I am notoriously bad with goal setting and seeing through long-term goals, as such a couple of beneficial nuggets of knowledge have come to light through my previous experiences. Firstly, the best accomplishments don't happen overnight, they are achieved through long-term persistence. Secondly, it is human nature to take the lazy route. Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea of a quick win and will seek out effective shortcuts where possible but more often than not there is no free lunch, as it were.
With that being said, there are a number of ways that we can stack the odds in our favour when setting goals which I want to share for your benefit just as much as a personal reminder to myself.
First and foremost… What do you want?
"Life punishes the vague wish and rewards the specific ask."― Tim Ferriss
Knowing what you want takes out 80% of the hassle, get specific before you move forward. Instead of “I want to start a business”, make your goal “I want to start a business in the tech industry, selling high-end, custom headphones to producers who work in the music industry around Europe”. From here you already know where to look, who to look for and in turn where to find them, what kind of copy you will need to talk to your customer etc.
If you have a chance to go broad, don’t. Go narrow.
NB: When writing a list of all the things you desire it is important to set aside the constraints of time, money and obligation, think less on what you “should” do, or “could” do with more “insert perceived limitation”. This list should be entirely without doubt, fear or expectations. Take your time, take a break if you need, take a little walk somewhere quiet but most of all don't censor or edit the nature of the list. Be sure to set challenging goals that excite you, go outlandish! The goal itself can be as crazy as you like as long as you follow it by creating a realistic timeline and process to get there.
Reduce the competition...
Creating your own niche:
In business, this is called the ‘Blue Ocean Strategy’ or, to a marketer ‘the law of category’. It is where you find your own market where you are the only player. For example, tell me what these men all have in common…
Pete Conrad
Alan Bean
Alan Shepard
Edgar Mitchell
David Scott
James Irwin
Charles Duke
Eugene Cernan
Harrison Schmitt
You most likely can’t, however if I include Buzz Aldrin or Neil Armstrong then you will likely come to the conclusion that they have all walked on the moon. Yet no one really remembers anyone involved after the first mission (that's not to say it is any less impressive).
Creating your own niche is similar, it removes all competition creating a space that you can dominate. Consider the fact that computers started out the size of rooms, but quickly advanced to mini-computers, desktop computers, super computers, laptops, tablets and on it goes. Find your own category to branch out into and make your own. The best competition, is no competition.
“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).” ― Mark Twain Shoot for the moon, and even if you miss you will be among the stars:
The other option is to aim higher than everyone else. Think of it as a food chain, there is less competition at the top. Don't just be good, be exceptional.
The degrees of separation between being the world's best and being pretty good are minute, but that small difference is the difference between being in competition with a few or many.
As they say, the fishing is best where the fewest go.
How to say no...
What you don't do is just as, if not more, important than what you do. Prioritise meticulously, time and energy are your greatest assets and both are limited. Think ‘priority’, not ‘priorities’. Have a set goal in mind and continuously ask yourself “is my current task advancing my main goal?” If not, stop and refocus. A useful tool to break down the importance of tasks is Stephen Covey’s time-management matrix (seen below), this will aid in separating the important tasks from the rest.
Remember, your destination is concrete but the route taken to get there can be fluid. Give up low-level goals strategically if they are hindering your success, know when to drop a project or task that isn’t working and find an alternative route.
Numerous studies have shown multitasking can make a serious dent in your productivity, seeing reductions of up to 40%. By trying to achieve too much at once you are more likely to disappoint yourself or, achieve half-baked results at best. This can also be a blow to your confidence, hindering later attempts at the same goals.
Baby steps
Breaking your goals down into manageable bite-size chunks will sustain motivation in the long-run by creating a minimum resistance path to achievement while also enabling clearer progress tracking. Essentially this is a process to make decision making simpler when the time comes.
Ask yourself: "what would this look like if it were easy?"
By breaking a goal down into a timeline you create many smaller achievements rather than a strict pass/fail and can see that you have in fact made progress through ‘little wins’. In behavioural training, something similar is shaping, when you get stuck or feel frustrated with a task it can be helpful to run over each of the previous steps to assure yourself of progress and interrupt the pattern of failure with the reminder of the success you have achieved to get to that task.
Shaping: The process of reinforcing successively closer and closer approximations to a desired terminal behavior.
This is a neat psychologically trick to seem as though you are always overshooting tasks, by setting the end goal high but the tasks to get there very low there is much more chance you will overshoot your success. So instead of going straight in with an hours exercise every day, try just 5 press ups in the morning.
"Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat."― Sun Tzu
NB: Quant based marketing was a method used to grow mint.com, from scratch to 1 million users in one month (I have linked an article on this as it’s great reading!). It is also a great method for breaking down goals and how you plan to achieve them! Quant-based marketing is a method where you start with the end goal in mind and work backward, do the exact same thing with your goals, breaking them down into small simple steps to get there.
Visualisations and affirmations
Define your goals clearly and specifically. Go into detail about what you want to achieve, why you want it, how it will benefit you, how you plan to achieve it and how you will gauge accomplishment, along with a timeline and most importantly a deadline. By writing out each of these questions in detail you are helping to foster your interest, reinforcing it and creating something that you can come back to in times when things seem hard or unachievable.
NB: A fellow named Cyril Northcote Parkinson first stated a long time ago that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. Known today as Parkinson’s law or the law of time, it dictates that the time you set for a task will be spent doing said task. Therefore it is wise to set timelines in which to complete important tasks, these will also help gauge progress and reduce dropout rates.
“A goal is a dream with a deadline”― Napoleon Hill
There will always be room for improvement. With this in mind however, forever editing will end up causing a severe lack of finished work. Setting deadlines prevents late stage tinkering. Business projects will generally involve large teams initially to ensure all serious issues are addressed in the early stages. Then, as the project develops fewer and fewer people are involved. I am sure you have heard the proverb “too many cooks spoil the broth”, this is somewhat similar.
“Perfect is the enemy of great.”― Voltaire
The psychology of emotion
Humans are emotional beings and as such it is best to work with one's emotional desires. Willpower may work in the beginning but is unsustainable for most people in the long-run. This can be seen in fad diets, broken new year's resolutions and, I guarantee it won't take you long to list of a few things you yourself have tried for a short period of time but failed to pursue. Relying solely on willpower will eventually create negative feelings towards the habit you are forcefully trying to establish and can be damaging to long-term achievement, it is better to work with emotions and use them to your advantage rather than battle against them. If you aren't enjoying something, figure out why, and work with your emotional self to prove the benefits and work around the issues.
Decision making is the balance between the pain of indecision and the benefits of making the decision. By working with your emotional self and imagining in detail the benefits of making a decision along with the pain that will come from indecision, you can tip the scales in your favour while reducing the anxiety that indecision brings.
If you’re ever feeling lost or uninspired revisit your vivid description of your goal and write out two lists detailing the cost of not making the decision and the benefits of what can come from moving forward(NB: if you are still unsure, you can use a method called fear setting which is gone through here).
Learn to use your emotions to your advantage.
NB: Confidence Testing:
*The coffee challenge- Go to a local cafe or restaurant and ask for 10% off your coffee/lunch. Sounds easy right.
Try it you will be surprised, you may learn something about yourself or you may just save some change.
*For Men(or women)- Go into town and spend an hour walking around and asking women(or men) for their number. Say you saw them and thought you’d take a chance, I am sure you will flatter a few women if anything. You don't have to call them back, just get their number.
*Eye gazing- Hold eye contact with someone for 30 seconds, try not to be creepy and if they ask why just say you reminded them of someone you know.
The reason for these challenges is to inoculate yourself against fear from uncomfortable situations. Throughout life, uncomfortable situations will arise and the more often you experience them the easier they will be to handle.
Embrace them, as they are usually less painful than your reptilian mind makes them out to be.
A game of stakes
“80% of success in life is showing up”― Woody Allen Take action now, right now.
Find something you can do to move forward right now. Anything that can make you accountable and start you on the route to your goal.
Let's face some facts. You won't always be motivated, accept this early and save yourself a little pain. There are going to be sometimes when you wake up and want and hit snooze, use some of the techniques in this list along with a dash of grit to overcome these. Break it down, leverage emotion. engrain routine and reward yourself.
“All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it's impossible), but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer.” ― NiccolΓ² Machiavelli
NB: There are a number of psychological principles you can leverage here:
The sunk cost effect- Individuals commit the sunk cost fallacy when they continue a behaviour or endeavour as a result of previously invested resources (time, money or effort) (Arkes & Blumer, 1985). Say you want to learn Krav Maga(because it’s pretty awesome), well if you pay for three months worth of lessons up front you are more likely to attend these sessions than if you were to pay on a lesson-by-lesson basis.
The endowment effect- The endowment effect describes a circumstance in which an individual values something which they already own more than something which they do not yet own. By owning your goal and the outcome along with creating a stake in it you will be more committed to seeing it through until the end.
High-stakes commitments- Creating financial stakes have been found by Stikk to increase success rates by up to three times as much. This has been studied by The University of California, Santa Barbara economists and not only does it increase success rates, but habits are often sustained long past the commitments end date.
Positive reinforcement
Reinforcement is a huge driver of the human learning process and it is well advised to use this to your advantage. Positive reinforcement is, for most cases, the best method to change a behaviour either in yourself or others.
It is to be noted however reinforcement must be given immediately after the skill/action you intend to reinforce. This will create a subconscious link between the desired action and the positive reinforcer.
This can be used for rewarding yourself for waking up at a specific time by allowing yourself to have that breakfast you love so much rather than your standard toast. To a cube of green & black's dark chocolate for doing 20 minutes of meditation.
NB: this can also be used as a handy method to ‘train’ housemates or colleagues with undesirable habits.
For case studies and more see Goal setting theory: How to get what you want using behavioural psychology
Submitted November 26, 2017 at 09:08PM by Razzle3 http://ift.tt/2BqS7vp
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