Ya know, motivation is a fragile thing.
We always start out working toward our goals with tons of inspiration and motivation, but
for some reason, when we get in the thick of it, we end up giving up before we’ve
even truly started!
If you can relate to this you’ve come to the right place.
In this video I’m gonna show you some steps you can take to not only reach your goals
this year, but develop the mental toughness to achieve any goal you set your mind to!
Plus if you stick around till the end, I’ll share with you my secret to getting through
even the toughest times when you feel like you’ll never get to where you want to be!
Honestly itI feels like it’s some sort of super power because almost no one I know talks
about this.
But first let’s start at the beginning, step one, Set a goal that is actually achievable
in a given time frame.
Let’s face it, if your goal is to win the powerball lottery, that goal is definitely
achievable, but statistically it will just take you around 2.8 Million Years if you play
every time, ya know assuming they keep it going that long.
Almost any goal can be achieved given enough time, but we don’t have that much time on
Earth so we should probably stick to setting goals we can actually achieve in a reasonable
amount of time.
That's the first thing you need to focus on when setting these goals.
You need to get a good idea of what is statistically likely in a given time frame.
Setting goals for this year?
Probably not a good idea to say you want to become a millionaire.
That’s achievable in the long term absolutely, but giving yourself a year to do that is just
setting yourself up for failure.
That’s not to say you can’t set goals for yourself outside of the short term, you
absolutely can.
You just need to be realistic about the time in which you’ll be able to accomplish these
goals.
The second step when setting these goals is to set a goal that is specific and finite,
something you can point toward to know when you’ve actually reached your goal.
If you want to run a mile in under 7 minutes, that is a specific goal that you can achieve.
Want to make more friends?
That’s a little more vague and harder to define.
Same with saying “I want to lose weight” It’s much better to say, I want to lose
20 pounds or I want to make two new friends this year that I hang out with regularly.
Which side note, if that is a goal of yours make sure to check out my other video talking
about how to do just that.
If your goal is not something that can be boiled down to a numerical value such as wanting
to learn the piano or teaching yourself how to code, make the main goal a byproduct of
another goal.
If you want to learn to code, rather than make “learning to code” be your goal,
set a goal to write an application.
If you want to learn the piano, tell yourself you will learn how to play your favorite song.
These are much more tangible goals that will allow you to know when you actually reach
them.
It may sound weird, but you may not realize you’ve reached your goal once you've gotten
to a certain point.
Our brains are weird, and we often forget where we started or what skills we used to
lack.
Alright step three, once you’ve set a tangible goal and given yourself a time frame to accomplish
said goal, the next thing you need to do is to set more goals.
Well you need to set smaller mini goals.
If you have a goal that you want to achieve by the end of the year, you need to set goals
that you can achieve by the end of the month.
Want to learn to play the piano?
Set a goal to learn a song.
Want to learn a song?
Set a goal to learn just the first verse by the end of the week.
This will help you stay motivated and not get overwhelmed by all the work ahead of you.
It can be so discouraging when you start to work toward something, especially when things
aren’t going well.
If you are trying to write an application, but can’t even get one little feature to
work, you will most likely give up.
By breaking your goals into smaller and smaller goals this will help you get little wins along
the way that will keep you motivated.
The beauty of this method is that you can just keep setting smaller and shorter term
goals until this big task is actually just a tiny thing.
If we go back to the running a mile in 7 minutes, what you could do is break that down into
smaller chunks.
Set goals to run a quarter mile in a minute 45.
Once you get that down then set a goal to run half a mile in three and a half minutes.
If you find that even that’s too much for you, maybe you can’t even run a whole mile
without stopping then start there.
Run a quarter mile without stopping, then the half mile, whole mile, then work on a
quarter mile for time.
I know this is a lot for a running analogy but it applies to every type of goal out there.
You want small incremental successes, those incremental successes will eventually propel
you toward your goal.
Now, step four, once you’ve broken your goals down, you have to develop daily goals
that will become habits.
Sometimes your big goals require you to improve your skills in other areas, and setting these
side mini goals can help you achieve your big goal.
Let’s use a different example this time.
Let’s say your goal is to be ranked really high in whatever game you are playing.
You’ve probably set smaller goals of getting X number of eliminations per game or maybe
getting to some lower rank by the end of the month.
You may find though that you just can’t get past a certain rank.
Maybe you could benefit from improving your aim or your map awareness.
You should set little goals every day to spend 30 minutes practicing your aim or 30 minutes
studying the maps.
These little tasks are easy to do, can be knocked out quickly, and can give you a little
mental boost when it seems like you aren’t making any progress.
The same idea can be applied to all other goals.
If you want to be a manager at your company, maybe make a habit of spending at least 5
minutes a day getting to know your coworker, or practicing your public speaking in the
mirror.
These little things do add up and might seem small but over time these microskills will
snowball into transforming you into a goal crushing beast!
Ok we’ve done all the other things, and we are well on our way to reaching our goal,
but sometimes, things just don’t go our way.
Sometimes, stuff that is out of our control happens and we just don’t have things pay
off the way we think they will.
That’s where step five comes in, and that is to frequently take a look back at your
input rather than the outcome in order to assess how you are doing.
If you are falling behind or things aren’t quite working out, that doesn’t mean you
aren’t going to reach your goal, it’s possible that you just underestimated how
long or how difficult it would be to get there!
Any time you feel that way just look back at all the work you have already done.
It feels really good look back at where you started and see how far you’ve come.
Compare yourself to you from yesterday, that’s all you can really do.
As long as you are improving incrementally you are on your way.
That’s something you can feel good about, something you can be proud of.
The true reason people never reach their goals is they just don’t know how to trick their
brains into working for them.
For some reason we have to do a little mental gymnastics in order to accomplish the things
we want to accomplish.
Our brain wants to discourage us, it wants to send us back to the realm of easy.
We can’t let that happen.
Now I promised you the secret to getting through those tough times, and I’m going to deliver
but first I need you guys to hit that like button.
I’m dropping some life bombs on you so bomb that like button!
Ok ready?
Back to the secret, here it is, the fundamental truth:
A lot of times, people never reach their goals because they never really put in the effort
to get there, and they never put in the effort because they are afraid they might fail.
You have to remove your fear of failure if you want to reach your goals.
Deep down many people are afraid of failure, so they never really try.
The idea of putting years of hard work into something only to fail is a tough pill to
swallow for many.
But the only way you can remove that fear is by training your brain to understand that
failure is not a step backwards, but a step sideways.
When you fail, you aren’t back where you started.
You may not have ended up where you wanted to be but you ended up somewhere, and now
you have the knowledge of what didn’t work at your disposal.
You are smarter, more experienced.
So when working toward your goals, and you fail constantly, just look at those failures
as you becoming way more experienced, getting way better at whatever you are trying to do.
I have never in my life regretted setting a goal, working towards it, and not achieving
it.
I have only regretted not starting or putting in the effort required to get there.
I am who I am because of my failures, not because of my successes.
Anyways guys that got pretty real, but I appreciate you sticking with me.
If this was eye opening for you please share with anyone that needs to hear it.
We have access to so much information these days but I feel like the stuff people really
need to hear gets buried.
Thanks again guys, good luck out there.
Peace .