Goal:
Posted by Amy Hale on November 7, 2011 at 7:30 am
Do you have a goal that seems to just stay out there in front of you? One that you just can’t seem to wrap your mind around it. Maybe even a small goal seem huge for whatever reason. Just like many of you, I let goals get the best of me until I really learned to annihilate them.
If you have one or more goals getting the best of you, what could you do to make it smaller than you? Alicia works in sales and most of her sales begin with speaking with a potential client by phone. She always had trouble with making these calls. She would put them off and put them off, finding other tasks to keep her busy. Her initial goal was to call four people per day to invite them to review what she had to offer.
Sure this could be deduced to fear of rejection, this or that, however, we decided to try an experiment to help her crush that goal. Instead of letting that goal control her, she became bigger than that goal and began imagining her success as having made the calls and feeling the freedom of being successful.
To her surprise, she began making her calls earlier and earlier in the day and she was calling approximately nine people per day. She told me that her goal was something that she didn’t want to do, however when she decided to beat it down and use her mind to accept no as a no instead of no meaning she wasn’t enough, she was able to make more calls than she anticipated. To her further surprise, she 2/3 of the people she spoke with were interested in speaking with her further.
This weeks experiment:
Do you have a goal that seems to always be there or you have trouble maintaining certain tasks (such as calling customers on the phone)? How is it controlling you? How can you make yourself larger than it?
Make the decision to annihilate that goal. Laugh at it, stomp on it. Imagine having accomplished it and how you feel with it behind you. Use that as your motivation to follow through with it.
Then notice how easy it really is to blast your goals because you’re bigger than they are and you’re in control.
Let me know how you do.
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Posted by Amy Hale on January 25, 2011 at 10:45 pm
If your favorite team is playing this season, do you want a tense, stressed-out person shooting a free throw, or kicking a long field goal in the last moments of the game? Or would you rather see a confident, calm, rested player step up to the challenge?
Most people stress themselves out believing it’s as a form of caring. But it’s not caring, it’s just stressing out. Stressing out makes one do worse. True caring makes one do better. That’s why it’s vital to know the difference. The two couldn’t be more different.
Caring is relaxing, focusing and calling on all of my resources, all of that relaxed magic, that “lazy dynamite” that I bring to bear when I pay full attention with peace of mind. No one performs better than when they are relaxed and focused.
“Stress is basically a disconnection from the earth,” says the great creativity teacher Natalie Goldberg. “It’s a forgetting of the breath. Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency. Nothing is that important. Just lie down.”
A successful person knows when to lie down. And when to stand up.
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Posted by Amy Hale on August 26, 2010 at 6:00 am
Here’s my favorite time management trick:
Put on a piece of paper all the things you’d like to do in tomorrow. These are things that you know that you would like to do. Then you choose, among all these things, the one thing that’s the most challenging and important.
Now look at your list. What is that one thing that you’re most likely to put off? What’s your most important thing to do, the thing that really needs to be done; not necessarily the most urgent thing, but the most important?
Most people respond to whatever feels most urgent. Not even thinking about it. Go with the feelings. All day they wonder, “What do I FEEL has to be addressed right now?” And a lot of time the urgent things that come up as an answer to that question are really small. They’re nitpicky things: they’re just hassles.
So this is why you want to create the category of Worst First: You want to pick that one thing that’s hardest to do, that you would love to have finished and have it behind you. You want to make this your first priority. Nothing gets done until that gets done. Do the worst first. And watch the surge in energy and self-esteem that happens!
Please share your thoughts and successes. I enjoying sharing with you.
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Posted by Amy Hale on April 5, 2010 at 6:00 am
Rarely do people walk down a simple, straight path to our goals. To help myself keep to the straight and easy, I’ve been using a version the G.R.I.N. model. This model helps overcome procrastination and keeps my feet moving along the detours to my vision.
G is for Goal - What do you want? Stop. What do you REALLY want? What would be even better than that? Imagine that you’ve already got it – what are you seeing, hearing, and feeling? Bring as many senses into it as you can.
R is for Reality – Where are you in relation to your goal? What resources do you have? Who can you ask for help? What have you accomplished or tried so far? What have the results been?
I.N. is for Identify Next Steps – What’s the very next action you can take NOW (not next week or next month). What can you do NOW to bridge the gap from where you are to where you want to be?
A nice thing about the G.R.I.N. method is that you can drive your success with any goal and at anytime. Your state of mind doesn’t matter, nor do your circumstances. Why is this?
a. You can always have a goal
b. There will always be a current reality
c. There is always a next step
This Week’s Experiment:
Pick 3 goals and run them through the G.R.I.N model then ask yourself:
- What do I want?
- Where am I in relation to that?
- What’s the very next action(s) I can take NOW in the direction of my goal?
Take those actions, notice what results you’re producing, and keep shaping your success.
Let us know how you do.
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Posted by Amy Hale on March 24, 2010 at 5:25 am
So many people speed past all kinds of opportunities that they can’t even see because a speeded-up person is always in the future, where nothing exists.
Trying to do too much too quickly leaves everything incomplete and you end up looking incompetent. And when it’s not complete, it kicks you where it counts. Speed is not the antidote to overwhelm, speed is how overwhelm gets created.
The great Thomas Merton said it this way, “To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. More than that, it is cooperation in violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his work for peace. It destroys his own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of his own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”
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Posted by Amy Hale on January 21, 2010 at 10:35 am
I was thinking this morning how beneficial setting goals and visions for our lives can be. It’s great, we know where we’re going, we can make better plans and the Universe knows where to meet us. But what about those people with procrastination challenges? People who procrastinate have a tendency to not make it to their goals and they sit around frustrated or doing something to escape the reality of self-imposed failure.
Earlier last year, I wrote about using a “have done” list, rather than using a “to do” list. There are many benefits to using this method to achieve short and long term goals. (You’ll need to subscribe to my ezine for the archived newsletter if you want to know the other great benefits of a “have don” list can bring.)
I’ve been thinking about subconscious goals vs. conscious goals lately. Subconscious goals usually override conscious goals. They are at the backbone of sabotaging the conscious agenda. If you have a subconscious goal or belief that doesn’t coincide with something that you consciously want to accomplish, you find it extremely hard or impossible to achieve what you want to achieve.
How many of us have ever made a list of goals or even just a “to do” list of the day. We get going and then stall out, never reaching the goal or it takes years longer to get to. If you’ve been a procrastinator and/or have had this experience over and over, you’ve trained your subconscious mind to react to goal setting as a goal failure. The subconscious habit/belief system sets in that when you write down the goal, you won’t achieve it.
So, for procrastination clients, I’m beginning to ask them what they want to accomplish but don’t write it down. Pick one or two goals, get a good picture or movie going in your head about how life will look when the goal is accomplished. It’s easy to remember what one or two goals are without writing them down. Then before going to bed, play the movie again and again until you fall asleep.
When you tell your subconscious mind what you want, during sleep it will figure out how to get it. Often you’ll wake up with what you can do first. But don’t write it down if you’re a procrastinator or if you often fail at achieving steps toward your goals.
Make the mental decision that you are going to take at step toward your goal that day. Then as you go about your day, write down what you’ve accomplished. You’ll also be including things that don’t appear to be related to the goal set in mind.
My clients have been finding this powerfully motivating. When they see everything that they accomplished, their confidence builds and their procrastination dissolves. Plus the subconscious begins to work with your conscious desires.
It’s been pretty cool. Coming from the standpoint of previously being a procrastinator, I get so much more done and it feels empowering.
I’d love to know if you experiment with this and the results or just leave a comment. Maybe you’ve used this or other methods. Please share. I look forward to commenting with you.
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Posted by Amy Hale on January 14, 2010 at 3:48 pm
Once in a while there’s a goal I set and for one reason or another I don’t reach it. I either change my mind or I don’t actively move toward it at all. When I don’t reach a goal, I take a few moments to review that goal once again. Usually I’ll find that the goal was just a middle of the road goal or mediocre goal that was similar to a lot of other goals out there.
A friend once told me that realistic goals are often mediocre goals and it’s actually easier to reach goals that at first seem unrealistic. He mentioned that’s how he made his first $500,000. You see, since most people set realistic goals, they find a lot of people making similar goals and it then appears to be a competitive goal. If many people are attempting to make ends meet and the average income is, let’s say, $60,000, why not shoot for more? There are far fewer millionaires than there are people making $60,000. It can be lonely at the top.
Another reason for setting unrealistic goals is that having a powerful goal and vision is far more motivating than having a mediocre goal. When you have a mediocre goal, the effort toward that goal is often also mediocre. This was my problem, I would set mediocre goals and give mediocre effort, but now I’m much more motivated by making the big ones.
Can you review your goals and make them bigger and easier to achieve?
Once in a while there’s a goal I set and for one reason or another I don’t reach it. I either change my mind or I don’t actively move toward it at all. When I don’t reach a goal, I take a few moments to review that goal once again. Usually I’ll find that the goal was just a middle of the road goal or mediocre goal that was similar to a lot of other goals out there.
A friend of mind once told me that realistic goals are often mediocre goals and it’s actually easier to reach goals that at first seem unrealistic. He mentioned that’s how he made his first $500,000. You see, since most people set realistic goals, they find a lot of people making similar goals and it then appears to be a competitive goal. If many people are attempting to make ends meet and the average income is, let’s say, $60,000, why not shoot for more? There are far fewer millionaires than there are people making $60,000. It can be lonely at the top.
Another reason for setting unrealistic goals is that having a powerful goal and vision is far more motivating than having a mediocre goal. When you have a mediocre goal, the effort toward that goal is often also mediocre. This was my problem, I would set mediocre goals and give mediocre effort, but now I’m much more motivated by making the big ones.
Can you review your goals and make them bigger and easier to achieve?
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Posted by Amy Hale on January 4, 2010 at 10:36 am
Fear comes in many forms. It’s hypnotic and no one entirely escapes its grasp. People rationalize their fears which helps them excuse themselves from moving forward with their goals and visions for themselves.
Hate is a form of fear. Where there is one, there is often the other. “I hate meetings” could mean for some, “I’m afraid of speaking up in front of my boss because he is mean.” It turns into, “I’ll speak up next time,” but that next time doesn’t seem to ever come.
Some people tend to look at some of their fear on the bright side. “At least I won’t look foolish” or “if I say that, then I open myself up for being put down.”
But then a week goes by and everything is still the same. The person hasn’t spoken up in order to be noticed enough to be a credible part of the team. So s/he stays in the same old cubicle.
Are things better off than a year ago?
If not, things aren’t going to improve by themselves. It’s time to stop putting on the brake and really take some initiative to move ahead? Do you want to spend the next 40 years of your life feeling the same way? How many years are you going to let yourself just hang there in the same place in the hellish dungeon of rationalization?
If you want your life to move, you’re going to have to move it. No one is going to save you. If they were going to, they already would have. So, what are you waiting for?
Un-optimistic fear tends to get people moving forward. I can’t believe how many people come to see me when they find out they might be cut from their job or their doctor just diagnosed them with diabetes. They didn’t move until they were afraid.
So here’s an idea, define the worst thing that could happen if you didn’t accomplished what you want to accomplish? What are you putting off because of fear and what is it really costing you – financially, emotionally, and physically – by postponing taking action?
What are you waiting for? If you say you don’t have time or the time is not right, I can almost guarantee that fear is standing in your way and your rationalizing it so that you stay in the same place.
This post is intended to be a wake-up call for you and the wonderful life that awaits you. By thinking about the worst thing that could possible happen by not taking action – like being miserable or bored in the same job, not being able to make ends meet and feeling like a worthless pile or even living with someone you just don’t even like anymore – you can motivate yourself to take action.
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