Goal Scoring and Eating Elephants

When we watch a game of soccer we enjoy the thrill of the attack that leads to a goal scoring chance. That’s the essence of the game, to score goals. However, if it was 90 minutes of penalty shoot outs, how interested would we be in watching the game? Not at all most likely, would be a waste of time as well as unrealistic to call that a sport!

The same goes for goal setting. To score, or achieve, goals the fun is doing whatever it takes along the way. Making the right or wrong decisions, adjusting your strategy, enlisting the help of ‘teammates’, moving forward in increments and then ‘scoring’ the goal followed by exuberant celebrations.

If we were to hit every goal every time, easy peasy lemon squeezy, would that have the same appeal? No, it certainly wouldn’t, would be the same as watching a game full of penalties, right?

In soccer teams are awarded penalties because of fouls committed in the Penalty Area, the larger box just in front of the goal mouth for non-soccer peeps (you’re probably none the wiser but hey ho!) How does that relate to goal setting?

By setting a goal that in reality is unrealistic you could say you’re fouling your chances of ‘scoring’, it would be against you. So what makes an unrealistic goal? Something you want in a certain timescale but is actually, unless a miracle happens, unachievable.

Let’s say you’ve read or listened to The Secret and you decide The Law of Attraction is going to get you the lifestyle you want. So you set a goal to become a billionaire and you date it 3 months from now. Is it going to happen? Chances are it won’t and you’ll be very disappointed and claim the Law of Attraction and The Secret is a load of bull.

The truth is you had unrealistic expectations. Even if you had won the lottery you still wouldn’t have achieved your billionaire goal. Why? Well let’s break it down and see how this penalty was awarded.

To become a billionaire (one thousand million by UK standards) within 3 months would mean earning over 333 hundred million per month or over 11 million every day. That would take some doing from scratch and I don’t think even soccer players get paid that much!

There’s nothing wrong with setting big massive goals so long as you’re realistic about the time scale and are also taking the steps to get there such as breaking the major goal down into smaller Milestone goals. But not too small, you still want to push yourself and have a sense of achievement.

So is there a best way, a cut and dried method, to set goals? Well that depends on who you ask, so I guess not. That’s simply because what works for one might not work for someone else. There is a basic framework to work with, however, which works and it’s this:

First determine what it is you want, you really, really want (sorry, couldn’t resist that)

Next give it a timescale, when do you want to achieve it? Give it a specific date.

Then figure out what you have to do to get there, break it down and be as specific as you can, give these steps dates too.

Finally get started, do whatever you have to do and don’t quit.

Now there are differences of opinion on whether you should write your goals down or not, whether you should write out a detailed Plan of Action or not, whether you should focus on daily activities or only on the prize. At the end of the day it’s whatever works best for you. I’ve tried all sorts and what works for me is writing my goals down once, without too many details, and then using visualization to keep my goals in mind, thinking of them as often as possible and using picture boards (also known as dream boards) with cut outs of the things I want to achieve and so on. Like I said, works for me.

I am however a great believer in constant daily activity. A little bit each day will go a long way towards hitting your goal. Always keep your main prize in mind, however don’t focus on it. Remember what I said about the journey towards a goal? It’s not the prize, it’s what you become along the way.

There are those who say you should only focus on the end goal and not worry about how to get there because if your end goal is big enough and you believe in it enough the How will take care of itself.  That may work for some, but in my experience if you only focus on the journey’s end you miss out on all the beauty spots in between and in all honesty, chances are you won’t even get started.

An architect will draw up plans for a house. The builder will look at those plans and say OK that’s what I have to achieve, that’s my end goal, but to get there I need to lay bricks every day, one by one. He’ll have his own daily target of so many bricks laid per day and will only check the plans to remind himself what the end result should look like.

To finish off here’s a few tips on goal setting to get you in the right frame of mind. 

1.      Take your goals seriously. Am I stating the obvious? Perhaps, yet there are so many people out there who are not achieving the success they deserve mainly because they treat their goals as a game, just a bit of end of year fun and so on.

All major companies take their goals seriously, very seriously and they have regular meetings to make sure they are still on track, making adjustments where necessary to improve results so by the time their financial year ends they will have hit their main targets.

The only difference between them and you is the number attending the meetings! Have regular review meetings with yourself and even enlist the help of a mentor or coach to help you stay on track.

2.     Goals or resolutions? I know I’ve covered this already but it’s worth repeating. Goals are achievable, resolutions are not. It’s that simple. Goals are within your personal control whereas resolutions have no real substance and are, therefore, uncontrollable.

“I’m going to lose 10 pounds in the next 10 days by losing a pound a day through a healthy diet and exercise” is a goal. “I want to lose weight in the next two weeks” is a resolution. Like I said earlier, both are good but don’t get them mixed up, resolutions are the seeds and goals are the all the actions needed to reap the harvest.

3.     “Aim for the stars to hit the moon” someone once said. This means dare to dream big. Have big goals as well as small goals. Big goals inspire and excite, small goals help you stay focused and are an aid to tracking your progress.

At the same time be realistic. Unless you are in business and have a massive global customer base, setting a goal to have a £1 million turnover by the end of the month isn’t realistic. Unless of course you land a multi-million-pound contract in the next few days, sadly reality isn’t always so generous.

4.     If big massive goals seem unreachable and overwhelming, you would be right. How do you eat an elephant? Easy, one bite at a time! Break your big goals down into bite-sized chunks. You can have short term goals; these would be from daily to maybe three month targets. You can have medium goals, from one to three years and there’s long term goals, possibly three to five years or beyond. You set your own timescale.

For example, let’s say you wanted to achieve a yearly turnover of £100,000 and you’ve given yourself 12 months to get there. Allowing for weekends, holidays and time off, that leaves around 230 trading days. Divide the 100,000 by 230 and you end up with a figure of roughly £435 per day or around £55 per hour for 8 hours worked. Not so scary now, is it?

5.     Commit yourself. Business coach Philip E. Humbert says “Secret goals are mere wishes or hopes or dreams.” Your goals won’t be tangible if you don’t write them down. Nor will they gain substance if you don’t tell someone about them. Keeping your goals under wraps, either because they embarrass you or you’re scared someone will hold you to account, shows a lack of commitment.

At the same time, it’s worthwhile to keep them constantly in mind whenever you go about your daily business or work on your project or follow your career. Now I don’t mean you have to fret and worry about them, that would defeat the object and only causes ulcers. You should, however, do everything you can, within reason, to reach your goals within the time frame you’ve set yourself.

Remember the New Year’s Resolutions? Some write them down, some tell others, very few do both and even less are serious about them. Those who write them and let others know tend to turn their resolutions into solid goals and commit to achieving them.

So score goals, not penalties and eat elephants bit by bit and you’ll achieve whatever realistic goal you set yourself.

Law of Attraction as an Extra Income

If you're like me and love the Law of Attraction, you might be wondering if there's any money in it. There is and I would say it's a great extra income opportunity which could develop further should you wish to.

Michael Losier is hosting a 2 day Law of Attraction Facilitator workshop on May 16 & 17 in Las Vegas. You will be taught how to give free presentations which will lead to paid seminars/workshops of your own.

For more information click HERE and you will be taken to the website where you can learn more and register - and get a $100 Early Bird discount!

You Makes Your Choice

Back in 2014 I rediscovered Bob Proctor. I say rediscovered, truth is I had paid him only scant attention until then. Now if you don’t know who Bob Proctor is he is probably the world’s foremost Prosperity teacher and speaker. You really have to watch his videos on YouTube, the guy is amazing and he’s been teaching this stuff since the 1960s so he knows his onions.

His main teaching is how our thoughts can make or break us. He talks about how we can replace the Paradigms, or ingrained habits, which hold us back and stop us from achieving greatness, with new ones.

Scientists, and those who study such things, say that the first six years of our lives are the most formative, hence they call them, unsurprisingly, the Formative Years. They have discovered that up until the age of six we accept anything we’re told as truth and without question. We soak up information, whether correct or incorrect, like a sponge. It’s only after the age of six that we start to question whether something is true or not, wrong or right. That’s why we should always be careful about what we say and do around very young children.

In fact, I would go so far as to say we should be careful, especially vocally, what we say or how react when around our unborn children for it has been noted that babies developing in the womb react to sound in a positive or negative way. 

Scientists who study child behaviour say that by the way a child reacts to situations after their first six years tends to determine not only the kind of person they are likely to develop into, but also what kind of job they’ll have and whether or not they’ll lead successful lives. Spooky stuff, right?

Obviously other factors, such as the environment we grow up in, the peer groups we associate with and personal experiences all add to the mix and add to our development and way of thinking.

All this will determine the choices we make in life and that is Bob Proctor’s point – it’s all about personal choice. No matter what situation we find ourselves in, no matter what kind of life we lead, no matter whether we are rich or poor, sick or healthy, somewhere along the line we all made personal conscious or subconscious choices leading to courses of action which culminate in the lives we now lead. Don’t get it? Let me explain it a little more.

Bob’s ‘Bible’ is the book “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill and is the basis for all his teaching and one which I have read and listened to several times over the years along with many other books and audios along similar lines. I have also attended related workshops, seminars, webinars and what have you and yet I was still more or less back to where I started – not stinking rich but filthy poor, and not just in a material sense. I couldn’t understand it, why was I not making any real progress? Why wasn’t I living the abundant lifestyle I’d set out to achieve? It was beyond me.

I’m sure I’m not alone, I’m not the only frustrated positive thinking self-helper in this world. In fact, I’ll bet many, if not most, of you reading this book are asking the self-same questions. You’ve had the same or similar experiences as I’ve had over the years. Am I right?

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve always been fascinated by the power of the mind, I wanted to know how it worked, how people could even heal themselves just by apparently thinking about it. I wanted to have that ‘power’ and use it to heal the world so we could all live in true peace and security and in harmony with each other. Whereas that may sound a bit idealistic, Pollyanna-ish and even naïve, it’s still at the root of why I want to help others to become so much more than they currently are.

As a result, from a very early age, I began to study people, became a People Watcher. I read books on psychology and anthropology and various philosophical works. I studied the Bible several times over the course of a 15-year period with Jehovah’s Witnesses, also delved into other religions and rounded all that off with some seriously deep thinking.

The conclusion? It is exactly as the wise King Solomon once wrote – “There is no new thing under the sun… for all is vanity.” I could no more straighten a crooked path or create something new than he could do even with all his great knowledge and wisdom. But, I have learned that we are not only individuals who occasionally do similar things, react in a similar way, we are also the makers of our own beds and each one of us is unique in the way we lie in them, in the choices we make. Let’s review an example of that in action.

  Let’s say you go into work and on the staff notice board is notice of an internal vacancy for a managerial position. You decide to apply because you believe you have the right skill sets needed for the job and your knowledge of the company’s operating procedures is high. You’ve proved you’re a hard worker, a top performer, and you get on well with your colleagues and management. All-in-all you believe you fulfil the criteria the post requires.

Your application is accepted and you sail through the initial interviews and are short-listed. In fact, the senior management have even hinted that you are the favourite during the final interview stages. You’re feeling well chuffed, you reckon it’s in the bag, just a matter of formality before you’re offered the post, even your colleagues are starting to congratulate you and you even start planning what you will do with the extra money the post will bring. What could possibly go wrong?

King Solomon also wrote about Pride before a Fall because what happens next could be described as your Brexit moment, something totally unexpected. For no apparent reason you have a blow up with a colleague, an absolute Ding Dong that almost comes to blows and during which you both let loose some disparaging remarks which are deemed offensive. You both end up on a disciplinary and end up with blots on your copy books. Further, you know you can kiss goodbye to that managerial post which was at your fingertips.

Why did that happen? Why did (the hypothetical) you sabotage your own efforts when victory was so close? This is what I term as The Crab Mentality. Remember those crabs in a bucket I talked about earlier? This is the personal version. It’s not just those around us who can pull us back, even cut off our pincers, but we can subconsciously do it to ourselves too.

Let’s go back to your blow up. It’s irrelevant how it started or who was the first antagonist. What is relevant is how you reacted, how you CHOSE to react at that particular time. Upon reflection you know you could have, and should have, handled the situation differently either by ignoring the provocation or biting your tongue to prevent you from being the provocateur. However, you chose to take a course of action which led to you and your colleague being disciplined and you losing the promotion you wanted.

It’s then you realise that something like this happens every time you try to move forward in life, every time you try to escape the bucket, you feel you are pulled back in some way. You think Life’s unfair, not treating you right, and it’s always somebody (or something) else’s fault. You’re then disgruntled, another choice, and it affects your performance and you get put on a Performance Review and, before you know it, you’ve left that company for pastures new. 

Does any of that have a familiar feel to it? It does to me because I was that hypothetical guy. Oh yes, my inner crab well and truly severed my pincers on that occasion! I had more or less got the post, was actually working in the role on a three-month probationary period when I had a fall out with my shift manager, just before my final interview. Needless to say that interview didn’t turn out so well.

And the cause of the blow out? Shift performance figures. I’d made a mistake in my hourly calculations and I went all defensive and let it get to me, blaming others for my lack of understanding. All I had to do was admit I didn’t have a clue, but I came from a point of weakness and tried to wing it instead, made a hash of it and a fool of myself. My anger was directed more at me than at my shift manager, although he played his part too.

I know I’m not the only one who has ruined their career chances in such a way. The news is full of celebrities, politicians and other note-worthies who have done something really stupid which has ended their career just as they were ‘getting famous’ or starting a new important or high profile role. President Bill Clinton and Monica, Boris Becker and the broom cupboard, George Michael and shop windows and a whole host more.

With all of us in that situation somewhere deep within our subconscious an event happened which was to have this seemingly everlasting effect and which is there solely to prevent us from being the success we consciously want, acting from a misguided form of protection.

The subconscious, remember, doesn’t know truth from untruth, fact from fiction, wrong from right. Like a computer it reacts upon the information given at any particular time and if that information says it has to take a certain form of action when a certain situation crops up, that’s exactly and dutifully what it will do. The irony is, we probably programmed it ourselves based on what we learned in those formative years or through personal experience in our peer groups and environment.

The question is, can anything be done to rectify this and the answer is yes. That’s the whole point of Bob Proctor’s teaching, to enable us to change those unwanted paradigms, replace them with more fortuitous ones, reprogram our subconscious minds. Then we can start enjoying the real life we were meant to have, the one the Good Books all talk about.

My Personal Law of Attraction Journey Update #2

Update #2, been a while in coming however there are good reasons for that. Firstly, as I explain in the video, I discovered I was focusing on too many Desires at once which meant progress has been slow. Secondly, over the last few weeks I’ve also been more focused on finishing and publishing my book, more about that in a bit.

There hasn’t been a great deal happening since my last update, I’ve attracted mainly small things such as shopping bargains, more Social Media Interaction, a new customer – but nothing significant. This started to get me down a bit, if I’m being honest, and I was wondering if what had happened regarding my eviction was just a flash in the pan.

Then, almost 2 weeks ago, I was watching Michael Losier’s Friday Facebook Live Hangout Show and the question came up about how many Desires we can work on at any one time. Is it ok to have multiple Desires? Michael’s answer was yes, however there is a price to pay.

As I explain in the video, when you work on multiple Desires it’s like spinning plates, get a few going and you have to keep running back and forth to keep them spinning. Working on multiple Desires is similar, in the sense of where our focus or attention is going. Remember, the definition of Law of Attraction is “Whatever you give your Energy, Time and Focus to is what you will attract, whether positive or negative.” So, by giving my attention to 5,6 or 7 Desires all at once, I was “spinning plates” and actually hindering the Law of Attraction by slowing my own progress down.

Now, as a result of what Michael advised, I’m only focusing on one of my Desires, and it already feels different. That makes sense because, when I was focused on my housing situation, I wasn’t focusing on anything else and, as a result, great things happened.

Which is a nice transition onto my Eviction story and when I’ll be posting it. As I said in the video, I haven’t plucked up the courage to record my story yet. I’m a very private person and it’s not something I would normally share, not even to my friends – most of whom have no idea that I was even in such a position. However, a way around that is to teach what I did to prevent my eviction and tell my story at the same time. I’ll split it into 3 or 4 parts, easier that way, so Part One will be coming soon.

I mentioned my book earlier. It’s called The Happiness Secret, Precepts for Inner Peace & Tranquility and I’ve finally finished and published it on Amazon and Kindle. This is also another reason why I’ve been distracted as it took a bit longer than expected. Anyway, here’s the deal: 

You can get the paperback version HERE or the Kindle version HERE OR if you would like a FREE PDF copy then all you have to do is join my Facebook Group #JezUpYourLife andyou’ll automatically get a copy via Messenger.

OK, that’s it for this time, bye for now!

Don't Hold Onto Resentment

For decades, ever since I was 16, I had an unhealthy resentment for my step-father. Why? Because he took me out of school and into a working life. 

Back then I was in the top O-Level class in my school, was doing very well and had just completed my mocks with 9 passes out of 9, all with decent grades. It would have meant me taking my A-Levels and possibly on to University where my studies would lead to either an acting career or journalism.

                                                   (Speaking before a room of Entrepreneurs)

My step-father, however, had decided that as I was now 16 I could start an apprenticeship instead and bring money into the house. I left school halfway through my final year, at Christmas, and started training as a car mechanic. I was not best pleased.

At first, though, I enjoyed the work, the City & Guilds course I was on (got a distinction in my first year) and, of course, getting paid. Sadly, that line of work came to an end when I had a run-in with the MD and was sacked. It was then when I really started to resent the fact that I, in essence, had become a school dropout, an unqualified minion in the eyes of future employers. I began to feel inferior because I didn’t have any bits of paper to say otherwise. I even lied to people, saying I had both O and A-levels just to make them think better of me. I didn’t want to admit, or accept, the truth.

Since then I have got various qualifications through my military career and work experience, have taken several courses and hold a Diploma in Freelance Journalism and am currently working on a Philosophy degree with Open University.

As for my step-father, thanks to my Reiki training I’ve been able to forgive him although sadly not in person. In hindsight, he actually did me a massive favour because I’ve learned more about life through personal experience than I would have done in any classroom. I’ve been able to ‘study’ people first hand rather than through the pages of books or through lectures.