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The Ultimate Goal Achievement Guide Essentials To Achieving Your Eluding Goals 1 Published by: The Plaskett Group, LLC dba MindVenue.com 109 E 17th St STE 4, Cheyenne, Wyoming 82001 © Copyright 2014 The Plaskett Group, LLC. All Rights Reserved. May be shared with copyright and credit left intact. MindVenue.com 2 The Ultimate Goal Achievement Guide About Mind Venue At Mind Venue our mission is to be the single authoritative place online for those who have an interest in developing themselves to achieve any goal. We do this by providing a vast array of knowledge, tactics and skills in the personal development and motivation arena. We take a practical, relatable, and positive approach to personal development with the hopes of causing you to rethink, reorganize, and refocus your potential to achieve. Our goal is that you would overcome the psychological barrier that holds you back from achieving your goals through the information we provide. We will make every effort to serve up actionable information to provoke and encourage change. We strive to maintain a truthful and unbiased collection of knowledge, both in original content, product reviews and personal development and motivational tips, as well as curated articles from other top personal development websites. If you haven’t already, visit MindVenue.com to subscribe to our FREE email newsletter. The Ultimate Goal Achievement Guide 3 The Ultimate Goal Achievement Guide: Essentials to Achieving Your Eluding Goals The Achievement Mindset Driving Force Long-Term Strategist Anchoring Goals Define a Course of Action (Clarity through Specific Goals) Characteristics of an Achiever Paralyzing Emotions 4 The Ultimate Goal Achievement Guide Introduction What does it mean to be unreasonable? Sure, we can take the dictionary definition of the word but that just gives us a cold relationship with other words. It lacks the societal and personal explanation of a word that is often misunderstood. Most people will look at “unreasonable” as negative ignoring the word’s ability to shape their lives. But how can a word that is synonymous with senseless, foolish, and silly able to change our lives? Consider the societal relationship with the word through the use of this quote by George Bernard Shaw: The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man. In this quote we discover the root to why so many of our goals and dreams go unfulfilled. We allow the world to define us. We conform to what society thinks is best. In some cases, this can be considered a good thing. Laws that protect and keep us from harming others are a prime example. On the other hand it places constraints on our aspirations, goals, and ideas that can be helpful to society. They deemed these ideas, goals, and aspirations as “unrealistic”, “unreasonable”, and “unattainable” simply because they do not fall into the norm of what everyone else is doing. Would there be common luxuries like electricity, plastic, transportation, and communication, if it weren’t for those who decided not to settle for what was reasonable and to push the boundaries to create, develop, and expand beyond what the norm has to offer? Companies like Apple, Tesla, and Amazon.com; people like Tony Fadell, Sal Khan, and Thomas Edison. The Ultimate Goal Achievement Guide 5 The Ultimate Goal Achievement Guide gives you the tools to change your relationship with your aspirations, goals, and ideas. You are the captain of your fate and must make the quality decision to be unreasonable about your potential. You must not accept the limitations that anyone, regardless of their relationship, places on you. As you go through these pages you will notice that there is less information on goal setting as there is about goal achieving. There are countless resources out there that will give you the mechanics of goal setting but very few that deal with the mental recalibration required to achieve your goals. This resource and other resources offered through Mind Venue focuses on (re)calibrating the mind towards high achievement. It is my sincere hope that you will incorporate the information contained in these pages into every facet of your life, beginning with the establishment of suitable goals. Ralph Plaskett 6 The Ultimate Goal Achievement Guide The Achievement Mindset The Achievement Mindset is: ¥¥ The confidence to reach goals; ¥¥ Not considering the options of failure; and ¥¥ Knowing that obstacles will come, but you will overcome each. I am amazed by how much effort our school systems focus on teaching memorized skills, but so little time on developing the mind with what most call “soft skills.” Every athlete, successful businessperson, and influential leader knows that without the proper frame of mind achievement isn’t possible. Our environment--the people, places, and things that we interact with--always yields itself to our mind and associated attributes like our habits. In other words, our external yields itself to our internal. The Ultimate Goal Achievement Guide 7 The skills that we learn and practice are critical to our achievement but without the proper frame of mind, those skills become useless. Among other things, the achievement mindset is responsible for the greatest innovators, leaders, star athletes, entrepreneurs, parents and mentors. But at the end of the day, achievement is a quality decision supported first by a positive self-image and then the appropriate knowledge and skills. Choices are hard, especially in an environment that has countless options. Often, large amounts of options cause us to be indecisive. We think to ourselves, “What happens if I make the wrong choice?” This fear paralyzes us from making any choice at all. The result is that our minds are consumed with the possibilities of failure instead of the possibilities of success. We are more fearful of failure than we are living an average, forgetful life. As odd as it may sound, the process to achieve success is unfamiliar therefore we are fearful, hesitant and paralyzed by the unknown. This is why we make decisions that are most familiar to us. The choice to establish a goal and work on achieving it is a bold one, yet the reward is far greater than you can imagine. Failure is not an option. Unfortunately there isn’t a magical pill that you and I can swallow to make life easier, but there are things that we can do to make it more manageable. Correctly relating to our environment is a critical step in making quality decisions needed to achieve. The idea is to concentrate our efforts toward overcoming our own combative minds rather than focus our energy on destructive emotions, ideas and thoughts. I remember my cousin asking me during our junior year of college, “How are you able to do it all?” At that time, I was taking a full course load, working two more-than-part-time jobs, juggling a relationship, managing several student associations, and enjoying the college party life. To say the least, I was busy. What my cousin was trying to ask was why my grades were not slipping. 8 The Ultimate Goal Achievement Guide How was I able to do all that I was doing with an equal level of success in each area? My answer: Failure wasn’t an option. I had no other choice. Sure, I could have chosen to cut back on some of my extracurricular activities, but I knew that my future success depended on my current success in everything that I was doing. I refocused my mind from thinking of how overwhelming the activities were, to thinking about the results of those activities would produce. In essence, I focused on the future. The relationship with my environment could have easily been one that caused me to give in to stress and quit activities that had an impact on my future. But like any successful relationship, I made a quality decision to put things into perspective in an effort to obtain the desired outcome. This required serious mental recalibration. Why? Because I had a history of quitting when things got rough. My habits and thought processes were selfdefeating. They caused me to give in instead of rise to the occasion. I never liked failure. I’m not sure who does. When I realized that what I was doing was failing my future, I changed my relationship with my environment in order to overcome difficult situations. You see, failure doesn’t have to be an option that you choose. Failure is not who you are and does not determine what future outcomes will be. The barrier between you and your goals is your relationship with your environment. It is the way that you interpret your life’s activities. Your mind is very much like a fertile farmland. It will produce whatever you plant and nurture. What are you planting and nurturing? Is it producing the outcome that you desire? The Ultimate Goal Achievement Guide 9 Driving Force What is your consuming desire to achieve your goals? External yields itself to the internal. In other words, it is mind over matter. You are able to become the master of your circumstances when you appropriately place those circumstances into the right perspective. As it relates to achieving your goals, the one thing that is preventing you from achieving them is your relationship with the goals. In order to successfully accomplish any goal you must possess the drive to achieve it. Goals themselves, no matter how well thought-out, are simply intentions that need to develop into activity. That activity requires fuel to keep the momentum going. Think of your goal as a car journey. You can complete this journey, but only when you take the necessary steps to do so. To achieve your goals you must get started. You need to turn the ignition and get the car started, if you will. To gain momentum you have to push forward in your activities—press down on the gas pedal and get the car moving. You can keep moving and keep that force going as long as something doesn’t get in your way. Simple, right? With that being said, what is driving you to or away from accomplishing your goals? 10 The Ultimate Goal Achievement Guide This driving force is an important attribute to accomplish your goals. It is also the missing link for so many people whose goals, ambitions, and dreams have been eluding them. This driving force is like a coin. On one side it has the ability to create the life that you desire and on the other the ability to hold you to a life of mediocrity. The choice is yours and yours alone of which side of the coin you choose. Choose a driving force When we hear stories of achievement, we are often told about something that helped the achiever overcome obstacles – to pursue the goal, no matter what. This could be a promise made to a love one, a boiling frustration, or a social cause. All of these are consuming desires that drive a person to achieve beyond their normal ability. This consuming desire gives you and I the ability to rise above the situation and jump over hurdles that would cause others to crumble. What this desire gives you is the ability to strive for a cause greater than yourself. No longer are your goals anchored simply to yourself. Now you are striving to reach your goals because of what it will mean to others (more on this later). As much as we hate to admit it, people are influenced by our actions every day. They are either inspired or disheartened by what we say or do. If they see us crumble, with no other example to emulate, they too will believe that their hopes, dreams, goals, and aspirations are not achievable. Fear will establish a permanent space in their mind. Fear can be used as a motivator, however it is best known for its ability to inhibit the pursuit of everything, if allowed. This paralyzing force against forward progress is often linked to the fear of the unknown. The Ultimate Goal Achievement Guide 11 Consider how you would move around in a pitch-black room. You are nervous because you cannot see what is in front of you. You are fearful of stumbling over something and falling. So what do you do? What can you do? You either stay in one spot, hoping that a source of light will appear, or you improvise by getting on all fours and feeling your way around until you find your way. Few people will improvise. Most will be overwhelmed with fear that paralyzes them from taking action. They are unfamiliar with the space so they take no action. They become complacent in the box that they created for themselves because at least in that box, there is a familiar feeling. Successful goal achievement is best aided when there is a driving force that helps you move past each milestone until the goal is achieved. Being prepared with a clearly defined goal and a plan that breaks down that goal to manageable parts is part of the equation. The other side of that equation are the intangibles that will cause you to successfully execute your plan and accomplish your goal. 12 The Ultimate Goal Achievement Guide Long-Term Strategist Short-term thinking is like being nearsighted - the things in the distance are blurry; without the proper lens you are bound to fall and pass over opportunities repeatedly. Quitting too soon is the #1 culprit as to why people don’t achieve their goals! Goal setting--and more importantly, goal achieving--requires long-term thinking and planning - at least for the goals that are worth putting effort into. Unfortunately it seems as if long-term anything is considered to be a like a plague that causes entire towns to be abandoned. We have become a culture that has difficulty looking beyond immediate gratification and “the now.” Technology has helped create a culture that expects results immediately. Nearly every aspect of our everyday lives is provided to us significantly faster than it was in the previous decade. We can obtain steaming-hot food within minutes with microwaves, convection ovens, and drive-through windows. We communicate at highspeed through text messages, Google Chat, and video calls (i.e. FaceTime or Skype). We travel faster and longer with energy-efficient and environmentally friendly vehicles, bullet trains, and expanding public transportation. We can even watch what we want, when we want to, where we want to, and on any device that suits us with digital video recorders (DVRs) and streaming services like Netflix. The Ultimate Goal Achievement Guide 13 Everything is literally at our fingertips. It is no wonder we have difficulty setting goals and achieving them. We are distracted and growing increasingly impatient. In an effort to not sound like a grandfather advocating the “good ‘ole days,” technology is wonderful but like anything else, you must understand the advantages as well as the disadvantages. You may have heard the saying “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” As cliché as this statement may be, understanding the historical significance of the Roman Empire will give you an appreciation for long-term thinking and planning. The Roman Empire enjoyed unprecedented stability and prosperity for nearly five centuries. Its expansion in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Mediterranean created lasting influence by the way of religion, philosophy, architecture, forms of government and law that we are still experiencing today. But prior to peace and prosperity the Romans encountered 500 years of civil wars and instability. To become a significant force in history, it took longterm planning, influence, and execution, execution and more execution. Absolutely nothing of significance was ever achieved with only today in mind. Imagine walking through a forest. A hiking trip through a forest can be a very rewarding experience. Not only do you get to enjoy nature’s beauty, but it gives you the opportunity to clear your head and gain perspective. While you are in a forest, it is difficult to see your destination beyond the trees. You might be able to see a short distance but the trees block your view of the longer distance. However, if you were to view that same forest from a different vantage point--–from on top of a cliff or mountain--you would be able to clearly see where you are and where you are going. 14 The Ultimate Goal Achievement Guide The benefit of long-term thinking and planning is that it allows for you to see things in a different light than if you simply planned for the now. You gain a larger perspective, have better insight, and are able to plan for things otherwise missed with short-term vision. The thing about “the now” is that it is already here and it will take care of itself. As much as short-term planning has it place, short-term thinking is detrimental to the achievement of anything worthwhile. And let’s be honest, time is a precious commodity. It is impossible to regain it when it is lost, or put on hold. This is why without the proper lens of long-term planning you are bound to pass over opportunities, time and time again. The Ultimate Goal Achievement Guide 15 Anchoring Goals It is not sufficient to simply create goals. We must create grand goals. We must create goals that are anchored so that they don’t drift away. What is a goal if not an aspiration of something not yet achieved? Everyone has goals but few achieve them. Why? Is there some secret formula that only achievers know about? Do they have some level of information that the rest of the world doesn’t? Well, in part they do, but rather than being secret information, it is information often overlooked due to its perceived simplicity. Goal setting surely isn’t rocket science, yet so many treat it as if it is. This is because goal setting causes people to do things that they are either unfamiliar or uncomfortable with. It causes us to do difficult things like commit, be accountable, think long-term, and face rejection and other aspects of failure. Who wants to do that? Yet, to accomplish anything worthwhile, we must establish clearly defined goals. In short, goals setting requires – even demands – establishing specific future accomplishments. This is where many people fall short. They miss the most 16 The Ultimate Goal Achievement Guide important part – clearly defined and specific goals. How do you accomplish something if you don’t know what you are going to accomplish first? It is like going on a road trip but not knowing where you are going or which route you are going to take. At the beginning of every year, people make New Year’s resolutions in the hope of improving themselves. You hear things like – “I want to lose weight,” “I will drink less,” “I will spend more time with family,” “I will…” 99 percent of the time, none of their resolutions are accomplished. More often than not, the resolutions don’t even last through the first two months of the year. Why? Their resolutions or goals are not anchored to anything or anyone. Anchoring Your Goals Often, people do not establish specific goals because they are fearful of not accomplishing it. They think that if a specific goal isn’t established then they wouldn’t have to worry about fear, rejection, or failure when the goal isn’t achieved. But which one is worse – never achieving the goal or only achieving 80% of the goal? Achieving some level of a specifically defined goal is far better than achieving nothing at all. Your goals must be anchored to specific accomplishments. This is where people fall short when creating their New Year’s resolutions. Without specifics, the goal becomes fluid and difficult to accomplish. Have you ever seen a boat on water with a mild current? After a while, the current moves the boat from its original destination. But when it is anchored, the boat remains steadfast. This current is a great representation of life. Sometimes it is a mild current and other times it is turbulent. Either way, you can guarantee that life will do its best to distract you from accomplishing your goals. The only way to counteract this is to have an anchor. The Ultimate Goal Achievement Guide 17 Having specific goals is not the only anchor. The second anchor involves an act that takes many people outside of their comfort zone. It is the act of accountability. You have told someone about your goals that will then hold you accountable to achieve them. In addition to accountability, you now have something to strive for. One of the most annoying feelings is when friends ask you, “How is X going?” or “Have you accomplished X yet?” When you are honest, it’s painful to provide a negative response. Your friends give you puzzled looks as if you’ve committed some heinous crime. This will cause you to push even more to accomplish your goals so that you do not disappoint your friends. It is the ‘ole peer pressure trick. When you anchor your goal to someone who will hold you accountable, it causes the extra push that everyone needs to do something outside of his or her comfort zone. Establish Grand Goals There should be a right mix of goals that you establish. If you have set your goal too small, too soon, or too unrealistic you will abandon them. If your goals are easily accomplished then, in my book, they aren’t real goals. They were simply tasks that you wanted or needed to get done. Goals, on the other hand, are grand. They require effort, faith, and number of personal acceleration principles. The only truly, completely successful person is the one who attempts nothing. If you aim low enough with small goals you will always achieve, you have adopted an existence that few will find exciting--including yourself. 18 The Ultimate Goal Achievement Guide Only a grand goal is sufficient to create the excitement necessary to achieve anything worthwhile. Consider any sport or game of wit. How much better do you become if you always play a weaker opponent? The truth of the matter is you wouldn’t improve and the game would lack the challenge for you to continue playing. Even worse, if you continue to play the opponent that you know you can beat, your skills will diminish. When you establish grand goals they will bring out the best in you. When you are at your best and you do your best every minute, every hour, and every day, you'll find those goals exciting to achieve. As long as you strive for those larger-than-your-current-life goals, something of significance will occur. You may not reach your goals on the first try, but it is better to strive for something big and come up short than to not strive at all. Small plans have no capacity to stir you to action. At the end of the day, whether your accomplishments have worth to you or to those you love will depend on what you attempted every bit as much as what you accomplished. The Ultimate Goal Achievement Guide 19 5 Define a Course of Action For each goal, plan out how you can best achieve it including timelines to hold yourself accountable. Benjamin Franklin once said, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” There is much truth to that axiom. If you ask others what their plans are for next week or month, you may be surprised at the answers. Their response often reveals that they don't know their plans or how they are going to accomplish something. In short, they have thought very little about tomorrow, much less next week. Try this experiment: Ask everybody you know, or even random people on the street, what their goals are – personal, financial, or any type of goal. I am more than confident that most will not have an answer. Now, what if you ask, “What are you doing to guarantee failure?” What would their answer be? 20 The Ultimate Goal Achievement Guide Nobody in their right mind is working towards failure—at least not intentionally. Everybody you talk to will be absolutely convinced that he or she is in hot pursuit of success. And yet, as you ask these questions you will observe that achievement is rarely planned. It is definitely a distressing thought: We work, day after day, in pursuit of failure. Why wouldn’t people have answers to these seemingly simple questions? Is this because there is a lack of opportunity? I would argue not. We live in an age of unprecedented opportunity. The question is whether you will recognize the available opportunities and go above and beyond to generate more of them. Each opportunity requires a journey. The journey requires a specific vision of an end-state that represents success. Successfully meeting each of your objectives along the journey requires that you have some specific knowledge of what the end will be, against which you will be able to measure success. So what am I saying here? In order to reach your grand goals there are specific steps that you and I must take. Sometimes these steps require additional information that we must turn into knowledge. Without it, we wouldn’t be able to get to our end state of accomplishing our goal. As you might imagine, this requires more work than most people will admit to taking on. This is exactly why so many New Year’s resolutions do not last past February – there is no clearly defined goal and therefore no plan on how to achieve it. But the question you have to ask yourself is, “Do I plan to fail?” Define a Course of Action No one wants to plan to fail; yet without clearly defined specific goals, you and I are bound to. We drift away from what we want to achieve and chase the next shiny object. The Ultimate Goal Achievement Guide 21 The clearly defined specific goal that you create is a picture of what the endstate looks like. In order to get to that end state, specific steps have to be taken. Without them, achieving the goal is impossible. It is like building a puzzle. Some goals are simple enough that they only have a handful of puzzle pieces. Others are so grand that they are like a complicated jigsaw puzzle with hundreds of pieces. Either way, understanding how the picture will look in the end will help you accomplish your goals, one step--or puzzle piece--at a time. So how do you take a future accomplishment and boil it down to actionable steps that you can do on a consistent basis? Consider the following goal: “I want to lose 60lbs in six months.” Sounds simple, right? But do you know how many people actually accomplish this goal? Of those who have committed to the goal of weight loss, 95% fail to accomplish it in the long-term. Why? Because they lack clearly defined goals (among other reasons). At the surface level, you will have to lose 10lbs a month to achieve your goal. But how you go about losing that weight is important. If you do more weight lifting, you will build muscle mass that will work against your weight loss goal. However, if you perform more cardio training, you position yourself to lose more weight. But exercising is only half of the battle. Dieting is equally--if not more-important in contributing to weight loss. What you eat, how often you eat, and how much you eat are all-important factors in losing weight. Simply leaving it to chance will not help in weight loss. Determining a course of action is important to accomplishing the goal. If nothing else, having a plan reduces anxiety because you have reduced the concern of the unknown. 22 The Ultimate Goal Achievement Guide 6 Characteristics of an Achiever Is what I am doing helping me to achieve my goals? Everything that exists has characteristics that make it what it is. Likewise, a goal achiever, such as you, has certain characteristics that are common among all goal achievers. Although there are no shortages of common goal-achiever characteristics, I want to cover only a few that, above all else, describe who an achiever is at their core. Passion: Have you ever heard a success story in which someone made it by doing something they could not care less about? That would be insane. Success is linked to having a strong interest and desire in something. You don’t become one of the world’s most loved entertainers if you don’t have a passion for the thing that you do and enjoy. The Ultimate Goal Achievement Guide 23 You don’t become a successful real estate tycoon if you don’t have a passion for business, investing, and property. And you don’t become the world’s most renowned athlete if you didn’t have a passion for the game. Passion plays a significant role in moving through obstacles to achievement. Without it, we crumble under the pressure of countless stumbling blocks and quit. But because we have a strong interest and desire for the very thing that we are passionate about, we are able to weather the storms. Persistence: My wife once told me that one of the reasons she decided to date me was because I was persistent. She saw something in me that she valued and saw as translatable to other areas of life. Persistence is a common characteristic of achievers, regardless of what you are seeking to accomplish. The result of my persistence, in this case, was that I was able to marry the love of my life. Goal accomplished! But it didn’t come without obstacles. The very meaning of persistence is that you continue, even when faced with roadblocks. I am reminded of a show called WipeOUT. The premise of the show is that average people go through multiple obstacle courses to win a cash prize. As you might imagine, the courses aren’t easy and each contestant continually gets wiped out. Yet, they continue to get up and run through the course until they are able to make it to the finish line. Why would someone but themselves through such a thing? It is because of the light at the end of the tunnel. Keeping your goals, and the subsequent results of accomplishing your goals, in front of you is a great motivator to help you preserver through the challenges. 24 The Ultimate Goal Achievement Guide Persuasion: People view persuasion as the act of convincing others of something. Although this is true, it also means to have a deep conviction or belief yourself. In other words, it takes faith to be a goal achiever. Why faith? Your goal is something that you have never seen or experienced before. It may not even exist in the lives of anyone you know. Yet, you know that your goals are achievable even if there isn’t proof. You are fully persuaded! This characteristic is the most prominent of all goal-achiever characteristics. For many, it is the driving force that wakes them up and keeps them going. If you look at any of the world’s achievers, both past and present, you will see that they were convinced of their beliefs of what the future holds. The Wright Brothers, American inventors and aviation pioneers, were convinced of man’s ability to fly. Charles Goodyear, the American inventor of vulcanized rubber, was convinced that rubber could be put to better use if it was more stable. In both of these examples, these men underwent years of trials and tests of their faith before they were able to see the fruits of their labor. Whether it takes you five weeks, five months or five years, deep conviction of your goals is a characteristic that you cannot do without. The Ultimate Goal Achievement Guide 25 7 Paralyzing Emotions You will become frustrated, and even angry, during the process of achieving your goals. Use these emotions as a fuel to push you further in your achievement. The alternative? Being paralyzed in that emotion. Fact of life: Things never seem to go the way you want them to. Murphy’s Law states that if it can go wrong, it will go wrong. Although I am not one to subscribe to such a negative outlook on life, it would be wise to plan for the possibility of Murphy messing things up. Undoubtedly, Murphy’s Law will cause you to get frustrated, upset, or even angry. It is OK. Anger is a healthy emotion as long as you appropriately relate to it. Anger, like many emotions, has the tendency to build up within you. If it isn’t released, it has the ability to become overwhelming and lead to a negative reaction. This is why we all need safe and productive outlets for our emotions. Some of us exercise, others draw or write and others clear their heads through meditation. Whatever way you choose to do so, know that it is an important part of your mental wellbeing. 26 The Ultimate Goal Achievement Guide In the pursuit of your goals you will find that frustration and anger will come up time and time again. It is a simple fact of life. This is why it is important for you and I to have a firm grasp on our emotions. Without a good handle on them, our emotions will cause us to experience highs and lows. The highs are great but the lows are rarely welcome. One of the most well known negative emotions is the paralyzing emotion of fear. Others that have the ability to stop progress in its tracks are anger, shame, disappointment, and regret. These and others have the ability to not only stop you from pursuing your goals, but even turn you around and move away from achievement. Here is where I stomp my feet again about how the external must yield itself to the internal. When you are paralyzed by your emotions it has the potential to cause physical reactions such as a heightened heart rate, tense muscles, and trouble focusing. These are common reactions to your emotions. However, through the ability of controlling your emotions you are able to lessen the impact of these paralyzing physical functions. Or better yet, control your emotions by using them as fuel to accomplish your goals. When was the last time that you saw a Steven Seagal movie? Seagal movies always include awesome fight scenes. What you may not know is that the martial arts style that Seagal uses is called Aikido. In Aikido, the attacker’s energy is used against them by blending the motion of the attacker and redirecting the force of the attack rather than opposing it head-on. This requires little physical strength and energy since the attacker is doing most of the work. Now imagine using this same concept on paralyzing emotions like the ones we described above. It is natural to either fight or flee from a physically aggressive or dangerous situation. When we choose to fight, we do so with brute force, exerting energy and effort. The Ultimate Goal Achievement Guide 27 Likewise, when we take paralyzing emotions head on, we exert energy and effort against an opponent. Now if we use the fear, anger, or frustration as a fuel in accomplishing our goals we have redirected what was once negative energy into positive and productive energy. Easier said than done, right? Handling Emotions Why are you angry, upset or frustrated? Why are you fearful? Beginning to answer these questions will give you the ability to utilize the negative energy of the paralyzing emotions into positive energy. You cannot force your emotions to be fuel to accomplishing your goals until you come to grips with why they exist. Sometimes the answer is a difficult pill to swallow, but it provides you with the liberty needed to move these emotions out of the “paralyzing” category to the “goal–accomplishment” category. For instance, you may be disappointed with yourself for not having a certain skill that you could have obtained freely, or for not listening to wise advice and experiencing a setback. You may be angry at what someone said or. Knowing the source of your emotion will help you deal with it. In the case of being angry with someone, forgiving them is the ultimate liberation and the best fuel to accomplishing your goals. In the case of being angry with yourself for not having a certain skill, the only way to solve this problem is to forgive yourself and then obtain that skillset either through study or leveraging someone who already has it. I know this may sound strange compared to many of the goal setting and achievement material you may have be familiar with, but this is for good reason. Those materials avoid the most critical element in goal achievement-you. Much of your success balances on your ability to rightly relate to your emotions. 28 The Ultimate Goal Achievement Guide [BONUS-1] Impact-Driven When your goals include things outside of yourself, you are more inclined to achieve them; especially if they include things you are already passionate about. Create an impact beyond yourself. Robert Browning wrote, “A man’s reach exceeds his grasp.” It is every human’s desire for their reach, their influence and their ability to assist to extend beyond what they can do themselves. This is why so many of us seek to succeed in a worthwhile area. Some of it is a sense of pride, while it can also be categorized as a sense of duty to humanity. However you categorize it, being impact-driven can be an excellent motivator to goal accomplishment. I’m sure that you have heard the saying, “You are your own worst enemy.” What this axiom is attempting to say is that you and I are our own stumbling block. We can come up with some of the wildest reasons why we shouldn’t do something. We can sabotage our own progress because of paralyzing emotions like the ones we spoke about earlier. We can develop and perpetuate a self-defeating belief, simply because we do not possess a positive self-image. The Ultimate Goal Achievement Guide 29 But when you take yourself out of the equation, complex thoughts becomes simple. When you consider the benefits that achieving your goals can do for you, your family, your community or an association or organization that you are involved in, you tend to view goal-achievement from a different lens. You are achieving goals for others rather than just yourself. Selflessness is something that I like to believe is a natural trait of humanity. If my belief is true, then it only makes sense to create and pursue goals that benefit others as much as ourselves. In recent years, there has been a huge rise in social entrepreneurship. It is the ultimate win-win scenario. Being able to develop innovative solutions to social problems and measure success, in part by the return on society, provides the goal-achiever both a feeling of self-accomplishment and a sense of duty to humanity. Even if you don’t pursue goals that are completely social in nature, having a few that fall outside of the realm of being self-involved is a great motivator. When your goals include things outside of yourself, you are more inclined to achieve them. 30 The Ultimate Goal Achievement Guide [BONUS-2] Risk vs Reward The achievement of anything crosses the threshold of the unknown, yet in that space of is the opportunity for reward. Push pass uncertainty to achieve! Imagine that you are in a pitch black room. There is absolutely no light. There are no windows. It is so dark, you cannot see your hand directly in front of your face. What do you do? How do you react? You have two options: Move around in an effort to find a way out or don’t move in hopes that someone will find you. Scary thought, isn’t it? Yet, this is exactly the situation we find ourselves in when we establish our goals. The purpose of the goal is to accomplish something that you have never done before. The goal is the dark room. The goal is a risk that we are taking. At first, the risk seems to be overwhelming. So overwhelming that it may not seem worth pursuing. But here is the thing: The achievement of anything crosses the threshold of the unknown, and in that space of the unknown, there is opportunity for reward. Going back to the dark room example, the reward is being able to find a way out of that room by risking obstacles that you cannot see. The Ultimate Goal Achievement Guide 31 When you see these words--risk and reward--they do not automatically lend themselves to be thought of as opposing forces. Yet, when you consider their counterbalance relationship, you will see that one cannot exist without the other. One is the yin and the other the yang. Often when you take a greater calculated risk, the outcome, if successful, is a greater reward. Likewise if you take a small risk, the reward is equally as small. The problem that most of us face is that we are excited about the reward but unwilling to take the risks even when we understand the counterbalanced relationship. We are afraid of moving around in the dark room. When we aspire to achieve our goals, we are breaking into to new and uncharted territory. This uncertainty stops most of us in our tracks if we don’t have the appropriate motivation to achieve our goals. But how much risk is uncertainty and how much of that uncertainty can be reduced? Calculated Risks In everything that we do, there is a risk. Often we don’t think of them because we have become accustom to evaluating the outcomes of everyday decisions without a second thought. When we calculate a risk we often do three things: (1) Assess the risk, (2) evaluate its worth, and (3) determine a course of action. When it comes to the bigger decisions in our lives we focus on the risks first, just like our everyday decisions, but we look at it from a different point-ofview. In our minds, we highlight the negatives to such an extent that the positives--the rewards-- are out numbered. Then, when we begin to calculate risk, we evaluate its worth much lower than if we looked at the risk from an objective standpoint. And of course, most often we determine that the best course of action is to do nothing at all. Thus, our goals never get off the ground. 32 The Ultimate Goal Achievement Guide But what happens if we slow down the risk evaluation process and truly look at the risk of not working toward the achievement of our goals? What would we see? At the least, we are able to better evaluate the value of taking the risk. Looking through this lens, we can visualize both processes of either taking or not taking the risk. We can see that the accomplishment of our goals have the ability to create a life we desire. We can see a future where we push pass uncertainty in an effort to achieve our goals. I know of no one who can tell you exactly how the future is going to turn out. Even with all of the wonders of this world, there is no one that can tell you exactly what the future holds because your future is completely determined by you--the decisions you do or do not make. This is as wonderful as it is terrifying. Without the proper relationship with your environment (remember that your environment is anything that has influence over you--mentally, physically, emotionally, etc.) you run the risk of living a life full of potential. Evaluate the risk and reap the rewards that come along with the accomplishment of your goals. The Ultimate Goal Achievement Guide 33 Conclusion Here are the next steps… Print The Ultimate Goal Achievement Guide Blueprint and post it next to your workstation. Use it as a point of reference to developing your goals and achieving them every day. With this resource and the other resources at MindVenue.com, you are well on your way to achieving your life’s dreams. 34 The Ultimate Goal Achievement Guide The Ultimate Goal Achievement Guide 35 36