Establishing your goals is the first step to putting your mission first and developing unstoppable confidence. Nobody looks or feels confident when they don’t know where they are going.
This is why you need a destination, a goal, a mission.
If you don’t know what that is, it’s ok. You can start where you are and crystallize it over time in your notebook.
Brian Tracy, Earl Nightingale and Jim Rohn all said to begin each day by sitting down with a paper notebook to write out your main goals in the present tense. So write these as if they were already true.
It is important that you take five minutes each day to write and rewrite your major goals, without referring back to what you wrote yesterday.
When you rewrite without looking back, your goals become clearer and stronger over time because you zone in on what you are really feeling but couldn’t initially put down on paper. When you don’t blindly copy yesterdays goals, you mold concrete goals out of the aggregates in your mind.
Eventually, like a heat seeking missile, your subconscious mind will lock on to what it is you’re really trying to accomplish. And like a missile honing in, you will start to make automatic adjustments to take actions that bring you towards your ultimate goals. That is, as long as you trust yourself, which is the largest part of unstoppable confidence.
One mistake I made when I started doing this was only writing my notes in the notepad of my iPhone.
The act of writing goals by hand is very important. I often think of the saying “Written in stone,” because of the time and deliberate thought that would go into such an activity.
Writing your goals by hand draws on a combined and coordinated set of cognitive and motor processes and each time you write out your goals, you drive them deeper into your subconscious mind.
Here’s what you do now…
1. Sit down and decide exactly how you want to live your life and what needs to be in it. Do this as if it were impossible for you to fail if you stayed focused on getting it. Pick the things that immediately come to mind. Your goals will probably change and refine over time anyway.
2. Make the list a maximum of 10 goals and make them achievable in the next year or sooner.
3. Write these goals as if you’ve already achieved them now. For example, I’d write something like this, “I am doing one arm chinups and earn “This much money” by using the systems and plan I have created.”
4. Once you have the big goals, divide that into little goals with if needed. For example my one arm chinup goal requires that I do a 60% bodyweight two arm chinup and a 30 second one arm hang first, before I can even come close to the one arm chinup.
5. Now look at all your goals and ask yourself which one would change your life the most if it was a reality when you woke up tomorrow. Make that your main mission. Bonus points if certain systems have positive outcomes on more than one goal from the same actions.
6. Further to the above point, list all the steps and things you have to do, in order to reach your main goal. If there is no viable model to follow, then do the best you can with the information you have now. This allows you to start figuring out what does and doesn’t work and start getting inputs and feedback. Writing these things down becomes your master plan. It can be edited and tweaked as more information comes to light. Take action, any action on this goal right away.
7. Anything worth achieving, is worth working on every day. And you must work on your main goal every day until you achieve it. Persist on the path towards your goal until you succeed. There will be obstacles and some of them may seem insurmountable. Sometimes just the length of time or boring, basic work will be the demotivator. No matter what, persevere. No matter how hard , long or boring it it becomes. It’s often the sneaky, small, low-key obstacles that create quitters.
8. The process of setting and achieving one big goal until achieved, builds unstoppable confidence. You feel capable of directing your future and less dependant on the approval of others. Freedom. Once you start making progress, and realize you can chip away at mountains, you will not only feel unstoppable, you will be.
Persistence hunt your dreams,
Raymond Burton
P.S. Once you know where you are heading, anxiety starts dropping, and it feels so good. This is because you are turning anxiety into excitement.
P.S.S. You’ll notice that setting a deadline is not part of this goal setting process. If you have a plan and work on that plan daily, as much as is important to you, the goal will be achieved as soon as it possibly can.
You can’t factor in good or bad luck, random chance and what not. These factors all put a deadline out of your control. You only control the effort, plan, commitment and consistency.
Having said that, studies show that setting deadlines through internal or external measures help to defeat procrastination.
We’ll talk more on systems thinking soon.
References:
About goals building confidence:
Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (2006). New Directions in Goal-Setting Theory. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 15(5), 265–268. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8721.2006.00449.x