006 – The NEW Rules of Goal Setting
Have you ever made a New Years resolution and failed to achieve it? Do you find yourself setting goals and giving up on them, or even forgetting about them? Listen, I was once like you and made a big mistake when it came to goal setting Fortunately, my mentor fixed my mindset and gave me a totally new way to create goals.
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On today’s show you’ll discover why you need to give up on the shotgun approach to setting goals and making resolutions, and how you can put the power of being laser focused to work. With this plan in place, you finally overcome the inertia holding you back in life.
Do you know what you want to accomplish in the next 24 hours, 4 weeks, 90 days, and 12 months? If you’ve created your vision, you should have a clear and concise picture of what you want your life to look like. If you don’t, well, you should relisten to episode 005 where I helped you write the movie script for your life.
Having a vision is essential for getting EXACTLY what you want in life.
You need to start there and work backwards, doing what I call reverse goal setting. You’ve probably never taken that approach to goal setting before and most people haven’t, but it makes achieving fast results a lot easier.
But that’s not the only change you need to make to your goal setting methods. Setting goals the right way also puts the law of action attraction to work for you. I’ll explain that in a moment. This law made me richer than I ever expected to be… and allowed me to crush my first big mission of helping 1 million people transform their lives.cToday I’m on track to 10x that, and when I hit my 10 million transformation mission, then I’ll reset my goal 10X again, and continue on to help 100 million people transform their lives, physically, financially, and emotionally.
Here’s where most folks go wrong with their goal setting and it’s something I did wrong too. I was trying to do far too many things at once. After expressing my frustration to my mentor, Mark Ford, he sat me down to set me straight. “Craig,” he said while sitting on the couch at his very own personal cigar bar in South Florida, “You should only be setting 4 major goals, one for each of the important areas in your life.” “When you focus your efforts on it,” he said while sipping an expensive tequila, “You’ll accomplish everything you want and more.” He told me to picture a bullseye. In the center are your 4 goals. That’s the key to success in life. Surrounding the bullseye are the outer rings, representing other areas in your life. When you hit the bullseye, meaning when you accomplish your major goals, everything outside of the bullseye will get better.
But if you set too many goals, you start going after the easy outer rings and hitting those goals don’t make a mark on what matters in your life. So stop being shotgun scattered. Instead, get laser focused on the 4 goals of your bullseye. These 4 goals address: Your wealth, your health, your social self, and your personal enrichment.
Wealth
Wealth is obvious. Whether you want to make more money this year or build a nest egg of a certain dollar figure, it’s easy to quantify your wealth goal. But keep it simple and specific. Don’t set 12-month goals of getting a raise, getting a promotion, starting your own business, buying two rental properties, paying extra on your mortgage, and doubling your 401K contribution. That disperses your focus.
Instead, pick the one that matters the most … probably getting a promotion or starting your own business or increasing our annual profits in your business by 12%… because if you hit that BIG goal, all the other ones will start to take care of themselves. Hitting the bullseye and achieving your big goal is like throwing a huge rock in the middle of a still pond… the ripples go out and out and out and have a greater impact than hitting a small goal, which would be like dropping a pebble at the water’s edge.
Health
Next is health. This is also simple to understand. Whether you want to lose 10 pounds of fat, gain 10 pounds of muscle, improve your blood measurements, or take up meditation to reduce your stress, health goals are obvious. Again, focus on the big ONE health goal that dictates how you’ll do in all the other areas.
Social Self
Third, pick a goal for your social self. This refers to your relationships in life. It could be focused on finding a love interest, making friends when you move to a new city, or re-building a family connection that has gone sour.
Personal Enrichment
Fourth, choose a goal for your personal enrichment… This refers to you getting smarter or giving back to your community through charity work.
Mark’s advice to cut back on the number of goals so I could focus on the impact of just four goals made a big difference in my life. I was no longer frustrated by “goal achievement batting average.” After all, if I accomplished 10 goals out of 100, that doesn’t look good, even if some of the goals were significant. However, with only 4 goals to focus on, you become much better at making the right decisions to move ahead in life.
There are EVEN more changes to make to the NEW way you set goals.
What you have now are Four Major Outcome Goals. That’s a good start, however, the truth is that we don’t have total control over our outcome goals. Sure, we can say that we want to lose 10 pounds in 60 days or that we want to close 10 sales in the next 30 days but the fact is the outside world, and whether fortune or misfortune smiles its face upon, has a lot of say in these exact outcomes. The good news is that we can control the action steps that get us closer to our goals. We’ll call these action steps, process goals.
Imagine a staircase. The landing at the top represents your outcome goal. The steps to get up to that landing represent your process goals. What you’re going to do next is set three process goals for each of your 4 outcome goals.
Back to our weight loss example. If you wanted to lose 10 pounds in 60 days, your process goals would be to exercise 4 times per week, follow your diet 90% of the time, and drink 3 liters of water. All of those process goals are within your control, and if you stick to those action steps, you’ll give yourself the best chance of achieving your outcome goal.
Here’s another example. Let’s say you want to write a book in this year. Well, a book is about 60,000 words. That means you have to write 500 words, 6 days a week, for 20 weeks. Isn’t that manageable and more concrete when you look at it that way, compared to wishing for a book to magically write itself this year?
With this plan in place, you set these process goals:
- Each day you’ll write 500 words first thing in the morning.
- Each night you’ll outline the next day’s writing.
- To hold yourself accountable, you’ll pay a $20 fine – to a cause you DISLIKE – for every day that you miss.
Finally, one more example. This is from my life. My outcome goal is to host 10 Perfect Life Workshops in the next 90 days. Each of these life-changing workshops helps 5 attendees, that means I need to convince 50 people to attend. In order to do everything I possibly can to fill these workshops, my process goals are:
- Make a list of my best 100 prospects and send them an email about the workshops, offering to get on a strategy call to help them out and tell them more.
- Film 30 videos and 10 podcasts that teach content from my workshops and upload them to the web to get more people interested in my events and generate more leads – I’ll tell them to visit PerfectLifeWorkshop.com to watch the success story videos.
- Reach out all of my past attendees and ask for 2-3 referrals and a testimonial from each person.
Based on my experiences with filling past workshops, taking these action steps puts me on the path to filling 10 more workshops in the next 90 days.
Build out your 3 process goals for every major outcome goal. This gives you a detailed blueprint for success. Now, when I work with clients at PerfectLifeWorkshops, we take it to two more levels of detailed planning, but I’m running out of time in today’s episode.
Preparing process goals and having laser focus on what you want to accomplish in these 4 key areas of life will set into play the Law of Action Attraction.
This is where you start doing all of the right things to attract success into your life. It starts with a clear and concise vision of your dream destination. Then you create the straight line of success and roadmap to your dream destination using this goal setting process I’ve outlined here. This in-depth approach also protects you from the dangerous detours that people often offer you… but if you have your vision in place, you’ll stick to the straight line and you’ll take the actions that attract more opportunity, success, and support into your life.
Take these NEW rules of goal setting and apply them to your plan so that you can get extraordinary results in every area of your life.
Hi, this is Craig Ballantyne, host of Early To Rise Radio. Have you ever wanted to become wealthier, healthier, wiser, or just have more time to appreciate the finer things in life? On this show, we reveal what high performers are doing every day to be more successful WITHOUT sacrificing their personal lives. Early To Rise Radio is sponsored by The Perfect Day Formula. Get your free copy of this game-changing success guide at FreePerfectDayBook.com.
Craig Ballantyne
If you want to double your income, work less, and become the ambitious millionaire you've always wanted to be... Craig Ballantyne is the coach who will help you do it. With more than 20-years of experience as an entrepreneur and five 7-figure businesses under his belt, he specializes in helping "struckling" entrepreneurs get out of the mud and build the business of their dreams. To see if you qualify for Craig's "Millionaire Coaching Program" send an email to support@earlytorise.com with the subject line "Millionaire".