Tag Archives: goals

It’s a New Year!

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Well not exactly…but it can be for you – especially if you haven’t been getting the results you want in your business or life.

Most of us know how to set goals.

WE KNOW WHAT WE WANT!

WE KNOW HOW TO GET IT!

Jeez…if I want to lose weight all I have to do is eat less and exercise more. If I want to see my bank balance increase all I have to do is spend less and save more. If I want to increase business I KNOW that sales is a numbers game – so all I have to do is increase the number of potential customers that I’m talking to and voila – ACME INSTANT SALES SUCCESS!

Except – you and I both know that we continue to struggle in all these and other similar areas in our lives.

So what’s missing?

Consistency.

Doing just a few things that you can influence, and in doing those things predict fairly easily whether you will reach your goal in the time that you have set for its achievement.

Jim Collins in his book Great by Choice asks :

Are you an Amundsen or a Scott?

In October 1911, two teams of adventurers made their final preparations in their quest to be the first people in modern history to reach the South Pole. For one team, it would be a race to victory and a safe return home. For the second team, it would be a devastating defeat, reaching the Pole only to find the wind-whipped flags of their rivals planted 34 days earlier, followed by a race for their lives — a race that they lost in the end, as the advancing winter swallowed them up. All five members of the second Pole team perished, staggering from exhaustion, suffering the dead-black pain of frostbite, and then freezing to death as some wrote their final journal entries and notes to loved ones back home.

It’s a near-perfect matched pair. Here we have two expedition leaders — Roald Amundsen, the winner, and Robert Falcon Scott, the loser — of similar ages (39 and 43) and with comparable experience. Amundsen and Scott started their respective journeys for the Pole within days of each other, both facing a roundtrip of more than 1,400 miles into an uncertain and unforgiving environment, where temperatures could easily reach 20˚ below zero even during the summer, made worse by gale-force winds. And keep in mind, this was 1911. They had no means of modern communication to call back to base camp — no radio, no cellphones, no satellite links — and a rescue would have been highly improbable at the South Pole if they screwed up. One leader led his team to victory and safety. The other led his team to defeat and death.

What separated these two men? Why did one achieve spectacular success in such an extreme set of conditions, while the other failed even to survive?

The short answer is that one of them was consistent in the number of miles he chose to cover on a daily basis regardless of the conditions – 20 miles to be exact. The other would determine how many miles he would cover based on the weather. In bad weather – very little or none at all in good weather, traveling much longer distances to the point of exhaustion sometimes not being able to take full advantage of good weather on the following day, being too tired to move! You can read more about that journey here and here.

What I want you to think about is this -

  1. are you working on way too many goals to be effective?
  2. are you acting in spurts or are you doing a little bit everyday?
  3. the little bit that you’re doing every day: is it taking you toward your goal or further away from it?
  4. are you staying with those daily actions long enough or are you bobbing and weaving, trying different things, losing steam and losing confidence in your ability to achieve your goals?
  5. are you noting all your efforts so that you can SEE your progress?
  6. are you modifying your plans if they’re not bringing you the results you want?

Make today your New Year!

Spend some time today thinking and answering these two questions:

  1. How can I structure my day so it’s optimally designed to get my most important tasks done early – those tasks that will predictably help me achieve my goal?
  2. How can I be more consistent in my daily performance?

Remember, consistency is key but you must first identify those things that you can do daily, that you can easily measure, and that you can have influence on, to determine whether you reach your goals or not!

 

Don’t Reset the Goal…Revise the Plan

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Planning has been on my mind a lot these days. In the main because I’ve set out to experience my best year yet and am realizing that to do so, my actions every single day must move me closer to aligning with my definite purpose or else I’m simply  walking from one day to the next with a goal in place doing nothing to close the gap between where I am and where I’d like to be.

But what happens when our plans DON’T work?

Many times we just excuse our way out of it with soothing words like “perhaps this wasn’t for me, wasn’t the right time, or wasn’t in the cards for me at all…” Makes you feel better doesn’t it? After all it’s not really your fault. Sure you’d like to achieve whatever it is but it’s not possible right now.

We will ALL experience temporary defeat. This is what others call failure but we know better.

Napoleon Hill says “when defeat comes, accept it as a signal that your plans are not sound, rebuild those plans and set sail once more toward your coveted goal”

Anthony Robbins’s OPA formula guides us in pretty much the same way:

O (outcome) = P (Plan) + A (Taking Massive Action)

So if you aren’t getting the outcome you desire, keep revising the plan (trying different things) until you discover your own formula for achievement.

We don’t revise our plans enough. It’s one and done for us.

Think about how many goals you set and those you didn’t achieve. Chances are it wasn’t so much your goal, but your plan for getting there. Don’t be discouraged. Revise the plan. If you’re not getting the outcome you desire you don’t yet have a sound plan. Keep going…you’ll get there eventually!

Become Curious and Turn a Bad Day into Good Data

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It’s important to recognize the adjustment process as we attempt to make changes in our lives. No matter how brilliant our intentions and plans are sometimes they just don’t work.

Or sometimes they DO work …for a time. Then we hit a snag, a wall, encounter temptation and BAM! We’re smack in the middle of a bad day!!!!

Is that an opportunity to give up? To chalk everything up to no willpower?

Definitely not.

In the book Change Anything consider the following:

“In the face of what feels like abject failure, you’ll become either depressed or curious.

You’ll become depressed if you blame yourself, become discouraged, and fall into a total binge – only making matters worse and lowering your self esteem.

If you become curious, you’ll step back and examine the data, LEARN from what happened, and then ADJUST the plan.”

So there’s your choice. You can bump into a new barrier and become depressed and quit, or you can experience the very same setback, become curious and TURN A BAD DAY INTO GOOD DATA.

 

Do Women Know What They Want?

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I was having breakfast recently with an old co-worker turned mastermind colleague and friend. We were exchanging what men like to call ‘war’ stories of what was going on in our businesses and lives and what we were presently ‘battling’ with. We looked at where we were, working together at the same company, and where we are now—building businesses as self-employed professionals and some of the issues that kept us stuck for a very long time.

Society definitely had a part to play in the stories we told about ourselves or felt that we had to. The society driven benchmarks were numerous: house you lived in, car you drove, the kind of businesses you did work for and what you wore.

As we sipped cappuccinos we both concluded that living a façade just never worked for us and as much as we tried to fit in, we almost always got rejected because we rejected ourselves first. We both were guilty of ‘playing the game’ but could not sustain that behaviour for a prolonged period of time before ‘outing’ our real selves.

The truth is that we all have insecurities. Many times we do things just to fit in and to be accepted. The reality is that while we think we’re smart at concealing our vulnerabilities by our big talk and ‘machesse’ exterior, it is the very thing that others who don’t have our best interest at heart, capitalise on. As long as we view our weaknesses as vulnerabilities, they will hold us back and work against us.

In her book The Art of War for Women Ching Ning Chu says, “We have trained our minds to think of success in a certain way—the male way; it’s about getting ahead, climbing the corporate ladder and becoming CEO.”

Contrary definitions of success feel awkward to us. We suppress our definitions because we feel they may be unacceptable and if we actually tell the truth about what we want our carefully cultivated life as it is will come crashing down around us. So we remain in the rut of going through the motions, unconsciously lying to ourselves and pursuing what we think we should instead of what is truly important to us.

Ching Ning Chu’s insight is like a bright light piercing reality. She says, “If many women were honest with themselves, they will admit that they don’t want to be CEOs. Some just want a certain level of comfort and a decent paycheck; they want to be able to take care of their family, spend time with their friends, read good books, travel, and wear sneakers and comfortable clothes…”

This is not to say that some women don’t want to be CEO but shouldn’t your decision come from your choice and not because you don’t want to be seen by others as not ambitious?

The sad truth is that instead of “fessing up” to their reality many women blame the “glass ceiling.” It’s much easier to say, “They just won’t promote a woman” than it is to be honest and say “I really don’t want the pressure and time commitment that comes with a top job.”

There is absolutely nothing wrong in the choices you make. Society could never determine what is right or wrong for you—only you deserve to embrace that power. The problem is not with the choices we make—that you want to put family first, work shorter hours, not have your career consume your every waking moment, or desire to give everything you got in your pursuit of the CEO position.

The point is that we must choose. After leaving my job in 1994 I knew that I could NEVER go back to work for someone else as an employee EVER again. What is your vision for yourself? What do you really see that no one but you knows about? What are your aspirations? In the work that you do now: what parts do you absolutely love, are drawn too, execute flawlessly? Which aspects do you dislike? Hate doing?

Whatever you decide on—don’t lie. Don’t justify. Just be proud of the choice you’ve made and begin right now, wherever you are to be that person. Sure men have discriminated against women, but be honest and recognise that the major force keeping us back is our own confusion about what we want.

It’s funny. Everyone seems to know what women want—but do we know? Now’s a good time to find out!

cartoon from http://www.cartoonstock.com – tzun3581.jpg

A Trinbagonian’s strength is his character

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“I could write a book about what is wrong with Trinidad and Tobago, but I could fill a library about what is good about it”.

My friend and colleague Nigel Wall had this up recently as his Facebook status – inspired by Charlie ‘Tremendous’ Jones accomplished speaker and writer (with over 5000 seminars under his belt and over 1.5 million copies of Life Is Tremendous in print).

Most Trinbagonians feel they have a firm handle on what’s wrong with Trinidad and Tobago and how it could be fixed. Many talk day in day out about how bad Trinidad and Tobago is becoming and all the woes we can look forward to in the future.

At a recent business seminar, I heard one of the local speakers, with reference to their ISO9000 qualification, talk about taking his business operations from a level of “trini” to a global level. I don’t think he meant anything “bad” by saying that but is this how we think of ourselves – that raising our standards means escaping everything “trini” and becoming something else?

At that same seminar, the keynote speaker spoke about our national anthem being the most beautiful he’d heard in all his travels and life. I started to really think about the words in our anthem and to see and hear it with beginner’s mind – as if for the first time.

Forged from the love of liberty, In the fires of hope and prayer, With boundless faith in our destiny…

Hope today is usually used as a synonym for a wish. Yet hope is far more tangible and powerful. In his book, The Richest Man Who Ever Lived, Steven Scott describes hope as a well-founded and confident belief a specific vision (goal, desire or promise) will be achieved or fulfilled within a specified amount of time.

How can you have a “well founded confident belief that a specific vision will be achieved” if you don’t have a specific vision? If visions and desires are vague instead of well-defined you cannot gain or sustain any genuine hope of achieving them.

Yet our anthem clearly states the vision for Trinidad and Tobago. Filled with faith and looking towards the future with hope — we will work together side by side and commit our efforts to continue to grow in this beautiful twin island nation of ours.

Still we continue to magnify what’s wrong and sometimes distort facts to fit in with our story of what’s wrong forgetting our very clear vision. So a maxi taxi explodes in flames on the Priority bus route and before any clarification the news is sensationalised on Facebook with “a maxi taxi has been bombed on the Priority Bus Route,” causing every boy and his brother to put in their two cents about gangs and violence and warfare.

Now please don’t tell me how naïve I am to what’s really going on in TT and ask me if I doh read the papers. I am well aware having been held up in Chaguanas and had my car stolen in broad daylight at Nelson Street, Port-of-Spain. Does this make me want to migrate to safer parts of the world? No. Because there is going to be bad wherever I go. Other human beings make sure of this regardless of the destination.

What I know for sure is whatever we focus on gets magnified. So if we continue to see all that’s bad in Trinidad and Tobago then that’s what we will experience. Reminds me of the story of these two persons leaving one town onwards to the next and who met a wise person at the intersection. They both ask “wise person – what kind of people will I meet in this town?” To which the guru asks “what kind of people did you leave in the last town?” Perception is everything!

So my fellow Trinbagonians I implore we be the change we dream of seeing. If every one of us would sweep our own doorstep, the whole (of Trinidad and Tobago) would be clean to paraphrase Mother Teresa yet she was right. Make time every day to reconnect to your highest ideals and boldest dreams. Leave every person you meet better than you found them. Life’s too short to withhold encouragement and kindness. Stop the putting down and picong excusing it as “de trini way!” Words can easily become swords. Stop it!

And finally – do what is right rather than what is or appears easy. Being a great Trinbagonian isn’t about being popular and how many people know you. It is about strength of character and if we don’t all hope for a better Trinidad and Tobago then Trinidad and Tobago will surely perish.

Image from http://www.tobagovacations.com

Profit is NOT a bad word!

Posted in Developing the Possibilities Mindset, Practicing Self Mastery by

Just finished reading George Cloutier’s ‘Profits Aren’t Everything, They’re the Only Thing’, and it got me thinking about how I usually address profit. I’d say mostly as an afterthought – but not any more!

Aren’t we in business to make a profit? I’m not sure where ‘profit’ got its bad rap but going into 2011 – I’m changing my mindset.

By keeping profit in the forefront of my  mind, is helping me decide what I should do first second and third. Think about this in the context of a typical day. Whenever I have a productivity discussion, most people complain about their inbox being the death of their existence. How those awful emails can ruin their day. Hey – by the time they get through checking and responding to emails, it’s noon.

After reading this book you’d probably ask yourself – how much of that activity really results in business and can you justify ALL the time you spend in your inbox and truthfully say that ALL that time is spent dealing with customers? I think if we were to be truthful we’d see that most of it is busy work. Skim emails for the most important ones – deal with that – and get out! Stop checking emails every hour. That’s like opening the refrigerator and standing in front of it every half hour. Nothing much has changed. Same stuff that was in it half hour ago IS STILL THERE.

I am not even talking about rigid time management techniques here.

I am saying simply consider everything you set out to do in the context of how profitable is the activity to your life and how doing that is going to help you towards your goals.

As much as I am a ritual run individual I often found that something was missing. And then I realized what that was. I had all the ideas in my head about what I wanted to do and where I wanted to go but one – I didn’t write them down and two – I would often forget that that’s where I said I was going in the first place.

You know what I’m talking about – writing down your goals.

Yes! You know all about goal setting but if you’re not keeping your top four goals in front of you:

  1. How are you planning your day?
  2. What activities are you gonna be involved in for that day?
  3. What things will actually lead you closer to these goals if they’re either vague in your head or on a card somewhere – wait – now where’s that card?

And the insane question at the end of it all would be:

Do you, given your present actions, still expect a profit in the end?

If you want to change some things in your life – you need to change some things in your life.

Nuff said. :)

Profit image fromm http://www.smallbusinesslegalblog.com

Taking ‘NEXT’ Steps 101

Posted in Developing the Possibilities Mindset, Practicing Self Mastery by

We’ve all been there. Great intentions – HUGE goal set – and then overwhelm descends like a cloud around us, binding our hands and feet, and sometimes our brain. Flash forward X number of years later and our goal is still to be attained.

Why is that?

Is it that we didn’t really want what we said we did?

Is it that it was unrealistic?

Well believe it or not, as simple as this is going to seem, even after writing the goal down (as all good goal setters do) we then THINK and THINK and THINK about it; remind ourselves for the first week after, that this is where we want to go and then we basically fall back in to comfort-zone-business-as-usual until of course we are reminded because a friend tells us of a recent milestone that they reached and then we remember “Oh yes…my goal…”

What we don’t do, right after writing down the goal is to write down the immediate NEXT step that we need to take to begin on that journey. It’s like walking really but until we jot down the next steps, chances are we’ll do nothing.

That’s it!

What’s the NEXT step that you need to take today to move closer to your goal (notice I’m not even questioning whether you have a goal or not. You do have a goal right?)

Get on with it then! (to borrow a phrase much my English pals! :) )

Next step picture from http://www.lifesd.com
Power point slide from http://www.edweb.sdu.edu

Too many *whatevers* spoil the broth

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My favorite – Japanese Vegetable Nabe…

‘Too many cooks spoil the broth’ has been used in actual kitchens but also in everyday activities meaning too many persons involved in managing an activity can ruin it.

So can:

setting too many goals result in none being attained

focusing on paying off all your debts at once but not making a dent in any

generating tons of ideas for improving your business but not implementing one

discovering a ton load of affirmations but never using any  effectively

For the next thirty days why not set one goal, work on paying off one debt, implement one business idea, use one affirmation every day for the thirty day duration.

I’d love to hear how this works for you.

If you’ve been following my blog – by now you must realize that I write about what I need to learn the most. :) I’m going to be reducing the number of cooks across the board.

Will let you know if the quality of food improves in the next thirty days!

Vegetable Nabe from http://www.picasaweb.google.com

 

Wine and Meat vs. Rum and Roti

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A Chinese aphorism states: “The wise individual’s friendship is as light as water. The small minded person’s relationship is as sticky and sweet as honey.”

A couple years ago I decided to end a friendship. I found the relationship to be very draining – the person to be sometimes reproachful. I remember another friend voicing the simple phrase to me during my deliberations “Friendship is not supposed to be hard work.”

Chin-Ning Chu author of Thick Face, Black Heart and Do Less, Achieve More says:

“A true friend is not one who is in your face constantly demanding your attention. They know your life is not about chitchatting with them; it is about bettering yourself and using your time wisely. In order to be a true friend to you, a person first has to be a true friend to himself. Friends are self assured and self-supportive; thus they can support you while not feeling threatened by your success.”

She goes on to say that the Chinese call the other non-supportive friends “wine and meat friends.” To bring this a little closer to home – I’ll offer “rum and roti” friends – a phrase used to describe politics in Trinidad and Tobago. These friends love to party with you but burn up with jealousy whenever they hear anything joyous regarding your career or personal triumphs. These friends will expose the very same secrets you shared with them confidently simply to undermine you and show your weaknesses publicly.

Take a look around you and assess those you call friends. You may find that those friends are not really friends at all. They would much rather see a stranger soar than to see you succeed. Once you are operating at their level, they are fine. Step out and step towards the things you wish to accomplish and you will meet with their scorn. Remember they don’t like who they are; they are not happy with themselves and so they are UNABLE to feel happy for you.

There is nothing that you can do to change how they feel or think about you. So do as I did and walk quietly and graciously away. No hard feelings, and no more depleting friendships.

Photo from http://www.affordablehousinginstitute.org

Henry’s Psalm

Posted in Developing the Possibilities Mindset by

Quite perfectly called “A Psalm For Life” – if ever you needed a lesson in living in the now, or some encouragement when you’re not seeing results as fast as you would like, this poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow should not be further than an arm’s length away so that you could read and get a quick injection of inspiration and encouragement.

The last verse in particular speaks volumes to me…

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate ;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.

We must always ask ourselves “what is one thing that I could do today that could take me a step closer to where I wish to go?”

Can I write a letter, send an email, make that call I’ve been putting off, read a couple pages of that new book my friend recommended?

That’s what I felt Henry meant when he said “Let us all be up and doing.” He didn’t say “let’s wait to see what God has in store for us”. ACTION is important.

We must also be prepared for whatever comes or at the very least recognize that it will not ALWAYS be smooth sailing….with a heart for any fate.

Sometimes when we are in the process, on the journey to – pursuing a goal we forget that every single step is an achievement. We forget to enjoy the journey towards the goal. We forget to celebrate the minute wins en route.

The most difficult part though is the last. Sometimes it takes us quite a while before we see our dreams manifest. This is why it’s so important to have support groups, master mind teams, great friends, and mentors who can help us up when all we feel to do is throw in the towel and go lie down in a nice dark room. We all need a dose of patience. We all need to “learn to labor and to wait.”

Thank you Henry!

Photo from http://www.collegnenews.org