The
Halfway Point
Mariupol,
the southern Ukrainian sea post, was bombed by Russia. The January 6th Committee
subpoenas Pat Cipollone. President Joe Biden is in Germany. Ketanji Brown
Jackson is sworn in as the first Black woman on the Supreme Court. Wall Street
investors are suffering from whiplash and fear of recession. Isn’t it here
already?
Stop.
Stop the madness. Stop focusing on this chaos.
Bring
you attention back to yourself. Focus your attention on you and your goals.
This
is our halfway point.
It’s
the beginning of July. Have your achieved any of your goals?
Have
you even been “working” on them? Have you looked at them since the first of the
year? Did you write them down?
There
is endless information that says having goals drive you to achieve. That they
keep you focused on the results you want.
A
Harvard Business Study found that the 3% of graduates from their MBA program who
had their goals written down, ended up earning ten times as much as the other
97% put together, just ten years after graduation.
There
is a definite correlation between writing down goals and developing plans for
those goals and massive achievement.
With
that backdrop, let me take a slightly different angle.
This
is the halfway point of the year.
Be
still. Sit with yourself. Block out the world’s confusion. It will always be
there.
Ask
yourself, “why haven’t I achieved my goals?”
Be
honest. You don’t want it that badly, do you? Not willing to be inconvenienced
to achieve it? Don’t feel like changing your schedule? No money saved to go back
to school? Too painful to create a budget – limits spending. And the list goes
on.
So,
we lie to ourselves.
It’s
still the halfway point of the year. Why can’t you achieve your goals?
That
word “why” is the problem. That word “why” is important for achieving our
goals.
Bob
Molle, Olympic medal winner and author of Get
Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable, says that within each goal there are 3
parts: the will, the being and the function.
The
WILL is the WHY. It’s the spirit.
The
BEING is the WHO. Who do you need to be (or become) to accomplish this goal?
And
the FUNCTION is the HOW. Finally, what do you need to do to reach this goal?
Knowing
what we need to do and doing it is very different.
That’s
the gap!
Knowing
our WHY will help us close the gap to achieving our goals. That WHY is the
deep-down, personal motivation for what we do.
Until
we identify our WHYs, we won’t be able to get clear about our
WHATs and HOWs.
Goals
meet with resistance. We face roadblocks, detours, even crashes, but we can
press on or push through if our WHY is powerful enough.
Many
of us set solid, realistic goals we never achieve. Why is that? We are not
motivated by our WHY!
If
it’s not personal, we’re not driven to achieve it.
With
each of our goals there should be a strong, “emotional WHY” – the rationale
behind wanting to do this thing.
We’re
at the halfway point of the year.
Find
that goal sheet, if you wrote any goals at the beginning of the year. If you
didn’t write any down, write just one important goal now.
Ask
yourself, “Why is it important to me? What is at stake?”
Do
not task lists. Focus on your WHYs.
For example:
Goal:
In the next 10 days, I will interview 5 consulting firms so I can pick their
brains.– Because I need to get to know people who have successful niche
businesses, so I can grow my practice and quit my day job.
This
is the halfway point of the year. Make that emotional connection with one of
your goals.
I
wrote my goals the beginning of the year. But I did not create a plan for each
one.
Now,
I’m focusing on my #1 goal.
WHY
do I want to achieve it?
I’m
writing down my emotional “WHY” reasons.
Keep
writing your emotional reasons for wanting to achieve your goal.
Will
you walk over “hot coals” to achieve that goal? Dogged determination…if that’s
what it
takes!