Are you the kind of person who makes resolutions and sets goals and then fails dismally at actually following through with them?
Don’t worry – you’re not alone!
According to an article published in New York Magazine Last January, new year’s resolutions were made by just over fifty percent of Americans. Yet incredibly: just eight percent actually realize the goals they set for themselves!
GOOD NEWS! You can start a resolution and set new goals any day of the year. Your New Year’s can begin TODAY!
Whether you want to lose weight, get into serious shape or build a highly successful business that eventually earns you a six (or seven) figure salary – you need to know the real bottom line when it comes to accomplishing your goals.
First, learn and apply the art and science of effective goal setting practiced by the world’s top business leaders, professional coaches, and fitness pros.
Second, develop and carefully follow a clear set of logical action steps that lead to the realization of each of the goals you set for yourself.
And by the way: the advanced goal setting best practices I’m going to share with you today are not just for finally realizing your most valued goals.
They’re actually the basis for positively transforming just about any aspect of your life, from the quality of your relationships to increasing the profitability of your business.
Ready to get started? Ok:
Here are 10 advanced goal setting strategies to ignite your transformation!
What’s one of the most important secrets practiced by the world’s top business leaders and the most highly efficient and highly paid professionals?
What do the world’s leading relationship, fitness and business coaches actually do to help their clients completely redesign their relationships, their bodies, their lives?
How do these experts help their clients and themselves build and enjoy ever increasing flows of positive success and accomplishment after accomplishment?
In the vast majority of cases: They start their goal setting processes by:
- Crafting a Deeply Motivating Personal and/or Business Vision Statement
When it comes to setting life transforming goals, goals you’ll actually accomplish, it’s critical that you develop a big picture view of what it’s actually going to look and feel like when you achieve the goal state.
Let’s go back to the “dismal failure levels” of so many new year’s resolutions that we talked about earlier.
Millions of people are going to set major fitness and weight loss goals for themselves this year. Especially after all the holiday eating, they’ll likely be doing.
To drastically increase your chances of meeting a major post-holiday fitness or weight loss goal, the first thing you need to do is vividly invasion what you’re going to look and feel like once you’ve succeeded.
This creates a vast reservoir of motivation that you’re going to need to draw on.
Why is having a highly motivating vision of what it’s going to look and feel like so essential to your success?
Because to be really successful at setting and achieving your “BHAGS” (big hairy audacious goals), you’re going to have to spend a lot of time in your discomfort zone!
Can you imagine how you’re going to feel? The extra energy you’ll have? The amazing positive changes that will take place in your life? Can you imagine the boost in confidence you’ll feel when you do reach your goal state?
What about-about career development and business growth goals?
Can you imagine how your life is going to look and feel once you’ve set yourself on the path to doubling, tripling or even quadrupling your income? Whatever you do:
- Set Optimal Financial-Growth Goals
What’s one of the biggest obstacles to people actually experiencing huge, even exponential growth in their personal wealth?
Well, they often hesitate when it comes to imagining becoming wealthy.
They simply don’t believe that they have what it takes to start building solid wealth and financial freedom.
And they often can’t imagine building that wealth doing what they’re really passionate about.
Let me ask you:
What’s your dream job/career? What have you always wanted to be able to do? And I do mean within reason: What job would you love to do, but it just seems to be too far out of reach for you?
Do you dream of becoming a world-class fitness expert with a full roster of high paying clients?
How about becoming a highly successful and well-paid health and wellness coach?
An 8-figure entrepreneur?
What are the three things you’d love most if you could start doing that very job tomorrow morning?
How will you feel doing that kind of work really making a positive difference in the lives of the people you serve?
What are the top three ways having a meaningful well-paying career doing something you love, will change your life?
How much do you want to earn? $50,000 per year? $100,000 or more?
Now, there are good ways of plugging in realistically high numbers into your projected earnings targets, based on solid research and consulting with a coach or mentor who knows the business ins and outs of your dream career. And you also want to become a highly flexible action learner (we talk about this shortly) in advanced goal setting:
For example, when you do visioning the right way, you may discover a type of work or proven business building strategy or even a whole new set of goals, that will empower you to follow your bliss while at the same time generating significant income for yourself.
And these may include goals and strategies you didn’t even know about in the first place!
In other words, you’ll find your vision and the strategy that grows out of it, will actually shape itself and grow based on things like:
- The discovery of opportunities that are out there, that you were previously unable to see (many of wich you’ll discover as you begin the journey of your personal transformation process)
- an increasing awareness of your growing strengths passions and, yes your weakness and limitations as well.
Ultimately, the most effective vision statements are built to be open to making any positive changes that increase positive value for the people who create them and the people they serve.
But what I’m really getting at here is that too many people don’t even get started in their visioning process, because they just don’t believe that they have what it takes to really succeed.
So before you actually sit down and write out, flip chart or white board your vision statement, you first need to identify and:
- Positively Transform Your Self-Limiting Beliefs
Now let’s take a minute and go back to my question about how much you’d like to see yourself earning each year.
When I ask you:
Can you see yourself making a six figure income and becoming more and more successful doing the kind of job you love?
What’s your initial reaction?
If you had thoughts like:
“I could never…” or “no way…”
..then you’ve you just surfaced your first two self-limiting beliefs.
As the world’s leading cognitive psychologists will tell you much of our behavior is driven by what we think, how we mentally assess who we are, what we’re capable of and what’s going on around us.
You see, in many cases, the brain can’t really tell the difference between what we say to our brain is going on and what is actually going on in the world around us.
It’s like our thinking is a mini version of the actual external environment. And it’s that representation of the world we’re responding to most of the time.
And that representation of our reality is actually made out of our thoughts and the often strong positive or negative feelings those ideas can lead us to feel.
A big part of unlocking truly amazing, even unimaginable success levels in our lives is not getting stuck in the false beliefs about our potential and our limits.
In other words: it’s all about unlocking the extraordinary power of positive thinking.
You see, when we start to use more positive words to label and understand ourselves and our environment, we also change how we feel and open up the possibility of more positive behavioral choices.
For example, if you think you can’t build a great career with a really, really good income, you may choose to avoid exploring the training and advice that can make your dream job a reality.
When we interact with the world in a more positive way, when we start to exude more positive energy, confidence, happiness, and openness we also positively impact how others see us and how they behave towards us.
In fact identifying and getting rid of self-limiting beliefs and choosing more positive thoughts and behaviors is actually the key to highly effective public speaking too.
Do you know what one of the biggest and most common self-limiting beliefs is about public speaking?
It turns out many people actually fear public speaking worse than they fear to death!
No matter what kinds of goals you’re setting, when it comes to advanced goal setting success, it’s an excellent idea to pay attention to really pay attention to and work on your thinking style. You want to:
- Get into the habit of quickly identifying and stopping your self-limiting beliefs.
- Practice quickly to stop and replace those self-limiting negative thoughts with:
- A more realistic and positive appraisal of yourself,
- An emphasis on your strengths,
- The abundance of positive opportunities that are out there (that you may not realize yet) and
- The fact that you can be incredibly, and I mean hugely successful!
At first it may take a bit of work, but eventually, it becomes automatic. And with just a few weeks or months brain-retraining you’ll very likely find you’ve actually become a positive thinker!
With a clear vision to help you more precisely shape and define your most important life transformation goals and with the solid brick wall of self-limiting beliefs out your way it’s time for you to:
- Set Really, Really Smart Goals
The core practice of any advanced goal setting process is crafting and actually writing down 1-3 high-value smart goals prioritized or top listed from your personal or business vision statement.
Why 1-3? Well, behavioral science research has shown that having more than 3 goals at once can overload the goal accomplishment process.
If you’ve never heard of smart goals before here’s how they work.
If you’ve heard of smart goals before, take the time to go over this quick refresher. This will set you up for the incredibly powerful tip I share right afterward that will make your smart goals really, really smart.
Smart Goals Explained:
Smart goals are based on a revolutionary goal setting framework first thought to come from one of the most influential of strategic business leadership experts of the last 50 years: Peter Drucker, as a key part of his “Management by Objectives” framework.
This is arguably the most useful and popular goal setting processes with top business leaders and coaches.
There are some variations to this approach, with some differences based on whether or not you’re working to set goals for teams or individuals. Yet the basic idea here is that the most effective goals are:
S – Specific (or Significant): Remember we talked about actually imagining and getting a sense of what reaching your goal state will look like? Well, it’s essential that your smart goals be defined very precisely, so you know exactly what you’re working towards.
And these goals also need to be significant in the sense that they really reflect your what you’re really positive and passionate about.
For example, the most successful people who enjoy the most incredible lifestyles often create their success by making one of their top goals to make a positive, healthy difference in the lives of others.
M – Measurable (or Meaningful): Peter Drucker himself famously once said: “What gets measured gets improved.” And the opposite is also often true: If it doesn’t get measured it doesn’t get done.
I cannot emphasize enough how critical it is for you actually to write down your goals.
It can be as simple as creating an MS Word document titled “My Goals” – but you do need to write them down!
A – Attainable (or Action-Oriented): Yes, it’s vital to identify and replace your self-limiting beliefs and to dream big. But at the same time, you need to ground your abundance mindset in some basic common sense.
It’s important to chunk down your larger goals into more manageable and attainable sub-goals.
It’s also a good idea to set really small sub-goals at first that you know you can accomplish so that you enjoy small, highly reinforcing wins right at the outset.
This will super-reinforce your whole goal setting process and increase the likelihood of your success moving forward.
R – Relevant (or Rewarding): Remember, your goal is to chunk down your BHAGS into manageable sub-goals. Sub-goal by sub-goal, you’re going to gradually attain each BHAG you target or develop clear strategic changes in your vision through learning.
That means that your sub-goals need to be directly relevant and connected to your vision statement and the way it defines your BHAGS.
“R” also stands for “Rewarding.” Again this is where your visioning process comes in. Always keep your eye on how it’s going to look and feel to be successful.
Also, make sure to build actual rewards into your goal setting process, in a way that lets you really enjoy something you love right after you finish each sub-goal.
Why? Because the top motivation science has established through decades of research that positively reinforcing your positive goal-directed behavior will increase that behavior as you move forward.
T – Time-bound (or Trackable): This may be the most critical of the parts of advanced goal setting and achievement. It’s absolutely critical that you link the goals and sub-goals you create to specific time frames.
For example, if you’re goal is to become a highly successful, well paid personal trainer or certified wellness coach, a key subgoal will be earning cutting-edge credentials.
That means setting up a larger statement for example:
“To become a well paid, online personal train and fitness coach who works from home.”
This would break down into the smaller sub-goal of:
“To earn my certification as a personal trainer within the next 4 months.”
But it also means setting up specific times each day to study and prepare for your exam.
For example, you might create a time bound sub-goal sub-goal like:
“I will study 2 hours per day in the evening starting at 7 PM after dinner Monday to Friday from from such and such a specific calendar date to such and such a particular calendar date for a total of 3 months of daily study.”
Another reason that GB is so powerful is that it allows you to define specific behaviors to reward each time you complete them.
For instance, you can make a list of highly rewarding or reinforcing short activities like listening to music or doing some relaxing breathing and stretching.
You can then build short breaks into your study time and positively reinforce your study behaviors by doing rewarding activities from your reward list.
Setting up your goals and sub-goals around very specific dates and times will create an incredibly important structure so that you can develop particular habits and behaviors to move toward your goals, quickly and efficiently.
This will also make it easier for you to identify and create fresh strategies to address challenges or obstacles that might arise to effectively following through with your goals.
- Goal Behaviorization is Critical
If you’re one of the many students of the Spencer Institute who have earned the cutting edge “Certified Corporate Wellness Coach” credential, you know that arguably the single biggest trend right now in the corporate leadership world is “Goal Behaviorization (GB).”
Not only is GB is a critical success factor in the corporate wellness initiatives with the highest ROIs (Returns on Investment), but it’s also an essential ingredient in the top employee recognition programs and performance management systems.
So what exactly is goal behaviorization?
Put simply, GB is an advanced goal setting process based on clearly defining the specific behaviors that lead to the goal being accomplished.
GB takes your goal setting to the next level because your not just clearly defining “what needs to get done” and “when it’s going to get done (i.e. time bound)” but you’re also defining very precisely “how it’s going to get done” as well.
Back to the example of earning your personal training certification as a sub-goal in realizing your BHAG of becoming a highly paid online personal trainer.
An example of behaviorizing your Monday to Friday evening study goal would be to more precisely define the specific behaviors that will make your studying as efficient as possible.
For example, will you learn best by doing an hour and a half of reading followed by taking a short quiz to test your knowledge and ensure that you’re actually retaining what you’ve learned?
Will you commit to going back and studying those pieces of information that you didn’t quite get or remember?
And just like with every other part of your advanced goal setting process, from your transformational visioning to your smart goal and smart sub-goal setting steps, the GB method allows you to really hone in and continuously improve your effectiveness in actually meeting and in many cases exceeding your goals!
- Become an Avid Action Learning
You’ve probably noticed by know that I’ve often referred to the fact that you have to be highly flexible in your advanced goal setting.
For example, I mentioned that when it comes to your visions process, you may well discover new targets and options that you may never have thought of before.
And the personal vision you started out with may not be the same more deeply inspiring personal vision you started out with.
Not only that but your sub-goals and the specific behavioral strategies you develop to meet those goals may need to change as well to more effectively meet your goals.
The core of this flexibility is what expert leadership development and productivity coaches call “Action-Learning.”
Action learning is all about learning from your mistakes or under performance and continuously improving both the goals your set and the specific strategies for meeting those goals.
Let’s go back to your example BHAG of becoming a well paid online coach who works from home and the Monday-to-Friday daily study goal for earning your personal training certification.
Imagine that, you try studying for 2 hours each night starting at 7 PM. But you find that family responsibilities are getting in the way at that time.
You many decide to study 3 hours a week, instead so you can actually over deliver on family responsibilities on other nights.
For example, you may choose to change your sub-goal and study once on Monday, once on Thursday and once on Sunday for 3 hours.
Even though you’re only studying 3 times per week now, because you’ve bumped your studying time up to 3 hours for each session, you’re actually studying for 12 hours per week instead of 10! That’s and extra 12 hours per month!
You’ve actually learned from your underperformance (the particular original action you took towards meeting your goals) and made a major improvement in your study strategy!
- Become an Expert Gap-Zapper!
One of the most powerful tools in the advanced goal setting tool chest is what Leadership-development legend Kenneth Blanchard beautiful describes in his co-written book “Zap the Gaps.”
Gap Zapping is really an easy way of explaining what leadership and life coaches call “discrepancy analysis” and “SWOT analysis”(where strategy is assessed by looking at Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats).
The basic idea here is always to have an eye out for the gaps between your goal state and your current situation. When you see a gap, you know it’s time to come up with and test a new action plan to get to your goal state from your current state.
- Set Your Daily Big 3
There’s only so much you can do in a day. Don’t overload yourself with too much at once because that can increase your chances of failure.
According to productivity expert, Michael Hyatt, the optimal number of daily goals is 3.
These are your MITs or most important tasks each day.
For instance, if you’re goal is to learn a new set of skills 3 times per week, that may just become your top MIT.
But your optimal health and wellbeing is also a critical part of your personal transformation vision statement.
As any great Certified Sleep Science Coach will tell you: building a healthy sleep habit into your daily routine is one of the most important foundations of your health and daytime performance levels.
So if you’re not getting enough healthy, recuperative sleep each night, building a healthy sleep habit may need to become one of your top 3 daily MITs.
You may also have current work responsibilities and or relationship development goals that need be added to your top 3 daily MITs.
Identifying your top 3 daily MITs needs to be addressed in your personal transformation visioning process.
- Single Task Your Big 3 MITs
Now that you’ve identified your big 3 daily essential tasks, it’s critical that you set specific times for them each day. And the earlier in the day, the better.
Single tasking is a productivity hack where you devote 110% of your attention to the MIT you’re working on in the moment.
What’s really key here is designing your work or learning environment so that it’s completely free from other distractions.
And that means action-learning and gap-zapping around things like email checking, phone calls and other interruptions that may interfere with maintaining your state of flow.
- Get Expert Coaching and Mentoring To Help You With Your Visioning and Goal Setting Process
As you can see: doing the visioning and goal setting process involves some pretty specialized skills and knowledge.
This is particularly the case when it comes to learning about and integrating the proven best-practices and hard earned success-hacks in the industry.
What’s the single most high-value goal identification strategy that the world’s top earning fitness professionals and life coaches apply to build top notch personal effectiveness and wealth creation strategy?
Simple: They get mentoring and coaching from leading mentors and coaches in their industry.
Why? Because it allows them to learn from often decades of experience, trial, and error that the industry leading coach they select has under their belt.
Because the world’s leading coaches, themselves get coaching, often from multiple industry-leading coaches, mentors and thought leaders themselves, you’ll also get the benefit of all that combined experience.
Bonus Tips: Are you a current or aspiring fitness pro or life coach who’s ready to start your own world class learning, visioning and goal setting process? If so:
You Need to Check the Career and Life-Transforming Penthouse Group Right Now Because Seats are Limited and Going Fast!
Also, join John’s exclusive private Facebook Group so he can provide you with free business development coaching and mentoring.
Remember, seats for The Penthouse Group are very limited. Make sure you are able to join this life enhancing experience.
https://johnspencerellis.com/penthouse
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