Achieve

by Chris Friesen

  Of course, you’re not just reviewing your goals. You want to check in with yourself to make sure these goals are still the right goals for you, or the right goals to be focusing on at this point in time.

  You’ll find that some of your goals for the month were accomplished and you should find a way to mark these accomplishments. One way is to take your written-out goals and move them to another file or folder labeled Completed Goals or Achievements, or whatever you like. You should review these about every six months to help you see how far you’ve come.

  In your review, you may end up slightly altering or changing goals altogether. Remember, goals are fluid and you need to be flexible. If your goal was to beat your best time in your track event within the month, but you tore your ACL, this goal needs to be abandoned and moved into the 1-Year Goals list.

  Next, plan your outcome and process goals for the coming month and plan out when and how you will achieve them.

  Then, each week pick a day to review your past week and the week to come. Take 10 to 30 minutes to do this. Look at your goals from the week before and evaluate how well you did. Then, look ahead at the week to come and schedule where and when you will work on your goals.

  This is undoubtedly superior to scheduling on a daily basis, a process that will inevitably get you caught up in what Stephen Covey refers to as “The thick of thin things.” Covey notes that “things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least”. With daily planning, you will get caught up in things that are not in line with your overall mission, purpose, values, and goals.

  When you plan out the week, you need to schedule non-negotiable times when you’re going to work on things that will bring you closer to your goals. These are activities that are important, but often not urgent. Still, they require us to take action to make them happen. If we don’t act, we will end up living our lives at the whims of others. We’ll become slaves to things that may not be in our best interests.

  For example, some athletes say they want to make it big and play lip service to the idea that the mental game is important. But they never seem to get around to doing what is needed to improve their mental game. Life just gets in the way. They have practice, training sessions, possibly school or jobs, a social life, and more. These are all important, but we need to realize we are making a choice. And that’s okay as long as we are aware we are making that choice.

  As I said at the beginning of this book, you want to be able to look yourself in the mirror and say you did everything you could to achieve your dream. We all fall victim to getting caught up in things that seem important, but really aren’t. That’s why we need to repeatedly keep in touch with our overall mission, values, and goals. And we need to plan what we are going to do on a yearly, monthly, weekly, and even daily basis.

  Conclusion

  You now have everything in place. You now have some goals that are in line with your personality, values, strengths, interests, and most importantly, your purpose or mission.

  In the next chapter, you’ll learn how to put your goals into action and deal with any stumbling blocks on a day-to-day basis. I will help you understand what it takes to stay motivated, productive, and effective.

  Resources

  Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals by Heidi Halvorson, Ph.D.: http://goo.gl/qwdLq4

  First Things First by Covey, Merrill, & Merill: http://goo.gl/pcUHwq

  The Freedom Journal, John Lee Dumas: http://thefreedomjournal.com

  The Legendary Life Movement, Ted Ryce: http://FriesenPerformance.com.legendarylifepodcast.com

  BONUS MATERIAL

  Visit FriesenPerformance.com/Achieve-Bonus-Materials to download your Goals Worksheets.

  STEP 6

  MAKING IT HAPPEN!

  Chapter 14

  How to Walk the Path to Success

  A dream doesn’t become reality through magic; it takes sweat, determination and hard work.

  ― Colin Powell

  Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard.

  ― Guy Kawasaki

  At this point, you should know a lot more about yourself and what you are trying to achieve. You’ve figured out your Basic Personality Tendencies, values, strengths, interests, purpose, mission, and goals.

  Now comes the hard part: putting in the hard work to make your goals a reality. This is where many of us crumble. You may know what you want, but have no idea how to make it happen on a daily basis. This chapter will help you make it happen even if you are not high on Motivation.

  Some of the strategies to follow may be applicable to you and some may not. The metric for your success is when you do your weekly, monthly, semi-annual, and annual reviews of your progress. At each of these intervals, you’re going to ask yourself how you’re coming along in terms of your goals and mission.

  Is the To-Do List Dead?

  As noted in the last chapter, at regular intervals you need to review and plan your goals and how you are going to achieve them. We stopped at weekly planning. The problem with stopping at weekly planning is that we often get caught up in all sorts of things that may or may not be in line with our values, goals, and mission. How do we prevent this from happening? Use a to-do list.

  Although some productivity books say that to-do lists are a thing of the past, I disagree. Of course, I think we can all agree that making to-do lists that are not informed by your values, mission, and long-range goals won’t help you achieve the right goals. But to-do lists have a number of useful functions.

  Simply having your tasks written out, with old fashion pen or pencil or electronically, serves to free up your brain’s RAM, known as working memory. Your working memory is your brain’s ability to keep information front-and-center so that you can work on it for short periods of time.

  Some cognitive neuroscientists have argued that working memory is the key to intelligence. They believe it is the core cognitive ability that underlies almost all of our cognitive powers. There is some evidence that you can improve your working memory with training, but it’s generally limited in capacity.

  Working memory, along with your brain’s ability to process information quickly, are part of a more global cognitive ability known as cognitive efficiency. Poor cognitive efficiency acts as a bottleneck for your other cognitive abilities like memory, language, and problem-solving. So you don’t want to clog up your working memory with tasks you are trying to remember to do. Writing things down on a to-do list frees up your brain’s working memory capacity, which allows you to use it for tasks you want to be focused on.

  In addition to weekly tracking of progress toward goals, you need to track small accomplishments. Again, this is where the to-do list comes in. The act of physically checking off boxes and crossing things out serves an important psychological function. You’re telling your brain that you’re “done” with that task. This allows your brain to take any information about the task out of working memory, freeing it up for more pressing tasks.

  It also gives you a feeling of accomplishment, of moving forward, and activates your brain’s dopamine reward system. So, in other words, it helps keep motivation and morale strong and also just feels good.

  It’s also best to finish tasks or to get some form of “closure” on something you’re working on before moving on to the next task or finishing your day. Otherwise, it may tend to linger in your working memory and affect your performance later. This is known as Attentional Residue.43

  If you leave a bunch of unfinished tasks, you feel a diminished sense of competence and accomplishment, even though you recognize that you worked hard all day. Your brain needs this reward to keep going. Otherwise you’ll end up procrastinating or feeling overwhelmed. This will wreak havoc on your motivation. This is why you have to break down your big goals into smaller and smaller tasks.

  Each night look over your weekly plan for what you scheduled for the next day, and then make a to-do list. When you do this the night before, there is still distance and perspective on t
he next day.

  If you only check your plan or make your to-do list in the morning, you may already have been bombarded with emails and other things that make it difficult to stick to your weekly plan. You may also feel tired or unmotivated when you wake up in the morning. It helps to have a set of written reminders of what you said you would tackle that day. And when you wake up, you’ve already completed the most important task for the day, making your to-do list!

  This doesn’t mean looking at your long-term goals here. You’re welcome to, of course, but if you are reviewing these on a weekly basis, it isn’t necessary. You’re looking at your goals for the week and day.

  Each morning, begin with a look at your written-out to-do list that was developed with your weekly plan in mind when you had more perspective the evening before. Do this before you check your email or voicemail or get caught up in any time-consuming tasks. If you wait to check your to-do list after doing these activities, you may get sucked down a rabbit hole of seemingly urgent, but possibly unimportant, tasks when it comes to your goals and mission. Learn to say ‘no’ to these things and say ‘yes’ to your bigger goals. The more you do this, the easier it will become.

  At the same time, important things that are urgent will crop up. These are things you have to deal with promptly to prevent them from leading to even bigger problems. If you have an urgent deadline at work, it could be career suicide to put it off so you can focus on your bigger goals. Or maybe you’re an athlete and you notice a strange pain in your knee while training. Even though your goal may be to train at a certain intensity a set number of times each week, it would be foolish to push through the pain. It may even be career-ending. Or you get a call that a loved one is in the hospital. I think we can all agree that your to-do list can wait. So you have to be somewhat flexible.

  At regular intervals throughout the day, check your to-do list and see how you’re doing. One way to do this is to program a repeating reminder into your smartphone. It can be as simple as having it go off at 9 a.m., 1 p.m., and 3 p.m., or at whatever intervals work within your schedule, with the message “to do list!” That should be enough to remind you to check your list.

  Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way

  You may have heard something about willpower. Willpower refers to your ability to delay gratification and resist short-term temptations in order to meet your longer-term goals. It’s been getting a lot of press these days, largely because of the work of psychologists Roy Baumeister, Kelly McGonigal, and their colleagues.

  You may have noticed that the definition of willpower is pretty similar to the Basic Personality Tendency of Motivation. You also may have heard of popular related terms like “grit” and “self-control.” The University of Pennsylvania’s positive psychologist Angela Duckworth defines grit as the tendency to sustain interest in and effort toward very long-term goals, and self-control as the ability to modulate impulses in the presence of momentarily gratifying temptations or diversions. It turns out, willpower, grit, and self-control are all sub-traits of the larger Basic Personality Tendency of Motivation.44

  There are a number of keys to high achievement, including having willpower and self-control. Higher levels of willpower in children predict numerous positive outcomes even into adulthood. Stronger willpower is related to higher or better grades, rates of sobriety, income, physical health, mental health, and self-esteem.45,46

  Like most Basic Personality Tendencies, there is room to improve your willpower through a combination of knowing how it works, working around it, and strengthening it.

  You should keep in mind that we all have difficulties getting ourselves to do things we don’t feel like doing, or stopping ourselves from doing things we know we shouldn’t be doing. Those of you who are average to low in the Basic Personality Tendency of Motivation will find this even harder. So you should devote even more attention to this section. This is especially true with getting yourself to do things you know you should be doing, as this is a motivational issue and is more closely tied to the concept of willpower. For example, getting yourself to wake up early to work out will be harder for you.

  Willpower & Negative Emotions

  Another key to high achievement relates to your ability to handle negative emotions and stress, which will be the focus of one of the upcoming books in this series. If you are average to high on Negative Emotions, learning to handle stress should be a major focus of your personal development if you want to be happy and achieve big goals.

  Although willpower is mostly related to the Basic Personality Tendency of Motivation, it’s also related to Negative Emotions, though to a lesser extent. Specifically, many personality psychologists argue that stopping yourself from doing something you know you shouldn’t do is more of an emotional issue than a motivational challenge. I’m referring to having trouble stopping yourself from doing things like overeating, eating unhealthy foods, overspending, over-drinking, smoking, or gambling. It’s mainly emotional because you may engage in these behaviors to improve your mood, or you struggle to tolerate the negative emotions that accompany not giving in to your urges.

  This means that learning to better tolerate negative emotions and stress will increase your willpower. So if you are average to high on Negative Emotions, you too should pay special attention to the strategies in this section.

  Recall that willpower refers to your ability to delay gratification and resist short-term temptations in order to meet your longer-term goals. This requires a more logical or rational way of thinking. It requires us to not get swept away by emotions.

  When we do get caught-up in high levels of negative emotions, the Amygdala Hijack kicks in. Recall that the amygdala is deep within your brain and is part of the emotional system, known as the limbic system. Your prefrontal cortex is the home of your more logical thinking system. When negative emotions or urges arise, our limbic system may get too amped and “hijack” the prefrontal cortex, essentially preventing us from thinking rationally.

  I once worked with a professional hockey player who was extremely talented but repeatedly underperformed whenever something didn’t go his way on the ice. When he would get checked or tripped by another player, he would “see red” and could no longer think rationally about what he needed to be doing. His logical, prefrontal cortex was essentially “shut down” by his limbic system and he would take bad penalties or just be out of the flow of the game. Attempts by coaches and teammates to calm him down only made him angrier, as in those moments he felt they “didn’t understand.” After the games, though, he was easily able to see how “ridiculous” his behaviors were.

  So willpower can be viewed as the ability to regulate your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. The good news is you can learn to work around and even improve your willpower.

  Willpower is a Limited Resource

  One of the first things you need to understand is that your willpower is a limited resource. You can imagine it as a gas tank that usually starts off the day being relatively full. It then gradually goes down over the course of the day.47

  You’re using this limited resource a lot more than you think. Even making simple decisions like what to wear in the morning depletes your willpower. This is why some researchers refer to this as “decision fatigue.” Whenever you’re at the coffee shop and find yourself looking at the donut and the 450-calorie mocha latte with cream and sugar, but instead go for the green tea and protein bar, your willpower is being sapped. Even closing your email window or social media feed to get down to work depletes your willpower.

  Research has shown that the more we use our willpower, the more energy is used by our brains. This energy is in the form of our brain’s primary fuel, glucose. The brain is a glucose hog. Despite making up only 2 percent of the body’s weight, it consumes 20 percent of its energy.

  When we exert self-control, our brains gobble up even more glucose, possibly more than it can replenish. Research has found that when our willpower has been repeatedly challenged, it
becomes depleted. This correlates with lower blood glucose levels and reduced activity in the rational part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex. The good news is that consumption of foods high in glucose can give our willpower a short boost.48 Even better, of course, is to eat the foods that keep our bodies fixed with a nice, steady supply of fuel. More on this in the upcoming books in this series.

  How to Limit the Willpower Drain

  Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.

  — Jim Ryun

  A problem that trips up many people with lots of motivation is trying to tackle too many big goals or make too many big changes at once. This is especially problematic for those who are high on the Basic Personality Tendency of Motivation.

  Understand that working on your goals or making changes in your life takes a lot of willpower and self-control. So if you find yourself struggling to keep up with your daily goals, check to see if you aren’t trying to do too many things at once. If so, try to cut back your less urgent goals for a limited time — let’s say a month or two — and see how that goes. It should free up more willpower.

  After you’ve engaged in a new behavior for a longer period of time, like getting up 30 minutes earlier each morning, the control of the behavior moves from the effortful and conscious outer part of your brain to the more automatic and unconscious deeper parts of your brain. When this happens, the new behavior no longer requires as much willpower. It becomes an automatic habit.

  Think of something as simple as learning to skate or dribble a basketball. When you were first learning to do these things, it took a lot of conscious mental energy. It also took a lot of willpower and self-control to not go back to easier moves like just gliding around a turn instead of doing crossovers while skating or traveling in basketball by taking a few steps without dribbling the ball.