There is an actual science behind setting and achieving goals. A science that you can learn and implement in your life going forwards. A science that can be a complete game changer for you! Learn the difference between a goal and a fantasy how to address potential pitfalls many people experience that can lead to frustration, and the specific steps to follow to set goals that you’re most likely to achieve.

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Anytime you set a goal that is beyond your timeframe,

the space and time horizon you're in, you will automatically hesitate,

procrastinate, frustrate, in the achievement of it,

unless you strategically plan in small chunks.

In the 80s when I used to do consulting for a lot of doctors and clinics,

I watched doctor say, okay,

I I'll just use this example cause that's what came to mind.

'I would like to have a million dollar practice.' That was decent in 1980s.

And 'I want to have work four days a week.' And they would write,

four days, a week and million dollar practice, I want to work six hours a day.

And they wrote all these things down. And then I said, well,

how much is the average cases? This. How many new patients do you want? This.

And the number of new patients x the case visit average x the number of

visits came out $600,000, putting all the numbers together.

I said, 'So what do you want? You want $600,000 practice with those goals,

cause that goal contradicts that goal.' They went,

'Oh.' So we'd have to re adjust all the goals until they were congruent,

because the brain just deletes them all. The brain goes, 'can't do',

it already knows, not doable.

So if you say you want to do a goal and you want to earn a certain income let's

say, you know, some thousand dollars a day or something, and then you go,

'But I want to work four days a week.

And I want to make $2,000 a day and that's $8,000 a week.' And then I say,

'Well, that's a 32,000 a month. And that means you're going to end up with about

$400,000 a year. And you have a million dollar goal.

You've got an incongruent goal.' So you go,

'Hmm.' You got to actually take that goal and break it all the way down and make

sure that all the components of that goal are real for you,

that they don't contradict. Because anytime you have a contradiction,

you got an internal conflict and you're not going to get it done because you

can't., It's not numerically possible. Quantitatively it's not possible.

Or if you say I have a goal,

I had somebody recently that said 'I want to get rid of my bulemia.' And then

they realized that they want to keep thin and they want to make sure they can

enjoy their food, but they don't want to gain weight.

And their unconscious motives were actually saying one thing.

And then their conscious state was saying, 'Oh,

I want to stop doing that.' But that was the strategy that they had figured out

doing the bulemia and letting the food out,

that was the strategy they were getting in order to get a goal that they want,

keep thin,

be able to control their weight and also enjoy big food, you know,

plenty of food.

So if you don't take the time to look at what your unconscious and conscious

motives are, you will probably have contradictory objectives.

And what you say and what you're doing. Now,

people say they want to be financially independent.

I was speaking in South Africa many years ago, eight years ago, I think.

And there were 5,000 people in this room and I asked,

'How many of you want to be financially independent?' All of them put their

hands up. Some people put their feet up. And then I said, 'Well,

how many of you are?' And all the hands went down just about.

And I said okay, 'If you had, if I give you $10 million,

what would you do with it?' And they all wrote down in the matter of a minute

the 10 things they would do if they had $10 million and they all wrote down

things about spending it on consumables that depreciate.

None of them were investing it hardly.

So unless you have a value on buying assets that go up in value to

grow your wealth,

and you really have a value on buying consumables for a lifestyle of the rich

and famous, you don't have really a wealth building conscious goal,

you just have a fantasy that 'I'm going to get wealthy buying and spending my

money shopping'. You're consuming instead of producing.

And so you think 'I want to get this wealth without the actual saving',

deferring immediate gratification into longterm investment.

So these contradictions cause a lot of angst inside and a lot of self

depreciation and a lot of wonderance. You know,

your self worth is got these two sides.

It's got an elevated pride and it's got a depressed shame.

And anytime you set up a fantasy like that,

your BS meter goes off and the other one comes in and says 'BS,

BS.' Your intuition knows when you set up a fantasy,

it's BSing you inside you having doubt, anxiety, fears, trepidations,

and stuff. That's why it's so important to set real goals in real time with real

strategies, according to what's really important to you.

And if you do and build little bitty action steps,

baby steps make big dreams,

build little action steps that build momentum as you go to get goals.

When you do, you achieve them.

If you take a, I'm going to just build this in layers here.

And this is a generic thing. So there's always variations on this.

But if you just,

if you were to imagine a factory worker working in a big factory,

doing kind of a routine work that's kind of mundane, it's monotonous, et cetera.

They may be living literally day to day, or maybe week to week.

And they,

the second to get their paycheck it's probably going to be spent and it's just

barely going to last through the week. If you go to a supervisor,

they may think in terms of months. If you go to lower management,

they may think in terms of maybe a year.

Middle-management maybe think in terms of decade. Upper management,

maybe think in terms of a generation.

The CEO may be thinking of maybe in terms of

maybe a whole century possibly, who knows,

it could be more than a generation.

The visionary maybe think in terms of a millennium and the Sage may be a whole

millennium. The farther you go up into space and time in your mind,

the bigger the vision, the longer the vision.

You take a visionary CEO like Elon Musk,

there's an art of how to go down into the factory and talk

in terms of the timeframe that's week to week. If you say,

we're going to go to Mars, people that think week to week,

they can't comprehend that,

but they can comprehend doing this particular action for the next week.

So everybody has a time and space horizon in which they live in.

And anytime you're living congruently in your highest values,

your space and time horizons expand.

And anytime you're living incongruently and down in lower values

and trying to be somebody you're not, maybe you've envied somebody else,

or you're living in a fantasy about what you want,

and you're now down in the amygdala, the time and space horizons shrink.

And that's what immediate gratification is.

Immediate gratification is a shrunken space and time horizon.

And long-term vision is a broadened space and time horizon.

When you live by your highest values,

it's an intrinsic value and you spontaneously want to

to need motivation. But when you're down in your amygdala in lower values,

you need motivation. You need a reward or punishment to get you to do it.

So they shrink, and immediate gratification comes in.

So what happens is you have small timeframes.

So anytime you set a goal that is beyond your timeframe,

the space and time horizon you're in, you will automatically hesitate,

procrastinate, frustrate, in the achievement of it,

unless you strategically plan in small chunks. And go, okay,

this is if I do this,

like when I first started way back when I was 18 years old,

when I first started to learn how to read, you know,

I went and I got really determined

I was gonna overcome my learning problems and reading problems.

And I went and I got a dictionary out and I made a commitment to read and

memorize 30 words a day. It was a small chunk.

That means saying the words, spelling the word,

putting it in a sentence and get the meaning.

And I'd practice 30 words a day with the help of my mom.

She would test me on 30 words a day. I was able to do 30 words a day.

If I tried to do a hundred, it would be overwhelming. If I did five,

that was too easy., But 30 words a day and little by little,

at the end of the year, I got a thousand new words almost. Thousand words, plus.

Two years, I have a couple, that's a lot of words. 30 x 300,

it's more than that. It's amazing what you can get done. It's not a thousand,

it's 10,000.

So when I grew my vocabulary at an incredible space and time,

because I did little small increments. And the same thing with reading,

I just said, okay, I'm just going to read. I'm going to practice reading,

and I'm going to do a paragraph and I'm going to do a page.

I'm going to do a whole chapter and I'm going to do a whole book.

And I just kept incrementally doing it.

Incremental momentum towards a long-term vision,

that's well-structured and strategized,

that are in time horizons that was within your time horizon,

increases the probability of goals. And that is very powerful.

And it also what's interesting is,

you can see it in your mind's eye easily if it's chunked down in small bites.

By the inch it's a cinch. It's like the domino effect.

You take a little domino and it goes to a bigger domino,

goes to a bigger domino,

and you can knock down a building with it if you start them up and get them in

motion. And so incremental momentum increases the probability of goals.

So start small. Piggy banks become piggy banks, little actions make big dreams,

and little visions can become huge visions if you just keep doing it.

I remember an exercise I did many years ago where I practiced doing what I

said, just practice with integrity.

So I took a circle and I just practiced drawing a circle until I was satisfied

it was the perfect circle.

I took a square and I practiced it till I could draw a perfect square, freehand,

the same thing with a triangle, and ellipse.

So I just kept practicing simple things because every time you do a simple thing

and you achieve what you set out to do, your brain goes, 'I can do what I say.'

That's a great little exercise.

So you want to make sure you do small steps and chunking things down and

strategic planning like that is to everybody's advantage to do so.

Those with a vision flourish.

Alec Mackenzie in his 'Time Trap' show that the people who spend more time

planning it out, seeing it in their mind's eye, and then delegating things,

and not so much doing,

but just delegating and managing and structuring the strategy to delegate it,

go way farther in life than the people who are doing it all themselves.

So give yourself permission to surround yourself with people that do

extraordinary things in the area of expertise that you may not have,

or otherwise you'll set goals that are,

take action steps that are beyond your value system.

That's an important component.

If you set a goal and what's needed to do to fulfill that goal is

outside the skills and primary focus of your own life,

you want to make sure you put a team in there to be able to get it done,

because if it's low on your values and it's something you don't want to do,

people, if you don't have somebody to delegate it to,

you're going to trap yourself cause you're not going to want to do it.

There's some things in business I don't like doing it.

And so if I have that delegate and give it to experts,

they can do it and I can get my goal done. As Truman says, you know,

if you don't get attached to the goal and think you have to do everything

yourself and get other people to do it, you can achieve even more.

So I really think that you can achieve way more in your life if you stick to

what your core competence is, do what it is

that's truly inspiring on your highest value with a true objective,

strategized out,

broken down and chunked down into small steps and then hand those delegated

steps down to people who love doing the parts that are lower on your values,

not inspiring to you, that you'll procrastinate on,

and then you'll get way more done in a whole lot less time.

Remember time X intensity gives results. The more intensely you focus on it,

the more intense, and you're going to focus on it if it's high in your value,

and the less intense focus you are, the longer it's going to take.

Well I always say that a purpose or mission,

some people use those interchangeably, some people try to differentiate that,

I don't mind using them. I call my life's mission statement,

my purpose statement, statement of purpose, synonymous,

but some people differentiate it, I don't really differentiate those. A

mission is a Christian term purpose goes all the way back into the ancient

Greeks, but the mission term is much later,

but this really means the same thing it's the metier or the calling of the

individual that is through time and space. That's something like,

I'm a mission to be a teacher. And, you know,

I had a dream to travel the world and teach, which I do. And that's the mission.

I will do that probably to the day I pass,

probably on my last day I'll probably be speaking, I'll probably just croak,

you know, fall over. But that's a mission through time and space.

And then there's goals in time and space,

where you have intermediate steps that you want to do.

I had a goal to go to every country. Okay, well,

I've spoken in 155 countries now,

I've done the Breakthrough Experience in 66 countries. Those are goals.

Those are doable. They're achievables, they're done.

And I'm still adding to those as I go. And I usually expand them as I go.

But all goals start out achievable and they become concrete and eventually

become more abstract and long-term,

and eventually something that's unachievable.

And as it does it approximates towards the mission and the purpose,

because those are something through time and space, not in time and space.

Those are things you want to dedicate your life to,

and you'll continue to do it probably to the passing, and may have goals

that go beyond your life.

I have many goals that I envision going beyond my life.

I want my Demartini Method,

I want the Breakthrough Experience and all of those to continue beyond my life,

so they're not something that I can complete and they

after generation. You know,

there's some companies that have gone for 1400 years they've been in existence,

way beyond the founder, because the vision was there.

So if you have an inspired vision that is massively in space time,

you measure an individual by their most distant end, says Seneca,

so if you have a vision that's a thousand years in the future and you structure

your systems in place and delegate systems and put the legals in

place and the structure in place, you can have goals that go very long.

But that's the fulfillment of a mission.

So you can have a goal that's immediate gratifying,

all the way to an eternal mission that's life, your whole life.

They can go to any of those scales.

But they're still things that are deeply meaningful. The more meaningful it is,

the longer they're going to be. And the more immediate gratifying it is,

you have a pleasure center and a meaning center and a power. Freud said,

if you're searching for pleasure and you're looking for the pleasure principle,

you're going to look for immediate gratification,

like the marshmallow experiment.

And then you've got search for power as Nietzsche said,

and then you've got search of meaning like Frankl.

But the search of meaning is the one that's the most powerful in the long run.

You'll actually empower all areas of your life if you have something deeply

meaningful to pursue. But immediate gratification won't empower you,

nor will it give you a deep meaning. I always say,

money without meaning leads to debauchery, which is immediate gratification,

and money with meaning, leads to philanthropy,