be the catalyst to hone and develop the thinking and skills that you need. To become an achiever, you need to develop the skills and perspectives it takes to achieve anything you want. Those people who seem superhuman in their ability to achieve success, did not come by those skills without a lot of hard work, trial and error and many failures.

 Accept that you will get it wrong sometimes, there will be some disappointments and occasional failures. Those who achieve, have the ability to have a clear vision that they are fixated on achieving, accept that they don’t immediately have all the abilities to achieve, but are committed to working towards gaining those special skills that will allow them to achieve what they really want. Just ask anyone successful. If you are looking for a great podcast full of interviews by successful people, each of who had to set out on a journey, watch Lewis Howes, School of Greatness interviews. #schoolofgreatness

Life is a Journey and it's about Growing and Changing and Coming to Terms with Who and What you Are, and Loving Who and What you are. - Kelly McGillis

Hustle.

“Hustle” is the real differentiator between actually achieving and wanting to achieve for many. There is no actual definition for developing hustle when it comes to creating success, as we are each different, with different perspectives, backgrounds and capabilities, wanting different goals, but here are some key elements to getting up each day to hustle to achieve your goals.

1.     Shameless Urgency. High achievers typically have a high degree of urgency and internal drive to get things done every day. They chase opportunity with great urgency, like their life depends on it, because it does! They want to move the line forward a little every day, and are disciplined to achieve towards their goal, even if only a small step. Every day is an opportunity to achieve.

2.     Personally highly motivated. People who hustle have a clear vision, with an equally clear timeline they feel the clock ticking every day. Hustlers hate to go to bed feeling like they have not moved closer to their goal today. You must want your goal more than you don’t want it, and be internally highly motivated to achievement. If you are not highly motivated, rethink your goal.

3.     Single-minded passion. Those who hustle have an internally motivated drive to achieve what they want, and their personal passion and fire drives them every day, when others might burn out. You don’t need to have the greatest talent, but you must love what you do and the goal you are looking to achieve.

4.     A mindset to relentlessly overcome obstacles and challenges. Complexity, confusion, busyness, lack of resources, time and financial constraints, competing priorities, and many other obstacles will appear in your quest to achieve. Those with hustle, are on a mission, and refuse to succumb to obstacles to stop them achieving. In fact, those who have a hustler mindset, often enjoy the challenge of overcoming obstacles, as they understand this is what hones and refines their ability to achieve what they want. If they fail, they look at this as a temporary setback, and get up, dust themselves off, and continue the journey to completion.

5.     Zigging and Zagging. Find a way. Hustlers are creative, zigging and zagging, changing strategies on the fly, leveraging relationships, working new angles, relentlessly pushing forward every day to achieve their goal.

6.     No Fear. People who hustle are not afraid of looking bad, embarrassment, fear of failure, or the criticism of others. They realize these are all deterrents and obstacles towards achievement, so they plow on regardless every day, relentless, in the pursuit of their goal.

7.     Developing the Hustle Muscle. It takes time and practice to develop the hustle mindset. We all know people with this perspective, but it does not come naturally for most of us. It takes personal discipline, practice, time and resilience, but once you work it out, you will become a super achiever. Just don’t overdo it. Keep balance in your life.

Hustle Beats Talent, When Talent Doesn’t Hustle. – Ross Simmonds

Believe in Yourself. Believe It’s Possible.

People who achieve, believe fully in themselves. They have a clear vision, and are confident they can achieve their goal. To achieve your goal, you must absolutely believe you will achieve, even if you don’t have all the answers yet. You must believe you can work it out. This is often a significant difference in those who achieve – they believe they have the ability to overcome any adversity along the way and to work it out, while those who don’t achieve are waiting to determine a clear path to success before they start – often never starting!

As Soon as you Trust Yourself, you will Know How to Live."

-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

 

Get Sh*t Done

GSD, encompasses all of what this article is about. Those who accomplish (GSD) have a crystal clear vision, take small steps daily, refuse to let adversity stop them, believe they will achieve, and are motivated by the quest to achieve their goals.

 Most people achieve very little. “In between every action and reaction, there is a space,” says author Rebecca Eanes. In this moment, you choose how you will react. Many people hide behind learned and constantly reinforced excuses that their behaviors, actions, and choices are out of their control. This is just not true. Achievement is a journey of a million steps.

Git ‘er Done! - Larry the Cable Guy

Photo by Ryan Wong on Unsplash

Eliminate distractions.

Many people get constantly caught up in being distracted away from their mission. Assuming that achieving your goal is important to you, any distraction is going to make it harder and take longer to achieve your goal. In today’s digital, 24-7, switched on world, it is easy to get distracted. Social media, email, TV, YouTube, phone calls, voicemail, all distracting our mental focus and concentration, while deflecting our time and energy. The ability to apply uninterrupted, narrow, disciplined focus to a task allows our brain to operate at its highest capability – keeping a motivated, positive perspective.

 What makes highly successful people so successful is they're experts at practicing— they can push themselves to the exact limit (or more) of their skillset, go all in, and thus expand their abilities day after day. To do this they learn to focus without distractions. Multi-tasking considerably slows your brain’s processing power (much like overloading your computer), creates complexity in your mind resulting in overload and confusion, and will eliminate that clear, single-minded perspective towards achievement. You will clearly need to multi-task at times, but consciously create a personal “no interruptions” policy when you are working on achieving your goal.

You will never reach your Destination if you Stop and Throw Stones at Every Dog that Barks.” 

― Winston S. Churchill

 

Protect Yourself From Burnout.

Burnout is a brain physiology issue that results when your neural pathways alter because they are perceiving stress. Highly motivated people can easily burn out, because of the challenges, mental battles, demands and overwhelming issues you may have to deal with on your journey. Tune in and observe your mind and body closely to recognize any signs of tiredness, exhaustion, lack of motivation or lack of creativity. 

 When this happens (and it will), take time to rest both your body and your mind. Schedule relaxation and fun time also into your weekly calendar. Work out, create a sweat regularly. Do diverse tasks, keep switching between something creative and logical, something physical and something passive, work alone and then collaborate with a team. Keep it interesting, switch locations, change your environment, mediate or just take deep breaths, watch a quick video, take a walk, get a cold water drink, or focus on one other thing for five minutes.

Burnout is what Happens when you Try to Avoid Being Human for too Long. - Michael Gungor

 Live Inspired. Your Choice.

To live inspired is to live confidently, with curiosity, with passion, internally motivated to make the world a better place. Feeling inspired every day, is the daily fuel and energy you need to get you through the barriers and adversity you will experience on your road to achieve your goal. If you're not living inspired, you're not living up to full potential, and you are likely living on autopilot, not achieving what you want from life. Look at the people you associate most closely with. Are they inspired people who inspire you? If not, you might look to spend more time with inspired people, as we typically become like those we spend most time with. Surround yourself with winners and warriors — and with others trying to achieve the impossible, just like you.

It is Good to Love Many Things, for Therein Lies the True Strength, and Whosoever Loves Much Performs Much, and can Accomplish Much. - Vincent van Gogh

 No Judgement. Positive Thinking.

My last point on how to achieve anything. The energy it takes to judge others, to think about their shortcomings, to find fault, to make comparisons, is typically wasted energy, and not in tandem with the focus and energy it will take you to achieve your goal.  Additionally, we judge others to make ourselves feel better about our current state or current situation, when really those judgements are just insecurities in ourselves. Let go of reactions. Stay focused on you, and not others. When you spend effort to pass judgement on others, you are creating negative thoughts, that are out of sync with your narrow drive to achieve your goals, in effect you are diverting your energy away from achieving, and focusing your thinking and time on negative thoughts towards others.

Mentally note next time you are making a judgement on another person, and take an inner refection on why you may be feeling insecure at that moment. Once you begin to gain awareness of negative thinking, you will not only have the ability to refocus your thinking back to your personal goals, but you will also get to know yourself a little better also.

It Amazes Me Sometimes that Even Intelligent People Will Analyze a Situation or Make a Judgement After Only Recognizing the Standard or Traditional Structure of a Piece. - David Bowie

Peter Ashworth is a high energy, innovative Executive Coach, Life Coach and change agent. He has many years experience making things happen, and helping others live their best life, and become achievers of anything. He is available for Coaching and speaking engagements.