The Complete Goal Setting and Goal Achievement Master Class

Ask yourself, “Have I set enough goals at a high enough level, and achieved them to make them real? The honest answer to this will put your journey to achieve your vision in the reality seat. When you can answer yes, then achieving goals become a journey, and not a destination in itself.

In a program centered on a workplace achievement, why would our first topic start outside of work? Because your vision is most powerful when it is developed in light of, and in alignment with, your personal vision. The reason so many people fail to follow through when things become difficult is due to this lack of connection with their personal lives.

It is often said that we become a product of what we read, what we listen to, and who we spend time with. So start with an examination those. From those influences you can get a vision for what is possible in your life, and what you might need to change to open up greater possibilities. Think about what you want to achieve personally and the type of person you want to be.

Everything in this lesson up to this point has been about creating a personal vision – creating something upon which to aim your focus outside of work. So the next step in the process is to devise the tactics, methods, and processes you will use to apply that focus. Create tactics and you can actually drive improvement through your focus on a personal vision.

It’s grand to say you are creating improvement through focus, but really, how do you know? The only way to know something like that is to measure it. You have to confront the truth and keep score.

It’s your turn to uncover opportunities for personal focus and leverage that focus on creating beneficial change in your life.

What is the most important thing you can be doing in any given moment in your workday? What is your vision? Are you intentionally expending focused effort to bring the vision to life?

Effective use of your day can be the difference between mediocre and great performance. The choices that you make on how you spend your time ultimately determines your results.

The more you can create routine in your days and weeks, the more effective your execution of all tasks will be. The best way to do this is to create a picture of an ideal week.

If you can use focus to bring about beneficial changes in your personal life by achieving your personal vision, you can certainly do the same professionally. Applying focus at work is more than just taking control of your day and being intentional with your time. You can tangibly do something with all of that focus…bring that professional vision to life.

It’s your turn to demonstrate your focus through intentionally managing your time and sharing your accountability at work.

While only you can actually hold yourself accountable, it is possible to leverage the people around you to help you maintain a laser focus on your goals and progress. If you are working towards achieving big goals, you are a leader – you have to be. Leaders must lead by example. Use the pressure of being a leader (no matter how many you are leading) to keep you on-target with your vision, goals, and metrics.

As a leader, especially a Goal-Driven leader, your ability to keep commitments is essential in building and maintaining strong relationships and a productive workforce. Give yourself permission to say no to things that are of lower value than the things you are currently pursuing - prospects are more important than micromanaging tasks.

What is your team's response when you come back from a personal training like this one? Is it "Ugh…here it goes again…"? You are once again all pumped for a day, hype the team on all the great new things, and then two weeks later nothing has changed.

It’s your turn to go public with your results to leverage others to help you stay focused on achieving your professional goals.

Most people don’t want stuff to slip through the cracks. You’re about to learn an easy and fail-safe system of reminders to create and follow up with all the key tasks that you need to do in order to achieve the key goals, tactics and measurables that you set in place in the last two chapters. This will help you avoid any of them from slipping through the cracks.

As things come into to your email or paper in-baskets, there are certain things you need to take action on and other things that you don’t need to take action on. These are called “actionables” and “non-actionables”.

How does a person determine what’s actionable and what’s non-actionable? To answer this question, let’s look at some common examples of things that come into your inbox and analyze how you would determine whether each is actionable or not.

Once you’ve determined if the item is actionable or not, the next step is to actually do the actionable items in your inbox. Recall actionable items are all of the things you (or your staff) need to take action on immediately to increase revenue in your business in the next few weeks. If these particular tasks don’t happen, bad things will occur.

A task list is a place where you can put all of the tasks you need to do each day. It relieves a ton of stress because you don’t have to worry anymore about remembering to do all of these things. They are off your brain and on the list. The key is that for each of your tasks, you must list specific actions, along with a date for when it needs to be done.

Let’s start with a task that is decided to be delegated to an assistant (Michelle) because it would take more than two minutes, and it wasn’t a task that this person was uniquely qualified to do.

It’s your turn to follow up on what helps you achieve your goals now.

Step 1: For each item below, ask yourself if it’s something that will helps you achieve your goals in the next two months or not. If it will help you achieve your goals in the next two months, then it’s actionable. If it won’t, then its non-actionable.

Step 2: Then, for each of your actionable tasks, decide which of the five task labels apply: Do it now? Delegate it? Defer it? Schedule it? Wait?

Step 3: Finally, decide what category you would label each the tasks below: Calls, Computer, Errands, Office, Schedule, Team Meeting, Staff, Waiting For, Home.

You’ve learned an efficient system to follow up on what makes you money now. It’s time to use that same system to follow up on what makes you money later. To do that, we’re going to take a look at how to deal with the non-actionable items in your inbox.

Step One: For each of the non-actionable items below, ask yourself if it’s something that you think you want to trash, file, or tickle.

The last step in an efficient production system is to monitor, on a daily and weekly basis, everything you need to do. This includes your task list, your calendar, and the projects you need to do. Recall a task is an actionable item that only takes one step to complete, and a project is an actionable item that takes multiple steps to complete. We’re going to start with how to process your in-basket on a daily basis.

Every Friday, it’s important for you to review the key things that will help you follow up on all of the things you need to do for the coming week. For example, you can review your calendar to make sure your Monday and Tuesday don’t include a meeting you’re not ready for.

Put it all together

It’s your turn to manage your time more efficiently.

If you desire positive success in life, you must not just possess grit, you must master it. Period. The extent to which you do will define whether you go from good to great, great to success, or success to significance. The best of the best of would score highest on the grit scale, so if you care to join them, mastery is essential.

Before you can grow and master your grit, you need to see where you stand right now. Grit is a learned and acquired skill. You develop grit when you don’t want to do something and you attack the job, you are successful on it, and you are complimented on it.

Assessments are handy because there are discrete questions and answers and a score comes out at the end. But recognizing grit in yourself and others doesn’t always come with the time to take a test.

It’s your turn to take the grit scale assessment to identify how gritty you are.

We are 100% disciplined to our existing set of habits and rituals. Therefore, self-discipline is simply a Matter of creating the habits and rituals that will achieve our goals.

No Matter what you need to do, or how badly you want it, you have to start every day fresh. You have to start somewhere each morning, so where are you starting from? You can’t get up and get going if there is no down-time. While no one has been successful while asleep, you also can’t achieve much if you deprive yourself of sleep.

The differentiator on the path to significance is how fast someone can recover from negative thoughts. Negative thoughts are poison – you must purge yourself of them.

Too many people merely get out of bed. They don’t have anything deliberate, a pre-performance ritual, that gets them ready for their day. Your ‘ready up’ time is your entire morning routine, from wake-up to getting in the car, to your morning commute, up until the moment you step through the door of the office.

Once you are ready, and standing at the threshold of your office, it’s time to ‘show up.’ Showing up is so much more than just walking in. Showing up is arriving at work with zest, grit, and excitement. Showing up is the difference between being in the game and just being at the game.

You have to be real with yourself to know where you are at and where you need to grow. You have to walk like a champion before you are a champion. You have to rise up – act, feel, believe you are successful before you actually get there.

It’s your turn to incorporate the five healthy, daily habits in your life so that you can create an environment of self-discipline to master your grit.

The greatest of the greats don’t just do these routines for a little while and then stop, they are sustaining these habits and rituals. Once a habit or ritual is established, once it truly becomes a habit or a ritual, then homeostasis is on your side.

Learning to sustain your grit is like being an acting coach. The actors have the script – the words and the stage cues, but you need to guide them to the best performance of that script. The catch is you are both the director and the actor.

There isn’t a magic pill you can take, no perfect formula, no secret steps that will up your grit scale score by two points. You internalized the habits to strengthen your resolve, now you have to reinforce it through practice.

It’s your turn to self-coach to sustain your grit so that you can become a master of your grit.

To get yourself to where you are today, what risks did you have to take? A lot of times, business leaders will tell you that they had to risk everything. Others will say they only had to risk a little bit, but everyone likely had to take some risks of some kind.

A successful entrepreneur once said that to be a success in any business or in life, you have to be willing to fall backwards, knowing there might be a net below you, but not knowing how far off the ground the net is. Have you ever felt that way in your life or your business when you take risks? By creating a safety net, we’re creating a safe environment for you to take a risk.

The safety parameter is the point at which you say this decision didn’t work out, and enough is enough. If you don’t create safety for yourself, you never change. The safety parameter defines how much you can risk and put out on the line before you say enough is enough. The safety parameter helps you avoid the “van down by the river” mentality.

It’s your turn to create a safety net for yourself.

In the first section of this chapter, we dealt with the more intangible risk items. This section will help you make the decision to make a risk more tangible. For example, suppose after the first section of this chapter, you now feel like if you hire a new staff member for nine thousand dollars for three months and you lose the money, that you’ll be OK. Now, you’re proving it to yourself.

A risk audit allowed Edward to figure out exactly how much he was willing to forego now to gain more in the future. Once he used this spreadsheet to conduct this risk audit, Edward realized some things need to change.

What about you? What should you do when you perform your own risk audit? A risk audit comes down to either time or money. Those are the two things you are really auditing. You want to be very real about both of these variables. To do this, you need to be really honest with yourself. In other words, don’t fluff the numbers.

It’s your turn to conduct a risk audit.

It’s not that people don’t know they should stay in shape, eat healthy food, and save money; it’s just that they don’t do it. Executing on the risk falls under that same category. This has HUGE IMPLICATIONS for goal setting and goal achieving. It’s the accountability piece to actually make it happen.

Your job as a human being is not to change. Your job is to stay the same. You’re going to naturally want to let yourself off the hook on this whole idea. You wouldn’t be creating an accountability plan with an accountability partner if you weren’t susceptible to this.

Recall the crabs we talked about earlier in this chapter that try to pull you down as you climb up the bucket or elevator of life? As you take more risks in your life, you go up that elevator of success. When you go up that elevator as you take more and more risks, you’re going to have people who start to exit your life and feel resentment for you because you’re taking risks.

The key to taking risks in your life is to know who you are, or at least have an idea of who you are. At the end of the day, you are going to have “Epic Successes” and “Epic Failures.” Knowing who are helps you get through both.

It’s your turn to execute on the risk.

Imagine if you had a life that was so efficient, you could spend three months out of your life each year bettering your life, your family’s life, and your community. Solving your inefficiencies is going to give you a higher rate of return on the investment of your time.

Most people who have less than five years in their career have an informal, “figure it out as you go” process for growing achieving their goals. This can be highly inefficient. This section will give you a more formal, written plan for how to succeed in the key areas of your life and how to achieve your goals in less time. You’ll be able to achieve more goals and take more time off than you would have been able to otherwise.

You might think you’re doing well in these seven areas already. You might think everything in your life is going just fine. However, when you actually step outside your life and look at it—or have someone else look at it for you—you may realize that things aren’t as “fine” as you thought they were. Whatever you are doing right now, a time audit can help you take those seven critical areas of your life to that next level.

It’s now time to use that time audit to create your most amazing future. Many people would make the argument here that everything they do is getting them closer to a most amazing future. Your time audit will show you the reality of whether that is, in fact, true. It will identify trends for you as you ask yourself one crucial question for each activity you documented in the time audit: “Is this activity getting me closer to or further away from the life (or the model) that I am pursuing?”

It’s your turn to identify your goal-success process.

You’ve written down your time-audit activities and categorized them in a manner similar to the above table. In addition, you have categorized them into one column of Positive Goal-Achieving activities and another column of non-Positive Goal- Achieving activities. Now it’s time to maximize your Positive Goal-Achieving activities.

We’ve now eliminated or isolated the activities that produce zero goal achievement for your life and move you further away from your target. The activities that are left on the list are the activities that get you closer to the vision you are trying to attain for your life.

It’s your turn to reduce inefficient activities.

Think about all the things we’ve addressed already in this chapter. Now imagine you have already done all the things you’ve learned so far in this chapter for your life.

The key to maximizing your goals is to look for the BHAGs. These are the goals and the people that fall under the category of the “Big Hairy Audacious Goal.” They are the people who scare you. They are the people who make you uncomfortable. Just by being alive, you probably are around people who are BHAGs. They are the big kahuna. Roughly 20% of the people that you put in your life every quarter should be BHAGs.

If you’re totally comfortable with where you’re at—your income, your lifestyle, and all your needs and goals are met—then stop reading this book and turn off the video. But, if there is anything that’s not how you want it to be in terms of your person, your career, your income, your health, relationships, or what you want to do for your community or your family, then put the seat belt on, and let’s go.

It’s your turn to maximize your Positive Goal-Achieving activities.

Goal setting ultimately is often about boundaries, and boundaries are all about respect. Successful people respect themselves by establishing boundaries. The ability to set and enforce boundaries is unique, challenging, and attractive. Most people are bad at it, but those who do it well find that people naturally gravitate to them and the goals they are trying to achieve.

While there is no master list of Positive Goal-Achieving boundaries, universal to all successful people, that doesn’t mean we can’t start to create one. In this section, Jason shares the Positive Goal-Achieving boundaries that helped him set and achieve his goals for the past three years.

Personally and professionally, you need to surround yourself with people that will advance you on your path to your goals (or help you stay there). Don’t spend time with people that don’t move you in the direction of your goal status.

Make life intentional. Be in control of your day. Always be aware of where you are, what is going on, and how you are operating. If you are going to have a conversation with a friend or colleague, there has to be a purpose and an intention to it, even if it is just “I want to say hi and let you know how much I care about you” instead of “I am here to do business.”

It’s your turn to establish some boundaries for yourself that demonstrate your respect for yourself and bring you closer to success.

Boundaries are meaningless if you don’t enforce them. If you don’t know whether or not you are living up to the standards established in and protected by your boundaries, the journey to goal achievement and success is going to be even more challenging. You need to know where you fall short and which boundaries are still allowing unnecessary pain and struggle to enter your life.

Earlier in this lesson, we hinted at the fact that there is no master list of Positive Goal-Achieving boundaries. While we can use Jason’s list as a starting point, Positive Goal-Achieving boundaries are created by the successful people who live by them. That means you have to create some of your own to supplement the starter-list in this lesson.

Ranking your adherence to boundaries and creating additional ones are not quite all it takes to recognize where you fall short. Those are certainly two critical elements, and a huge step in the right direction. But until you make your boundaries routine, and make the ranking and creation processes routine, you won’t really leverage your boundaries to achieve your goals.

It’s your turn to assess your adherence to your boundaries so that you know where you fall short in order to improve your ability to leverage boundaries to achieve your goals.

Contrary to all the reflection and planning you have done up to this point in the lesson, you haven’t actually done anything to implement boundaries in your life. You have only just identified them and where you are falling short in using them. Enforcing the goal-producing boundaries you created – that is the final piece to leveraging boundaries to get to Forum.

Remember the key to these boundaries, and what makes them Positive Goal- Achieving, is that they are self-focused. You are setting boundaries for yourself, not for others to abide by. So what happens when you are out of your element in trying to enforce them?

Before you can call in assistance, you need to know what you are asking for help on. Just as you ranked your adherence to your boundaries earlier, now you need to determine your boundary helpers.

It’s your turn to determine the methods you will use to enforce your boundaries to achieve the success you desire and achieve your goals.

Most people set goals and only work on themselves and their life when their world is on fire. When the bills need to be paid, or things aren’t going well, that’s when they set goals and work on themselves or their businesses. When a person’s world is not on fire, that’s when he typically stops progressing. The people who are going to benefit the most from this chapter are the ones who are ready to take their goal setting to the next level when their world is not on fire. This is the chapter for those people to take their goal setting from good to elite.

Most people spend their time focusing on what’s not working well in their life. This is where you can expand your mind. Think about it like flexing your muscles. Most people have used the muscle of survival their whole entire lives. That’s because most people are survivors.

The first step to identify what’s working in your life is to write down the different steps of your success process. When you do this, you want to drill down and think about the effectiveness of what’s working and what’s not working.

It’s your turn to identify what’s working in your life or business.

You now have your top half. You’ve identified what is working. It’s time to move on to explore what’s possible. This should be one of the most fun activities that you’ll get to do, because most people usually spend all their time focusing on what they’re not very good at. Now, you can spend some time on something you’re good at.

The next step is to write out your process and the current results you’re getting.

One of the easiest ways to help better your process is to have somebody else take a look at what you’re currently doing. You need to partner up with somebody to coach you to come up with what you could potentially do to better your process.

It’s your turn to explore what’s possible.

It’s time to move from a mediocre goal setting to goals that are thriving. You have now identified what’s working in your life. You’ve explored what’s possible. Now, it’s time to implement a solution. It’s the solution that’s going to move you from being mediocre to thriving.

Once you pick out the one area you need to work on, you want to create a turtle step or two in that area. Most people think changes need to happen in a quantum-leap format. Things don’t have to happen in quantum leaps. The best thing you can do for yourself is to take just a turtle step. The turtle step is sometimes harder to do than the subsequent larger steps.

Another bigger permission you can grant yourself is to try something new for three months. For example, consider how this applies to the goal of implementing an easy solution, like bringing on a new staff member. Most people are scared to get a new staff member. They think, “Oh, my gosh, how am I going to bring on this staff member? I can’t afford to do it.” What if, instead of taking on a staff member for life, you simply try it for three months. What if you say, “I’m going to take on a staff member for three months. If within that three months it’s not working, then that’s my answer.”

How did these people get themselves to be able to take the plunge and implement these kinds of changes? That’s what the remainder of this chapter is all about. You should know, these aren’t easy to do—for anybody. You have to create safety for yourself to make changes like this. One of the best ways to create safety for change is to ask yourself the following two questions.

The last step in implementing easy solutions is to write down exactly what those action steps for that decision are going to be. You can do this step now that you have created safety for yourself to make a change, and the two questions have told you which direction you want to go in terms of making a decision.

It’s your turn to implement easy solutions in your life.

None of us want to wake up some day with a lot of regret. Yet, many, many people will wake up with regret someday because they never really pushed themselves. They allowed themselves to wallow in mediocrity. They allowed themselves to sit around or to get by haphazardly.

Every day we run into different human beings. We either leave them feeling better for having run into us, or we ignore them, or we walk right by them like a drive-by shooting. However you choose to live is your decision. The best financial people are the ones who choose to be out there in traffic with other human beings, and when they are, they are genuine, able to share, connect, and engage.

If you can build yourself, then your advocates are just going to come. The first way to build yourself is to be a student of the industry and of the game that you play.

When you build others up, you are building up yourself. The key to building up others is through the way you care about and treat other people. When you build others up, you will start to create an army of advocates.

Whatever the situation, you want to get back to building the brand. As you build your brand, people will start to advocate for you. When something comes up, and people know what you do, they will advocate on your behalf to someone else. To build your personal brand, you need to give everyone your best self when working with them.

You don’t just want advocates; you also want a few people in your life who think bigger and push you to reach beyond where you think you can go. You need those who inspire you to set goals beyond what you think you are capable of doing.

One type of big thinker is known as the “strength big thinker.” Strength big thinkers are the ones who help you discover your strengths, build them up, and think even bigger.

Another big thinker is called the “new tape big thinker.” New tape big thinkers are the ones who show you the old tape you’re playing in your head. Then, they suggest a new tape that challenges your current beliefs and paradigm. New tape big thinkers help you remove the old tape in your mind and replace it with new tape.

It’s your turn to find your big thinkers.

Imagine meeting once a month with a group of people who are all more successful than you. Once you get to the point where you’re more successful than everyone else, it’s time to find a different group of people to hang out with.

Many times, when people go to industry meetings, they will say, “Hey, there’s John Doe, the industry giant with the amazing following!” But, they won’t introduce themselves. When you go to industry meetings, instead of hanging out with just the group from your office, try stretching yourself. Go meet people who are industry giants.

Just the fact you are in this program right now indicates you want to be a student of the game, but that’s not enough. It’s not only about showing up for the seminars, but it’s also taking the information you hear in the seminars and putting it into play.

It’s your turn to surround yourself with industry giants.

You probably have done things in your life or career to earn the respect of others. You probably deserve more respect than you have even given yourself credit for. Now it is a matter of taking that respect and turning it into self-belief. Do that and you are in a position to live out your true worth today.

If you don’t feel like you have anything of value to offer in your life, you are now left with this mentality of “I need everybody more than they need me.” That means you now have to spend your time with anybody, because you believe you need everybody. This morphs your life and goals into transaction-focused gaols with shallow relationships – not the territory of high success and achievement.

Go all the way back to your first day working on a goal, or in a business, or in a sport, or whatever you were trying to achieve, when you didn’t feel like you had any value. What did that look and feel like?

Have you ever had at least a couple of people say “Thank you for helping me/us.” Every time a person says “Thank you,” it is highlighting value that you provided and worth that you have to offer. Don’t blow past these.

It’s your turn to inventory your experiences to identify where you add value to others in your life.

You already identified numerous ways you have provided value to others and “done good” in their lives. But for some of you, seeing a list of ways you have worth is not enough. It can be there on paper, but you don’t accept that the lists mean you have value.

Before we can convince you to deconstruct the mind game you are playing that prevents you from accepting your value, you need to see how acceptance is different than identification.

When people go through the checklist from the prior section in this lesson, they often invent a hurdle of mastery or an obstacle of comparison. Even if half the list is checked off, frequently they invent an obstacle: “Yeah, I did these things, but until I can master this, I am really not that valuable.” Or decide they fail by comparison: “I know I can do these things, but I can’t do it as well as so-and-so, so it doesn’t really count.”

Hopefully we already convinced you of the value of saving the notes and positive feedback from others as proof that you have provided value. And maybe you are on the path to accepting your value by giving up illusions and excuses.

It’s your turn to break down the hurdles and unwind the mind game you play that prevent you from accepting the value you have already identified you offer other people.

No matter what you do for a living, you are in a service business. As such, you need to be wired with a servant-mentality. Everyone needs to be connected and dedicated to delivering a fantastic experience to others to achieve their goals.

You cannot physically help everyone that needs help – you don’t have the capacity to do that. When someone rejects us, temporarily or permanently, it gives us an opportunity to find someone that is ready to be helped.

It’s your turn to bring your value to the rest of the world.