What can you do to stay on your game? How can you make sure that you are working on what’s the most important? There are only 6 months left of 2021 so what is the status of your goals since January 2021 and how are you progressing on these? Let’s imagine that you have completed part of your goals while others are still in progress. How are you feeling about that? Do you feel that you, as a captain of your ship, need to change the direction? Or that the ship is actually going in a good direction so all you need to do is to keep working and be persistent?
What I would like to share with you today is the ability to do all the good things you can in life, everything that you have learned and steer the ship in the right direction.
- Use “5 x 3” technique
- Become a master of tracking your time
- Choose the right followers
1. 5 x 3 technique (3 goals, 3 actions, 3 rewards, 3 verification, 3 supporters)
This is a very powerful tool that you can use when you want to see results faster.
And it is not 1 nor 5 goals that you want to achieve, these are 3 goals. If you are more experienced in setting the goals you can have 3 for your personal life and 3 for your professional life, personally this works for me.
Once you have these 3 goals, next to them write 3 actions that you would do every week to achieve these goals and more importantly, schedule them in your calendar. For example, on Tuesday, from 7-9 I will be writing text for my website. And then for at least 2-3 months schedule it in your calendar. The mistake I used to make was that these slots were in my calendar for 2-3 weeks but not for the 2-3 months and that was not enough to create the habit because there will always be some more interesting opportunity or you will not feel like working. However once it is in the calendar the chance that you will do it is much higher.
So write down the goals, then write down the actions to it and schedule them in the calendar. The last two areas you will write down are 3 rewards for achieving each of these goals. Not one reward for all, but one reward for each of the goals because you will work hard to achieve these goals and you deserve to be rewarded for each of them. The idea behind it is that the reward would help you to reach the goal and will guide you through the moments when you will “not feel like doing it”. And remember to make the reward exciting!
In order for you to stay on the path, you need to regularly verify that you are still on the path. So the last part of this technique is to create in your calendar daily, weekly and monthly reviews with yourself and your goals. From my experience it is easy to do daily but much harder to do monthly however you would not believe how important and motivating this is. If you are looking for motivation, this is the way to go forward. Every day, I look back and see how you have been doing, what you have achieved and what went well or what could be improved. Usually it takes me less than 20 min. The next thing I do is every week I look back and see where I am making progress and where I am procrastinating. This is also time to remind yourself about your goals, about your rewards and also saying to yourself,”Hey, I achieved this or that”. Your memories will cause you to automatically connect to that experience and you will feel the rush of endorphins again. The more you remind yourself about your success the more motivated you will become. Full stop. The monthly reviews is a big topic because it may feel a bit scary for the beginning. Did I do well enough, did I help like I wanted, did I earn as much as I wanted, did I connect with all the people I wanted? But do not get discouraged, the more scary it looks, the better it is. Even though you have not achieved everything 100%, the most precious gem is that you will get the awareness of where you are, what you are doing, in other words, you are the captain of the ship and you are checking how you are navigating your life as a captain of this ship. You can use your own notebook or you can buy a planner from one of the coaches out there. I am using High-Performance Planner by Brendon Burchard.
And the last thing is tell your 3 people from your “trusted circle” (friends and family) about your goals so that they can ask you about it and support you.
So do not wait, even though you do not feel like it, take a piece of paper and write down 3 goals for the next 60-90 days (2-3 months) and follow this technique!
2. Become a master of tracking your time with timer
I would like to emphasise that time is your friend and that mastering it actually means that you will like being disciplined in how you spend your time because that circles back to the progress you will make with your goals. I would like to share my technique with you.
Using a kitchen timer on the string, like a necklace, is the best way for me to track my time. Why? It is close, practical, light, looks good, makes me feel that I am mastering my time as I am keeping track of it and what you keep track of, you treat better. This is also related to the universal law, what grows is what where your energy and attention go. Everyone heard that “money is your friend” but even though you say that you will not be watching TV for 2 hours, checking news, browsing, shopping “ONLY this one thing”, your know that one thing leads to the other thing and suddenly it si not 10 min but 30 mins of browsing. And it is enough that you do this couple of times per day and you have those 2 hours of the TV covered. So make a habit of managing your time well.
3. Choose the right followers
This is more of a reminder of how authority and leadership changes during our life. When we are children, first it is our family, friends, then school and our peers you are looking for inspiration and advice. With the boom and access to smartphones these days, lots of youngsters and adults have access to information they do not know how to handle which may sometimes cause confusion on how to create your opinion As adults we listen to the politicians, religious and other leaders who can help us where we want to be as well as to some family members and peers. The reason why I am mentioning this third point is to make you aware of who you listen to the most, apart from your intuition (soul) and subconscious mind (body) so that you make the right decision on your path of accomplishing your goals.
