Tony Robbins Goal Setting - Unlimited Power

Goal Setting Anthony Robbins
Summary

You need to first consciously decide what you want. Knowing what you want determines what you get. This is important, you must be sure of what it is that you want and that you are striving for and state it clearly and definitively.

To go beyond present limitations, we must first experience being more in our minds, feel, live as if, and changes in our life will follow suit.

1) State outcome in positive terms. - Say what you want to happen. (Not what you don't want to happen)

2) Be specific as possible. - Look, sound, feel, smell, taste, etc. Give as much detail as humanly possible.

3) Have an evidence procedure. - How you will look and feel. What you will see and hear in your external world once achieved. You must live yourself into the achieved goal. Imagine yourself already being there, what it would be like having achieved your goal.
(EXAMPLE : If it is a Merc SL65 that you aimed for, you must be able to feel what it feels like sitting in the car, looking through the front and rear windscreen, into the side rear-view mirrors, the windscreen rear-view mirrors, the touch and feel of the leather seats, the steering, you must get the smell and the sense of feelings that you feel sitting in and driving the car, see the other people sitting in the car with you.)

4) Be in control. - Initiated & controlled by you. Not dependent on others to change. Things you can affect directly. Your goals should be achievable in terms of what you yourself are willing and capable of doing, not dependent upon what others must do in order that you can achieve your goals. Never bring anything into it where you would need to depend upon others to achieve it. You only state your goals from your own personal perspective.

5) Verify outcome is ecologically sound and desirable. - Must benefit you and other people. Goals must be for the good of yourself, other people and the environment. The more advantageous it is to the more people the more successful would be the outcome.

FULL CHAPTER for background
LIMITATION DISENGAGE: WHAT DO YOU WANT?

'There is only one success — to be able to spend your life in your own way. ” — Christopher M or ley

In the first section of this book, I’ve shared with you what I believe are the tools of ultimate power. You now have the techniques and insights that will allow you to discover how people produce results and how to model their actions so that you can produce similar results. You’ve learned how to direct your mind and support your body. You now know how to achieve whatever you want and how to help others achieve what they want.

That leaves a major question. What do you want? What do the people you love and care about want? The second part of this book asks these questions, makes these distinctions, and finds these paths so you can use your abilities in the most elegant, effective, directed ways. You already know how to be an expert marksman. Now you need to find the right target.

Powerful tools aren’t much use if you don’t have a good idea what you want to use them for. You could find the greatest chainsaw ever invented and wander out into the forest. What are you going to do with it? If you know what trees you want to cut down and why, you’re in control of your situation. If you don’t, you have a fabulous tool that’s all but worthless.

We learned earlier that the quality of your life is the quality of your communication. In this section, we will talk about refining the communication skills that will allow you to use your abilities in the most effective way for the situation at hand. It’s important to be able to map out a strategy so you know precisely where you want to go — and know the things that can help get you there.

Before we go on, let’s review what we’ve learned thus far. The main thing you now know is that there are no limits to what you can do. Your key is power of modeling. Excellence can be duplicated. If other people can do something, all you need to do is model them with precision and you can do exactly the same thing, whether it’s walking on fire, making a million dollars, or developing a perfect relationship. How do you model? First you must realize that all results are produced by some specific set of actions. Every effect has a cause. If you exactly reproduce someone’s actions — both internal and external — then you, too, can produce the same final result. You begin by modeling someone’s mental actions, starting with his belief system, then you go on to his mental syntax, and finally you mirror his physiology. Do all three effectively and elegantly, and you can do just about anything.

You’ve learned that success or failure begins with belief. Whether you believe you can do something or you believe you can’t, you’re right. Even if you have the skills and resources to do something, once you tell yourself you can’t, you shut down the neurological pathways that can make it possible. If you tell yourself you can do something, you open up the pathways that can provide you with the resources for achievement.

You’ve learned the Ultimate Success Formula: Know your outcome, develop the sensory acuity to know what you’re getting, develop the flexibility to change your behavior until you find out what works — and you will reach your outcome. If you don’t get it, have you failed? Of course not. Like a helmsman guiding his boat, you just need to change your behavior until you get what you want.

You’ve learned, about the power of being in a resourceful state, and you’ve learned how to adjust your physiology and your internal representations so they serve you, enable you, embolden you to achieve your desires. You know that if you’re committed to success, you’ll create it.

“ People are not lazy. They simply have impotent goals — that is, goals that do not inspire theni. ” — Anthony Robbins

An important point worth adding is that there’s an incredible dynamism inherent in this process. The more resources you develop, the more power you have; the more strength you feel, the more you can tap into even greater resources and even more powerful states.

There’s an absolutely fascinating study that deals with something called the “100th monkey syndrome.” In his book LifeTide, published in 1979, biologist Lyall Watson recounted what happened in a monkey tribe on an island near Japan after a new food, freshly dug sweet potatoes covered with sand, was introduced into their midst. Since their other food required no preparation, the monkeys were reluctant to eat the dirty potatoes. Then one monkey solved the problem by washing the potatoes in a stream and teaching her mother and playmates to do the same. Then something remarkable happened. Once a certain number of monkeys — about one hundred of them — had acquired this knowledge, other monkeys who had no contact with them at all, even monkeys living on other islands, began to do the same thing. There was no physical way they could have interacted with the original monkeys. But somehow the behavior spread.

Now this is not unique. There are numerous cases where individuals with no way of coming in contact with one another act in remarkable unison. One physicist will get an idea, and simultaneously three physicists elsewhere will get the same idea. How does this happen? No one knows precisely, but many prominent scientists and brain researchers, such as physicist David Bohm and biologist Rupert Sheldrake, believe there is a collective consciousness we all can pull from — and that when we align ourselves through belief, through focus, through optimal physiology, we find a way to dip into this collective consciousness.*

Our bodies, our brains, and our states are like a tuning fork in harmony with that higher level of existence. So the better attuned you are, the better aligned you are, the more you can tap into this rich knowledge and feeling. Just as information filters to us from our unconscious, it may also filter in to us from completely outside of ourselves if we’re in a resourcefulenough state to receive it.

A key part of this process is knowing what you want. The unconscious mind is constantly processing information in such a way as to move us in particular directions. Even at the unconscious level, the mind is distorting, deleting, and generalizing. So before the mind can work efficiently, we must develop our perception of the outcomes we expect to reach. Maxwell Maltz calls this “psycho-cybernetics” in his well-known book of the same title. When the mind has a defined target, it can focus and direct and refocus and redirect until it reaches its intended goal. If it doesn’t have a defined target, its energy is squandered. It’s like the person with the world’s greatest chainsaw who has no idea why he’s standing in the forest.

The difference in people’s abilities to fully tap their personal resources is directly affected by their goals. A study of the 1953 graduates of Yale University clearly demonstrates this point. The graduates interviewed were asked if they had a clear, specific set of goals written down with a plan for achieving those goals. Only 3 percent had such written goals. Twenty years

(* Rupert Sheldrake, a biologist who did graduate work at Harvard and earned his Ph.D. from Cambridge, has published his ideas in A New Science of Life.
David Bohm, a physicist, is best known for his work on holographic paradigms. See his book, Wholeness and the Implicate Order.)

later, in 1973, the researchers went back and interviewed the surviving members of the 1953 graduating class. They discovered that the 3 percent with written specific goals were worth more in financial terms that the entire other 97 percent put together. Obviously, this study measures only people’s financial development. However, the interviewers also discovered that the less measurable or more subjective measures, such as the level of happiness and joy that the graduates felt, also seemed to be superior in the 3 percent with written goals. This is the power of goal setting.

In this chapter, you will learn how to formulate your goals and dreams and desires, how to fix firmly in your mind what you want and how to get it. Have you ever tried to put together a jigsaw puzzle without having seen the picture of what it represents? That’s what happens when you try to put your life together without knowing your outcomes. When you know your outcome, you give your brain a clear picture of which kinds of information being received by the nervous system need high priority. You give it the clear messages it needs to be effective.

“ Winning starts with beginning. ” — Anonymous

There are people — we all know some of them — who seem constantly lost in a fog of confusion. They go one way, then another. They try one thing, then shift to another. They move down one path and then retreat in the opposite direction. Their problem is simple: They don’t know what they w’ant. You can’t hit a target if you don’t know what it is.

What you need to do in this chapter is dream. But it’s absolutely essential that you do so in a totally focused way. If you just read this chapter, it’s not going to do you any good. You need to sit down with a pencil and paper — or a word processor, if you’re so inclined — and view this chapter as a twelve-step goal-setting workshop.

Settle into a place where you feel particularly comfortable — a favorite writing desk, a sunny comer table — someplace you find nurturing. Plan to spend an hour or so learning what you expect to be and do and share and see and create. It could be the most valuable hour you ever spend. You’re going to learn to set goals and determine outcomes. You’re going to make a map of the roads you want to travel on in your life. You’re going to figure out where you want to go and how you expect to get there.

Let me start with one major warning: There is no need to put any limitations on what’s possible. Of course, that doesn’t mean throwing your intelligence and common sense out the window. If you’re four feet eleven inches tall, there’s no sense deciding your outcome is to win the NBA slam dunk contest next year. No matter what you try, it won’t happen (unless you work well on stilts)*. More important, you’ll be diverting your energy from where it can be most effective. But when viewed intelligently, there are no limits to the outcomes available to you. Limited goals create limited lives. So stretch yourself as far as you want in setting your goals. You need to decide what you want, because that’s the only way you can expect to get it.

Follow these five rules in formulating your outcomes.

1 . State your outcome in positive terms. Say what you want to happen. Too often, people state what they don’t want to happen as their goals.

2 . Be as specific as possible. How does your outcome look, sound, feel, smell? Engage all of your senses in describing the results you want. The more sensory rich your description, the more you will empower your brain to create your desire. Also be certain to set a specific completion date and/or term.

3. Have an evidence procedure . Know how you will look, how you will feel, and what you will see and hear in your external world after you have achieved your outcome. If you don’t know how you’ll know when you’ve achieved your goal, you may already have it. You can be winning and feel like you’re losing if you don’t keep score.

* Since I wrote this. Spud Webb of the Atlanta Hawks, 57”, won the slamdunk contest. So much for the limitations of stilts.

SETTING OUTCOMES

KEY COMPONENTS

Specific:

What exactly do you / we want?

Sensory Based:

What will you / we see?
What will you / we hear?
What will you / we feel?
What will you / we smell?
What will you / we taste?

Desired State / Present State:

What do you / we want?
What is happening now?
What is the difference?

Evidence Procedure:

How will you / we know the outcome has been realized?

4. Be in control. Your outcome must be initiated and maintained by you. It must not be dependent upon other people having to change themselves for you to be happy. Make sure your outcome reflects things that you can affect directly.

5. Verify that your outcome is ecologically sound and desirable. Project into the future the consequences of your actual goal. Your outcome must be one that benefits you and other people.

I always ask a question in my seminars, and I want to ask it now: If you knew you could not fail, what would you do? If you were absolutely certain of success, what activities would you pursue, what actions would you take?

All of us have some idea of the things we want. Some are vague — more love, more money, more time to enjoy life. However, to empower our biocomputers to create a result, we need to become more specific than a new car, a new house, a better job.

As you create your list, some of the things you write down will be things you’ve thought about for years. Some will be things you’ve never consciously formulated before. But you need to consciously decide what you want, because knowing what you want determines what you will get. Before something happens in the external world, it must first happen in the internal world. There’s something rather amazing about what happens when you get a clear internal representation of what you want. It programs your mind and body to achieve that goal. To go beyond our present limitations, we must first experience being more in our minds, and our lives will then follow suit.

Let me give you a simple physical metaphor for this. Try the following. Stand up, with your feet slightly apart and pointing forward. Bring both arms straight up in front of you so that they are parallel to the floor. Now turn to your left, pointing with your finger as far as you comfortably can as you turn. Take note of where you stop by the point on the wall opposite where your finger stops. Now turn back around, close your eyes, and in your mind make a picture of yourself turning again — only this time going much farther. Now again, and this time much farther still. Now open your eyes and again physically turn. Note what happens. Did you turn much farther? Of course you did. You created a new external reality by first programming your brain to go beyond its previous limits.

Think of this chapter as doing the same for your life. You’re now going to create your life as you want it. Normally in life you could only go so far, but in your mind you’re going to take the time to create a reality greater than what you’ve experienced in the past. Then you’re going to externalize that internal reality.

1 . Start by making an inventory of your dreams, the things you want to have, do, be, and share. Create the people, feelings, and places you want to be a part of your life. Sit down right now, grab your paper , and pen, and begin writing. The key is to commit to keeping your pen moving nonstop for no less than ten to fifteen minutes. Don’t try to define how you’re going to get this outcome now. Just write it down. There are no limits. Abbreviate whenever possible so you can immediately get on to the next goal. Keep your pen moving for the entire time. Take as long as you need to put together a broad sampling of outcomes having to do with work; family; relationships; mental, emotional, social, material and physical states; and anything else. Feel like a king. Remember that everything is within your grasp. Knowing your outcome is the first key to reaching it.

One key to goal setting is play. Let your mind roam free. Whatever limitations you have are limitations you’ve created. Where do they exist? Only in your mind. So whenever you start to place limitations on yourself, throw them off. Do it visually. Make a picture in your mind of a wrestler flipping his opponent out of the ring, and then do the same thing with whatever limits you. Take those limiting beliefs and toss them out of the ring, and be aware of the feeling of freedom you have when you do it. This is Step 1. Make your list now!

2. Let’s do a second exercise. Go over the list you made, estimating when you expect to reach those outcomes-, six months, one year, two years, five years, ten years, twenty years. It’s helpful to see what sort of a time frame you’re operating in. Note how your list came out. Some people find that the list they made is dominated by things they want today. Others find their greatest dreams are far in the future, in some imagined period of total achievement and fulfillment. If all your goals are short term, you need to start taking a longer view of potential and possibility. If all your goals are long term, you need to first develop some steps that can lead you in the direction you expect to go. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. It’s important to be aware of both the first steps and the final ones.

3. Now I want you to try something else: Pick out the four most important goals for you for this year. Pick the things you’re most committed to, most excited about, things that would give you the most satisfaction. Write them down. Now I want you to write down why you absolutely will achieve them. Be clear and concise and positive. Tell yourself why you’re sure you can reach those outcomes, and why it’s important that you do.

If you can find enough r easons to do something, you can get yourself to do anything. Our purpose for doing something is a much stronger motivator than the object that we pursue. Jim Rohn, my first personal-development teacher, always taught me that if you have enough reasons, you can do anything. Reasons are the difference between being interested versus being committed to accomplishing something. There are many things in fife we say we want, but really we’re only interested in them for a time. We must be totally committed to whatever it takes to achieve. If, for example, you just say you want to be rich, well, that’s a goal, but it doesn’t tell your brain much. If you understand why you want to be rich, what being wealthy would mean to you, you’ll be much more motivated to get there. Why to do something is much more important than how to do it. If you get a big-enough why, you can always figure out the how. If you have enough reasons, you can do virtually anything in this world.

4. Now that you have a list of your key goals , review them against the five rules for formulating outcomes. Are your goals stated in the positive? Are they sensory specific? Do they have an evidence procedure? Describe what you will experience when you achieve them. In even clearer sensory terms, what will you see, hear, feel, and smell? Also note if the goals are maintainable by you. Are they ecological and desirable for you and others? If they violate any of these conditions, change them to fit.

5. Next, make a list of the important resources you already have at your disposal. When you begin a construction project, you need to know which tools you have. To construct an empowering vision of your future, you need to do the same thing. So make a list of what you have going for you: character traits, friends, financial resources, education, time, energy, or whatever. Come up with an inventory of the strengths, skills, resources, and tools.

6. When you've done that, focus in on times you used some of those resources most skillfully. Come up with three to five times in your life when you were totally successful. Think. of the times in business or sports or financial matters or relationships when you did something particularly well. It can be anything from a killing in the stock market to a wonderful day with your kids. Then write them down. Describe what you did that made you succeed, what qualities or resources you made effective use of, and what about that situation made you feel successful.

7. After you’ve done all that, describe the kind of person you would have to be to attain your goals . Will it take a great deal of discipline, a great deal of education? Would you have to manage your time well? If, for example, you want to be a civic leader who really makes a difference, describe what kind of person gets elected and really has the ability to affect large numbers of people. We hear a lot about success, but we don’t hear as much about the components of success — the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors that go into producing it. If you don’t have a good grasp of the components, you may find it difficult to put together the whole, so stop now and write a couple of paragraphs or a page about all the character traits, skills, attitudes, beliefs, and disciplines you would need to have as a person in order to achieve all that you desire. Take some time on this.

8. Next, in a few paragraphs, write down what prevents you from having the things you desire right now. One way to overcome the limitations you’ve created is to know exactly what they are. Dissect your personality to see what’s holding you back from achieving what you want. Do you fail to plan? Do you plan, but fail to act? Do you try to do too many things at one time, or do you get so fixated on one thing that you don’t do anything else? In the past, have you imagined the worst-possible scenario and then allowed that internal representation to stop you from taking action? We all have ways of limiting ourselves, our own strategies for failing, but by recognizing our past limitation strategies — recognizing your past limitation strategies — we can change them now.

We can know what we want, why we want it, who will help us, and a lot of other things, but the critical ingredient that in the end determines whether we succeed in achieving our outcomes is our actions. To guide our actions, we must create a step-by-step plan. When you build a house, do you just go out and get a pile of wood, some nails, a hammer, and a saw and then start to work? Would you start sawing and hammering and see what came out of it? Would that lead to success? It’s not likely. To build a house you need a blueprint, a plan. You need a sequence and a structure so your actions complement and reinforce one another. Otherwise you will just have a wild assemblage of boards. It’s the same with your life. So now you need to put together your own blueprint for success.

What are the necessary actions you must take consistently to produce the result you desire? If you’re not sure, think of someone you can model who has already accomplished what you desire. You need to start with your ultimate outcomes, then work backward, step by step. If one of your major outcomes is to become financially independent, the step before that might be to become president of your own company. The step before that might be becoming a vice-president or other important officer. Another step might be to find a smart investment counselor and/ or tax lawyer to help you manage your money. It’s critical that you continue to work back until you find something you could do today to support the achievement of that goal. Maybe today you could open a savings account or get a book that teaches you some financial strategies of successful people in our culture. If you want to be a professional dancer, what do you have to do to reach that outcome? What are the major steps, and what are some things you can do today, tomorrow, this week, this month, this year to produce the results? If you want to be the greatest composer in the world, what are the steps along the way? By working backward, step by step, for outcomes in everything from business to personal life, you can map out the precise path to follow from your ultimate goal down to what you can do today.

Use the information in the last exercise to guide the design of your plan. If you’re not sure what your plan should be, just ask yourself what prevents you from having what you want now. The answer to that question will be something you can work on immediately to change. The solving of that problem becomes a subgoal or stepping-stone to the achievement of your greater goals.

9. Take the time now to take each of your four key goals and create your first draft of a step-by-step plan on how to achieve it. Remember to start with the goal and ask yourself, What would I have to do first to accomplish this? or, What prevents me from having this now, and what can I do to change this? Make sure your plans include something you could do today.

So far we’ve completed the first part of the Ultimate Success Formula. You absolutely know your outcome. You’ve defined your outcomes over both the short and long terms, and you’ve defined which aspects of your personality help you and which hinder you in getting what you want. Now I want you to start developing a strategy of how to get there.

What’s the surest way to achieve excellence? It’s to model someone who has already done what you want to do.

10. So come up with some models. They can be people from your life or famous people who’ve achieved great success. Write down the names of three to five people who’ve achieved what you want to achieve, and specify in a few words the qualities and behaviors that made them successful. After you’ve done this, close your eyes and imagine for a moment that each of these people is going to give you some advice about how to best go about accomplishing your goals. Write down one main idea that each would give you if he or she were speaking to you personally. Maybe it’s how to avoid a roadblock or break through a limitation or what to pay attention to or look for. Just imagine they’re talking to you and jot down under each of their names the first idea that comes to you about what you think each would say. Even though you may not know them personally, through this process they can become excellent advisers on your future.

Adnan Khashoggi modeled Rockefeller. He wanted to be a wealthy, successful businessman, so he modeled someone who had done what he wanted to do. Steven Spielberg modeled people at Universal Studios even before he was hired. Virtually everyone who has been a great success has had a model or a mentor or teachers who guided him in the right direction.

Now you have a clear internal representation of where you want to go. You can save time and energy and avoid traveling down wrong paths by following the example of people who’ve succeeded already. Who are the people in your life who can serve as models? There are resources in friends, family, national leaders, celebrities. If you don’t know good models, you should make a point of going out and finding some.

What you’ve been doing is giving signals to your brain, forming a clear, concise pattern of outcomes. Goals are like magnets. They’ll attract the things that make them come true. In chapter 6, you learned how to run your own brain, how to manipulate your submodalities to enhance positive images and decrease the power of negative ones. Let’s apply that knowledge to your goals. Take a dip into your personal history to a time when you were totally successful at something. Close your eyes and form the clearest, brightest possible image of that accomplishment. Take note of whether you put the image to the left or to the right, up, middle, or down. Again, notice all the submodalities — the size, shape, and quality of its movement as well as the type of sound and internal feelings that it creates. Now think about the outcomes you’ve written down today. Make a picture of how you would be if you achieved everything you’ve set down today. Put that image on the same side as the other one and make it as big and bright and focused and colorful as you can. Notice how you feel. You’ll already feel very different, much more certain of success than you did when you first formulated your outcomes.

If you have trouble doing this, use the “swish” method we talked about earlier. Move the image of what you want to be to the other side of your mental frame. Make it defocused and black and white. Then quickly move it to the exact same spot as your successful image, having it break through any representations of possible failure that you may have perceived. Move it so that it takes on all the big, bright, colorful, focused qualities of the thing you’ve already accomplished. You should do these exercises on an ongoing basis so your brain gets an ever clearer, ever more intense picture of what you expect it to accomplish. The brain responds most to repetition and deep feelings, so if you can continually experience your life as you desire it, and if you experience this life with deep and intense feelings, you are almost certain to create what you desire. Remember, the road to success is always under construction.

11. It’s great to have all kinds of different goals. However, what’s even nicer is to be able to design what all of them together would mean for you. Now create your ideal day. What people would be involved? What would you do? How would it begin? Where would you go? Where would you be? Do it from the time you get up to the time you go to sleep. What kind of environment would you be in? How would you feel when you climbed into bed at the end of a perfect day? Use pen and paper and describe it in detail. Remember all results, actions, and realities we experience start from creations in our minds, so create your day the way you desire it most.

12. Sometimes we forget that dreams begin at home. We forget that the first step toward success is providing ourselves with an atmosphere that nurtures our creativity, that helps us be everything we can be.

Finally , design your perfect environment . I want you to accentuate the sense of place. Let your mind go. No limitations. Whatever you want is what you should put in. Remember to think like a king. Design an environment that would bring out the best of all that you are as a person. Where would you be — in the woods, in the ocean, in an office? What tools would you have — an art pad, paints, music, a computer, a telephone? What support people would you have around you to make sure you achieved and created all that you desired in your life?

If you don’t have a clear representation of what your ideal day would be, what are your chances of creating it? If you don’t know what your ideal environment would be, how would you create it? How are you going to hit a target if you don’t even know what it is? Remember, the brain needs clear, direct signals of what it wants to achieve. Your mind has the power to give you everything you want. But it can only do that if it’s getting clear, bright, intense, focused signals.

“ Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason why so few engage in it." — Henry Ford

Doing the exercises in this chapter could be one of the most important steps you can take toward producing those unmistakable signals. You can’t reach your outcome if you don’t know what it is. If you get anything from this chapter, it should be this: Results are inevitable. If you don’t provide your mind with the programming of the results you desire, someone else will provide that programming for you. If you don’t have your own plan, someone else is going to make you fit into their plan. If all you do is read this chapter, you’ve wasted your time. It’s imperative that you take the time to do each of these exercises. They may not be easy at first, but believe me, they’re worth it; and as you begin to do them, they become more and more fun.

One of the reasons most people don’t do well in life is because success is usually disguised behind hard work. And goal setting, or outcome development, is hard work. It’s easy for people to put things like this off and get trapped into making a living instead of designing their lives. Exert your personal pou'er now and take the time to discipline yourself to fully complete these exercises. It’s been said that there are only two pains in life, the pain of discipline or the pain of regret, and that discipline weighs ounces while regret weighs tons. There’s a great deal of excitement to be gained from applying these twelve principles. Do this for yourself.

Also, it’s important to review your outcomes on a regular basis. Sometimes we change, but our outcomes remain the same because we’ve never stopped to see if we still want to create the same things for our lives. Systematically update your outcomes every few months, and then perhaps once a year or every six months in a systematic way. One very useful thing is to keep a journal, which will provide you with an ongoing record of your goals at any time in your life. Journals are great to review, to study how your life has developed and how much you’ve grown. If your life is worth living, it’s worth recording.

Does all this work? You bet is does. Three years ago I sat down and designed my ideal day and my ideal environment. I’m living both right now.

At that time I was living in a dinky place in Marina del Rey, California, but I knew I wanted something more. So I decided to do my own goal-setting workshop. I decided to design my perfect day and then program my subconscious to create that ideal life by daily experiencing in my imagination my life exactly as I desired it most. This is how I began. I knew I wanted to be able to get up and see the ocean in the morning, and then 1 wanted to be able to take a run on the beach. I had a picture — it wasn’t perfectly clear — of a place that had both greenery and the beach.

After exercising, I wanted to have a great place to work. I saw it as someplace tall and spacious. I saw it as a cylindrical shape on the second or third floor of my home. I wanted a limousine and a driver. I wanted to have a business with four or five partners who were as strong and excited as I was, partners I could meet and brainstorm new ideas with on a regular basis.

I dreamed of the ideal woman to be my wife. I didn’t have any money, and I decided I wanted to be financially independent.

I got everything I programmed into my mind. Everything I imagined then has come to pass. My castle is exactly the kind of place I imagined when I was living in Marina del Rey. I met my ideal woman six months after I imagined her, and married her eighteen months after that. I’ve created an environment that totally nurtures my creativity, that constantly triggers my desire to be everything I can be and that creates for me a daily attitude of gratitude. Why? I gave myself a target, and every day I congniently gave my brain the clear, precise, direct message that this was my reality. Having a clear, precise target, my powerful unconscious mind guided my thoughts and actions to produce the results I desired. It worked for me, and it can work for you.

“ Where there is no vision, people perish, ” — Proverbs 29:18

Now you should do one final thing: make a list of the things you already have that were once goals — all the things in your ideal day you can already do, the activities and people of your life you are most grateful for, the resources you already have available to you. I call this a gratitude diary. Sometimes people get so fixated on what they want, they fail to appreciate or use what they already have. The first step toward a goal is seeing what you have, giving thanks for it, and applying it to future achievements. We all have ways to make our lives better at any moment. Achieving your wildest dreams should begin today with the everyday steps that can put you on the right path. Shakespeare once wrote, “Action is eloquence.” Begin today with eloquent action that will lead to even more eloquent outcomes.

In this chapter, you’ve seen the importance of precision in formulating your outcomes. It’s the same in all our communications with ourselves and with others. The more precise we are, the more effective we are.