How to reach your goals

Image: Week­end Inspi­ra­tion by muha…

By now you will know that I am a ’new-age’ type of a char­ac­ter. I have a lot of inter­est in spir­i­tu­al­ity, moti­va­tion, and other top­ics related to my per­sonal and spir­i­tual devel­op­ment. A few days ago, while read­ing an inter­view with Dan Mill­man, I found a very pow­er­ful quote about how to reach our goals (link ). This quote made me reflect on some of the views com­monly held in the Self-Help-Actrualisation-Movement about achiev­ing; and I realised that some­times less is more. Read on if you want to chal­lenge some of what many peo­ple accept as ’Wis­dom’ on the topic of suc­cess and reach­ing your goals.

Two paths for reach­ing your goals

Let’s start with what Dan said in the interview:

To progress toward your goals, please choose one of the fol­low­ing meth­ods: (1) You can find a way to quiet your mind, cre­ate empow­er­ing beliefs and pos­i­tive self-talk, find your focus and affirm your power to free your emo­tions and visu­al­ize pos­i­tive out­comes so that you can develop the con­fi­dence to gen­er­ate the courage to find the deter­mi­na­tion to make the com­mit­ment to feel suf­fi­ciently moti­vated to do what­ever it is you need to do. (2) Or you can just do it.

In every goal you set your­self to achieve, there will be these 2 ways to achieve it. One is sim­ple, one is com­plex. Which one do you usu­ally choose?

What ’The Secret’ never told you: The Power of Action

Unless you’ve been liv­ing in a cave, you prob­a­bly have heard about ’The Secret’, and either read the book; watched the movie; or at the very least heard of the very basic prin­ci­ples it pro­poses. When I saw the movie, I was inspired. Here is some­one who under­stands the power of pos­i­tive think­ing, and has man­aged to cre­ate a movie with Hollywood-style pro­duc­tion qual­ity. I was excited to think of how many peo­ple would be touched by this movie, and what a dif­fer­ence it would make in other people’s lives. But my per­spec­tive was some­how trans­formed after read­ing the quote above from Dan Mill­man. I realised that there is a very pow­er­ful ele­ment that the movie missed alto­gether: The Power of Action. All the pos­i­tive think­ing in the world is unlikely to help you achieve your goals unless you use it as a moti­va­tion for tak­ing action. Visu­al­i­sa­tions; Moti­va­tion; and Pos­i­tive think­ing will likely put you in the right state of mind to notice oppor­tu­ni­ties that before you would not have been aware of. But they will not ’mag­i­cally trans­form’ the world around you while you sit in your couch digest­ing the last bag of mind­less real­ity television.

Often times, sim­ple is better

Yes, some­times the sim­ple path is the bet­ter path. And visu­al­is­ing, cre­at­ing empow­erig beliefs, devel­op­ing more self-confidence, and becom­ing com­mit­ted can become unnec­es­sary steps on your way to suc­cess. What if you already have estab­lished a mind­set of pos­i­tive think­ing? What if you already have empow­er­ing beliefs? Going down that path is cre­at­ing a lot of unnec­es­sary redun­dancy. Let’s take 2 sim­ple exam­ples: Loos­ing weight, and Dou­bling your income. In the first case, you may know what needs to get done, why and how. But you’ve just been too lazy to actu­ally do it. Maybe some visu­al­i­sa­tion will moti­vate you enough to get on top of it and start a health­ier eat­ing & exer­cise regime. But truth is you prob­a­bly sim­ply need to get on with it and ’Just do it’. Dou­bling your income, on the other hand, may require tak­ing the first path. Becom­ing more in tune with oppor­tu­ni­ties to dou­ble your income, and then hav­ing the courage to fol­low them; the deter­mi­na­tion to stick with what appears like a high-stakes bet; and to stay the track for long enough to give it a chance of work­ing, may take some seri­ous psy­cho­log­i­cal weight lift­ing before the main event. In cases like this, the first path out­lined by Dan may be more con­ducive to a great outcome.

Make a choice at the start

If sim­ple is often times bet­ter, then we owe it to our­selves to think for a minute or two which path is required for the goal in con­sid­er­a­tion. The five min­utes you need to spend mak­ing a con­scious choice may save you hun­dreds of hours on your path to suc­cess. And remem­ber Dan’s words to reach suc­cess, you can “find a way to quiet your mind, cre­ate empow­er­ing beliefs and pos­i­tive self-talk, find your focus and affirm your power to free your emo­tions and visu­al­ize pos­i­tive out­comes so that you can develop the con­fi­dence to gen­er­ate the courage to find the deter­mi­na­tion to make the com­mit­ment to feel suf­fi­ciently moti­vated to do what­ever it is you need to do; or you can just do it”. It really is your choice.

Links

Note to loyal read­ers: This post is a re-write of a pre­vi­ous post that only had the orig­i­nal quote from Dan’s inter­view. I hope you enjoy the addi­tional value-add of my reflections.

Tagged as: Achieving, Goals, Life, Life skills, Productivity, Reflections, Thoughts