Personal Development;Life Enhancement;Achievement
Posts tagged des moines iowa coaching
Have You Checked In Lately?
Jun 1st
“With ordinary talent and extraordinary perseverance, all things are attainable”. ~Thomas Foxwell Buxton
How are you doing this year? Specifically, how are you doing with the goals that you set out to accomplish this year? Five months of this year are already behind us and if you are off track there is still time to make adjustments and bring it all home.
For me, I set some some very challenging goals for this year. You can look at them here and also read some of the background about the creation of them: Jack’s Original Goals for 2009. So how am I doing? I already have some mixed results.
Here again are my top five goals for the next twelve months:
- Health: I will return to my optimal bodyweight before the end of 2009.
- Family: My wife and I will take our family to New York for a great vacation to celebrate my elder daughter’s completion of her graduate program.
- Business: I will blog 5 days per week – every week of 2009.
- Finances: I will earn more in 2009 than I ever have before – at least 25% more.
- Fun: I will run in the USA’s largest cross-country race: The Living History Farms Seven Miler.
Here is a quick recap:
Goal 1) This is a health focused goal – my largest challenge in the past decade. It has now become impossible to achieve this goal in the remaining 7 months. I need to look at what happened here, make adjustments and recommit (I have already done this, but I will explain what I did and what I am doing so you can see the process. You won’t always get your goals done in the time that you originally allocate. How you react when this happens is critical!)
Goal 2) This is a family and fun related goal. We are well on track to making this goal happen.
Goal 3) This is a business related goal. This is a complex goal – a seemingly simple task with multiple rewards and changes. This goal cannot happen now although the results behind the goal are exceeding my expectations. Again, I will adjust and show you what I am doing.
Goal 4) This is a finances or money goal. I am certainly going to exceed this goal for the year.
Goal 5) This is a fun and health related goal. I can achieve some of this goal – but not all of it. We will talk about it.
Well, that is a new beginning for me. How about for you? Come back next time and see an example of what to do when you aren’t on track.
Till next time…Jack
“Don’t be afraid to give your best to what seemingly are small jobs. Every time you conquer one it makes you that much stronger. If you do the little jobs well, the big ones will tend to take care of themselves.” ~Dale Carnegie
Planning for Success Part Three
Feb 5th
“Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.” ~Albert Einstein
The last entry ending with a description of and homework for “capture.” Did you do a capture around a goal and why it is important to you? Here is my capture for why I intend to return to my optimal bodyweight by the end of this year:
- I am tired of being tired.
- I want the energy and vitality to really live my life again.
- I want to be able to jog again.
- I want to be able to play tennis again.
- I want to compete again in running road races.
- I want to look great in a swimsuit.
- I want to climb Mount Kilimanjaro.
- I want to run with the bulls in Spain.
- I want to be around to play with my grandchildren.
- I want to feel attractive again.
- I want to feel great about my appearance on stage when I am working and performing.
- I want my family to be proud of me.
- I want to feel energized and strong.
- I want the energy to live my dreams.
- I want to feel how great it feels to be an athlete again.
- I want to buy a new elegant wardrobe at my ideal weight.
- I want to see the wonder in the eyes of people when they see me again.
- I want my mother to see me in shape again while she is still living.
- I don’t want to get diabetes and this runs in my family and being overweight makes it much worse.
- I want to live a long life and have the energy and health to really enjoy it.
That may be enough for this entry. If you read those over, you will find that some of these are things that I want to move towards – positive motivation – and some of them are things that I want to move away from – negative motivation. When I was first studying NLP they taught us both positive and negative motivation strategies. The also taught us to create a compulsion – a place where you are simultaneously driven away from what you do not want and pulled towards what you do want. Although I am not going to create a near phobic response More >
Your Vision of the Future Part Eight
Jan 29th
“A successful person is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks that others throw at him or her.” ~David Brinkley
Did you get a chance to read through my personal vision for this next year? If not, take a few minutes and read it over; you will find it as part of yesterday’s entry. I want to point out a few of the special features of my vision statement for the coming year that you might consider incorporating into yours.
- Everything in my vision assumes that I have already been successful. I mentally want to be in the place where I expect to succeed. Sure, something could happen that prevents me from achieving one or more of my goals, but every day, as I read my vision, I am going to put myself in the mental frame of mind that I succeeded – that I found a way and made it happen.
- I talk in my vision about how it feels when I have made my goal into my reality. I talk about how great it feels to have achieved this. I am creating an anchor of feeling great that I am attaching to thinking about each of my goals and to taking action on each of my goals. More >
Your Vision of the Future Part Seven
Jan 28th
“Vision is the art of seeing the invisible.” ~Jonathan Swift
I thought I would share my personal vision today for the next twelve months. Seeing my example, built from my top five goals might be useful.
Here again are my top five goals for the next twelve months:
- Health: I will return to my optimal bodyweight before the end of 2009.
- Family: My wife and I will take our family to New York for a great vacation to celebrate my elder daughter’s completion of her graduate program.
- Business: I will blog 5 days per week – every week of 2009.
- Finances: I will earn more in 2009 than I ever have before – at least 25% more.
- Fun: I will run in the USA’s largest cross-country race: The Living History Farms Seven Miler.
Here is the vision that I built from those goals:
It is the morning of December 31st and I have had a marvelous year. I feel More >
Your Vision of the Future Part Five
Jan 23rd
“If you can find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn’t lead anywhere.” ~Frank A. Clark
How did you do with selecting your five most important goals for the coming year? I know that this was challenging for some of you – it was very challenging for me the first time I did this exercise. Remember, you are not giving up on your other goals for the year – you are committing to five goals that you will absolutely focus on achieving and the process of doing that will help many if not all of your other goals to happen along the way.
So, I am going to assume that you have selected five goals for the coming year. We are going to be using these to create a vision for what your life will be like in twelve months – once you have manifested these goals in your life. Here is your assignment and it does not need to be done perfectly, it just needs to be done: Write a story, your own life story, for a time twelve months from now. You have successfully achieved your five most important goals. Talk about what you feel like with these goals achieved. Talk about what having these goals manifested in your life allows you to do. Talk about the positive effects in your life from these goals now being done. Talk about whatever motivates you; especially talk about how great it feels to you and how great it feels for the significant others in your life to see you and experience you with these goals completed.
Have fun with this. We will fine-tune it next time and talk about how to use this vision.
Till next time…Jack
“Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave.” ~Rainer Maria Rilke
Your Vision of the Future Part Four
Jan 22nd
“Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be.” ~Grandma Moses
Did you balance out your goals so that you have a nice mix of short, medium and long-term things written down? Great! Now here is your next task: I want you to go thru all of your goals for the next twelve months and choose five of them to focus on. Choose the five most exciting and compelling and empowering goals. Many of my seminar attendees have a problem making this decision at first. “But I want all of my goals!” – I hear this all of the time. And I understand! I want you to have all of your goals, but you cannot focus on all of them at one time and be successful. It just doesn’t work.
What you can do is choose the five goals, spread across the categories of your life, that by accomplishing in the next year, you will almost as a side effect accomplish your other goals. I call these goals the drivers. As an example, here is a recap of my Top Five Commitments for 2009:
- Health: I will return to my optimal bodyweight before the end of 2009
- Family: My wife and I will take our family to New York for a great vacation to celebrate my elder daughter’s completion of her graduate program
- Business: I will blog 5 days per week – every week of 2009
- Finances: I will earn more in 2009 than I ever have before – at least 25% more
- Fun: I will run in the USA’s largest cross-country race: The Living History Farms Seven Miler.
Are these all of my goals for 2009? Not even close! But by focusing on these, by putting my concentration here, I can virtually guarantee that I will succeed in manifesting these goals and along the way, most if not all of my other goals for 2009 will also happen.
So, go ahead, choose your “Top Five” for 2009. Make sure that they are not all in one category and make sure that they are exciting. If they aren’t exciting, then rewrite them until they are. Next time we will take these goals and put them into a workable vision – something that you can use and enjoy and benefit from every day.
Till next time…Jack
“My life has a superb cast but I can’t figure out the plot.” ~Ashleigh Brilliant
New Year’s Resolutions Part Five
Jan 9th
“Let us love winter, for it is the spring of genius.” ~Pietro Aretino
Well hello. I am looking out at a beautiful winter scene as I write this entry. I spent much of my youth in Chicago and the winters there were often quite extreme. I can remember one Christmas break from college, I was working at Amtrak between college semesters, and we had a nice cold snap. For two weeks the temperature hovered near 50 below zero (Fahrenheit) and with wind chill – wow! It turned out to be a real blessing for me. Amtrak could not turn off the diesel locomotives, it was so cold that they could not be restarted, so I was paid overtime everyday to stay and tend things. For a college kid, this extra money was a great gift. I am still grateful more than 30 years later.
I was thinking about this time today when others around me were complaining about the weather. Winter doesn’t bother me. I know it will end. I know it is a natural part of life and needed for all of the plants and animals that are native to this area to rest and rejuvenate. I also know that I cannot change it and I will not allow something that I cannot change or influence to have control of my moods. I was also thinking about how sweet spring will be after this cold winter. So, thanks winter!
I was also thinking that every rough patch in my life, and there were some very rough patches indeed, always had a gift for me – if I was smart enough to find it. Even looking back at the darkest times in my life, poor, getting divorced, living in the back of my car, fighting for custody of my daughter – there were gifts for me in that experience. Now I was not smart enough to see them, those gifts, at the time. It took years of growth and reflection before I could achieve that place. Today, when I find myself in a rough patch, I ask myself two questions: 1) What is great about this and 2) What could be great about this if I looked at it from the right perspective? And you know what? There always is a gift waiting for me!
Last time I had you put your 5 driving goals on the front of three by five index cards. Here’s why. I want you to put the following questions on the back of the index cards:
- Why is this goal important to me? Above and beyond the goal itself, what will the accomplishment of this goal allow me to do or be or experience or feel?
- How great will it feel when this goal is accomplished?
- What do I need to change about myself to ensure that I accomplish this goal?
- What is the most important thing that I need to do today, to move myself along the path of achieving this goal?
- What else can I do to make it even more certain that I will achieve this goal?
- What can I do to make sure that I have fun, a blast, as I work to achieve this goal?
So, add these questions to the back of the cards. Do you have that done? Great! Now here is the critical part. Keep the cards with you and every single day, at least a couple of times per day, review your goals, all five of them, and then flip the card over and answer the questions. Within a short time you will feel the difference, you will begin to find the answers you need, make the changes required and you are very likely to achieve those goals! I know lots of more techniques, but I know of none easier and more certain at the same time.
And now a bit of fun and trivia: Some of you know that I am related to Robert Burns the Scottish Poet and that I have visited his hometown and gravesite in Scotland. Did you know that when you sing, on New Year’s Eve, “Auld Lang Syne”you are singing one of Robert’s most beloved creations? Since this is the last entry that will talk about New Year’s Resolutions, at least for awhile, I thought it would be fun to give you the poem/song here (sing with gusto!):
Should old acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind ?
Should old acquaintance be forgot,
and days of auld lang syne?
CHORUS:
For auld lang syne, my dear,
for auld lang syne,
we’ll take a cup of kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.
And surely you’ll buy your pint cup!
And surely I’ll buy mine!
And we’ll take a cup o’ kindness yet,
and days of auld lang syne?
CHORUS
We two have run about the slopes,
and picked the daisies fine;
But we’ve wandered many a weary foot,
since days of auld lang syne?
CHORUS
We two have paddled in the stream,
from morning sun till dine;
But seas between us broad have roared,
since days of auld lang syne?
CHORUS
And there’s a hand my trusty friend!
And give us a hand o’ thine!
And we’ll take a right good-will draught,
and days of auld lang syne?
Till next time…Jack
“Antisthenes says that in a certain faraway land the cold is so intense that words freeze as soon as they are uttered, and after some time then thaw and become audible, so that words spoken in winter go unheard until the next summer.” ~Plutarch, Moralia
Goals Part 4
Oct 12th
“Birthdays are good for you. Statistics show that the people who have the most live the longest.” ~Larry Lorenzoni
I recently had a birthday and I found myself in a very self-reflective mood that day. I believe that I have significant control over my emotional states and reactions and I could have changed this one, since it showed up unplanned, but I decided to go with self-reflection and see what it offered me.
It offered me this: What could I do – achieve, by my next birthday, that would be a wonderful gift to myself? I found this exciting to think about. I have an entire year to work. Now, what can I do in that time, for me, that will make my next birthday a real treat? This was fun! I spent the next hour or so walking around and doing a mini-goal setting session.
What could I achieve related to:
My body – my physical health?
My finances – my savings and investments?
My business – my coaching and writing and speaking?
My family?
My skills and talents – my toolbox of things that I know how to do?
It isn’t that I haven’t looked at all of these things many times in the past. I have. I am a dedicated and habitual goal setter. The difference was that I was looking at the achieving of the goals as a gift – a gift to myself! This change in perspective was powerful for me! Instead of looking at my goals as something that I needed to do, now I had added the feeling that achieving these things was something I got to do and it was a gift. I felt different and more empowered.
So, let me ask you this: What would you like to achieve, before your next birthday, that would be a gift to yourself? What would you like to do that once done, would make you feel great, or proud, or free, or satisfied or whatever way you would like to feel? Try this. If you only have a few days until your birthday, then choose something small – perhaps something you have been procrastinating – and do it and get it done and then on your birthday – celebrate!
If you have more time, then you can go thru an entire goals setting process as I am laying it out here and add the perspective of a gift to yourself. I believe it will make a difference for both you and I.
Till next time…Jack
“Inside every older person is a younger person wondering what happened.” ~Jennifer Yane