Goals, Not Resolutions

Welcome to 2007! I've personally entitled 2007 as "The Year Of Abundance," but you're welcome to give it whatever title you like. When I played football in highschool, we often liked to give our season a title or mission statement. Whether it was "Finish Strong" or "Commitment," it was something simple we could put on a t-shirt and wear under our game gear. There is something about being in a locker room putting your pads on and seeing every other guy in there with a t-shirt on that says "No Quit!" I get fired up just thinking back on it and it played a major part in me deciding to give a mission statement/title to my year. I know my fellow blogger, Steve Pavlina has written some wonderful things about goal setting, as have others, so I thought I should at least chime in.

Why do most people fail to maintain their resolutions? There are a number of reasons, but the most prominent is that the resolutions people make are generally too drastic or absolute. "I'm quitting smoking on January 1st" or "I'm going to never eat sweets again as of New Years 2007." I'm not saying these resolutions can't be achieved or maintained, but to make a surface decision without attempting to change the underlying programming causes most people to miss the boat. If you've eaten cupcakes on a weekly basis for the last 10 years, but "in 2007 it's gonna be different!" you might be fooling yourself. The problem isn't necessarily the cupcake eating, but what incites you to want to eat the cupcakes in the first place. If it's your stress or comfort food, you need to set goals to lessen the things that cause you stress, or to find positive alternatives to dealing with your stress. Shad Helmstetter covers this tremendously in his book, "What To Say When You Talk To Yourself." He says to imagine all the furniture in your house being your previous negative thoughts. You move it all out, but the only way to keep from having to go get that comfortable sofa, is to replace it with healthier programming.

The way I've broken my goals down may be a little different than others, but it's a way that I see as being effective for me, which is definitely important if I expect to actually feel like I can accomplish them. When I was heavy into bodybuilding (and that time will come again, once free from a day job,) I routinely built my workout around four major muscle movements: squats, bench press, deadlifts, and military press. Those heavy, multijoint movements had a greater effect on multiple areas of my body than any other exercise and so I used those as the baseline and everything else fit in appropriately around them. My goal setting for 2007 is the same way. My four areas for 2007 include: spiritual, family/relationships, health, and financial. These are four pillars that when I strengthen, will help everything else fall into place. Overtraining one over the others will likely cause atrophy in the neglected area.

Understand, the goal is not necessarily to live my life in balance when it comes to my time. I believe that to become successful, you have to live an unbalanced life to an extent in terms of where you spend your time. My goal is to use the time I spend in each area more efficiently and in ways that create a greater result. I'll give you a couple general examples in a moment, but to kick things off, I even wrote a basic mission statement:

"To maintain a pure and single focus on putting into practice methods and ideologies that will improve not only my spiritual, family, health and financial life, but also the lives around me. "

Here are a couple basic examples of the goals that I set:

Spiritual: Develop education in the word as a backdrop of teaching opportunities.

Family: Create more consistency in staying in contact with my parents.

Finance: Look for better and simpler ways to track finances.

Health: Keep a better record of your daily food intake.

Now, I understand that these can be misconstrued as general goals. They were simply an outline of areas that I wanted to become more detailed with. However, just writing that I wanted to be more consistent in staying in touch with my parents has upped the number of times we've spoken since the New Year. I often times get so caught up with helping people that are part of my business, that I can look past maintaining that basic contact just to say hello.

When it comes to health. I do get more specific with weight goals and how I plan to achieve them. I've dropped 7lb. in the first week of January and I couldn't be more excited about being in better shape. For the most part, my weight has a tendency to yo-yo when I don't focus on what and when I'm eating. We always think slipping a sweet in here and there doesn't hurt. But if "here" is Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday and "there" is Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, we're not really "slipping" anything. It's part of our diet.

For finances, I happen to be a person that dreads using tools like Quicken. I'm the first guy to extoll the virtues of it. I just hate to take the time to do it. The thing is, when I use it, I'm so much more on top of our finances. The issue isn't using the tool. The issue is setting aside the time. The greater detail of my financial goals covers setting aside time (where, when and how much) to analyze and plan our finances.

As far as my spirituality is concerned, I've become more and more a student of the teachings of the Bible and before the secularists go running away, here me out. The goal is to learn more on how to treat the book as a success manual. John Maxwell has a book called the Leadership Bible. I've heard two of my mentors talk about it and I'm reading it this year. Regardless of your faith (or lack of faith,) there are pliable, time-tested teachings on success in the Bible. I just want to learn how to use them better.

So there you have it. An inside look at some of my goals, not resolutions for 2007. What have you decided to turn around or improve on this year?

Trying To Get Focused

From time to time, my mentors remind me of something that I try and keep at the forefront of my thought process: Good is the opposite of great. From my own personal experience, this seems to be the greatest deterrent from higher levels of success. We often get excited about getting to a certain point and it can blind us from really stretching ourselves to a more enjoyable level of satisfaction. Many times, we put a couple minor things on hold and reach that "good" point, and then let a couple of the minor things back in to the forefront. Then, not only do we sabotage our efforts of getting to great, but we also endanger our comfort-filled "good" position.

What am I talking about? Well, I'll use personal anecdote to explain. I love sports. Going to sporting events, watching sporting events, reading about and talking about sports. I played just about any sport I could growing up and multiple sports in high school. As a kid, the most consistent conversation I had with my Dad was talking sports and sports statistics. That hasn't changed a lot, actually. Regardless, sports was an enormous part of my life.

The business that I'm involved in, however, takes a great deal of focus when it comes to where and how I'm spending my time. There is often a direct correlation between personal development, action and end result. The only issue is that often times what determined the end result and it's time frame can only be quantified when the end result is met. I know, I know, you want it in English. My business involves dealing with many different personalities if one plans to succeed at high levels and very few people are naturals in this arena. Even those who are benefit from continued development, so commiting time to developing in this area is pretty vital to succeeding. The thing is, you don't usually know if you've worked on yourself enough until you're either attracting people with your behavior or repelling them until after it's happened. It's not like you read a chapter of a book like Bringing Out The Best In People and at that moment everything clicks into place.

What do these different ramblings have to do with how I started this post? When I'm at home at night, choices abound. I can do anything from trying to combine a little ESPN with reading just before bed, to falling asleep with the TV on before I even get to the reading part. When I leave my day job, I have the opportunity to either go out and shake some hands, make some new friends and delve into the personal networking part of my business, or I can stop at the house and spend an hour or so with my little girl before heading back out. Now, most people will say, "why can't you just do a little of both?," and to be honest, that's what I fight all the time.

Here is why I can't do both: watching some sports and reading a little or spending a little of my prime networking time at home with my daughter before heading back out will most likely result in me being good at what I'm trying to accomplish, but not great. The fear is looking back in two years, not having the results I could have had, and still be working in the active-income arena with a daughter that is two years older. To be more to the point, this is what I look back on now and get angry at myself about. I've tried to do both and so far I've become pretty good at knowing my business, my personal development and the growing my business. What stinks is that I look back and see that if I would have just focused solely on the business, I could be in position right now to be living in the strictly passive income world.

The solution seems obvious, right? Just keep the dumb TV off and give up a little time with the kid to spend all kinds of time with her in the near future. So why is it still so hard to do? For one, I believe that putting watching sports (or more honestly - Sportscenter) on the back-burner is essentially breaking a habit spanning multiple decades. I'm only 30, but sports has been a mainstay as long as I can remember. Don't get me wrong, I don't sit at home watching games during prime time. I've overcome that. The issue is postponing even the 45 minutes of Sportscenter that I can oftentimes fall asleep watching, thus eliminating my attempts to read. Honestly, in total, outside of watching a movie rental on a Saturday night with Mrs. Objects In The Mirror, I may watch a little less than 10 hours of television a week. For most, this is pretty good. For me, it's not great.

When it comes to the stop at home, it was a mini-habit that started from me stopping at home to change cars with Mrs. Objects. I couldn't just switch cars and be back on the road. I had to at least go inside and see the little one. Well, once I was in the house, Mrs. Objects had a touch of relief and tried to knock out a couple of quick things while I played with the little one. Before you know it, it's an hour later and I've lost vital time.

So here's what we're going to do: despite the fact that my Bears are odds on favorites to go to the Super Bowl this year and the Bulls are actually better than their record (I shouldn't even know their record if I want to be great,) I am putting myself on a timeout. How? I'm going into the old bag of tricks to get the job done. I can't get rid of the TV because the little one loves Baby Einstein, but I can leave notes for myself to not watch it. Notes that say things like: "Sportscenter doesn't get you out of your job." I'm also putting myself back on a book per week habit. The last time I set a focus like this I was very good at maintaining it.

Can I turn it around that easily? I think I can. My freedom is that important to me. I'm planning on 2007 being the last year I work for someone else, and if I'm serious, I have to be serious. Here we go ...