This is the second blog a three part series about commitment and it’s all about the chaos you will attract when you set a super big goal. If you missed the first blog about commitment you can check it out here or my Disruption Session podcast covers all commitment three blog information in one.
The reason I’m dedicating so much time and giving away so much information around commitment is because I think it’s essential, not just for great business success, but for success in any area of life.
That’s why I’ve made it Step One in my Five Steps to Rapid Change because it’s vital and it’s also the one thing that most people don’t fully factor in when they set a goal. So it’s typically the place where newcomers to business, or even those looking to start some kind of change in their life fall down, because they didn’t have the right commitment in place. Which doesn’t mean your goal necessarily needs to change, just your WHY. When you have a really big why then any goal becomes achievable.
I gave you one of my favourite real life examples in the first blog, I had a client who wasn’t committed to his business goal and wasn’t going to get it achieved, even over a 12 month period where it’s in nice little pieces. When we made his goal bigger and really important to him he became completely committed and owned it and went after it and smashed his 12 month goal in only 90 days. Those results are inspiring but not unusual. That’s what being a TroubleMaker is all about, finding creative ways around a problem and causing a massive disruption to the norm that just means super fast success. Anyone out there can do that, I really mean that, anyone can achieve amazing results in 90 days if they are properly motivated.
In order to get where you want to go you need a map. And this map must have on it a destination you want to get to, otherwise, why would you take the time and effort to drive there?
Without commitment to get to your goal you will easily be distracted, or worse, quit as soon as an opportunity presents itself. Then people say, ‘Oh well, I tried but it didn’t work out.’
I call BS on that (that’s Belief Systems by the way). They didn’t really go for the goal they set themselves up with an escape route, an exit and then they took the exit, that’s not even starting to commit.
So you need a map with a destination that is so incredible and so important to you you’d drive continuously to get there without stopping or taking any detours. Can you live without toilet breaks? That’s the kind of commitment we want to see for incredible business results.
Now the thing about goals, is the bigger the goal that you set, the more chaos you’re going to attract.
So, if you’ve set this really, really big long-term goal, that probably means that you’re going to get enormous amounts of setback, enormous amounts of challenge, and it will be the kind of challenge that breaks you in two, then you come back together, you’re stronger, you’re more powerful, your vibration and energy and capacity changes and then you are able to attract the outcomes you need.
It’s just like doing a workout to get fitter or stronger or more toned. The quickest way to get results is to cause tiny tears in your muscles and then let them heal, and they heal stronger and bigger and better looking. That’s what we want, to exercise your goal and allow those mental rest days to absorb what you have learned. That means that you need to pick up and keep going after a set back or a failure or a loss. It’s not actually a negative thing, it’s just exercise and you allow that to change you in a really positive and rewarding way and you keep going.
And so if we look at it from that perspective the setbacks are the key to grow you or to help you become who you need to be in order to attract those things. Which is why I tell my Troublemakers to go out and fail as fast as possible; so they learn as fast as possible and train themselves to be their best.
Where to Start.
How you start is how you finish. So to start well we look at commitment and we look at goal setting and we look at the process that we’re heading into. And so if we come into a goal, the question I often ask my clients is, what are you willing to endure? Because often when we set a goal we are in this high emotional positive state, we’re inspired, we’re motivated and that is wonderful, but there is also the other side and I believe we need to prepare ourselves for that.
That is how you get through a really big goal and attract lots of chaos in your life. You ask, ‘Well, how much shit am I going to take?’ and then you look at it all and you weigh it all up against how badly to want the outcome and if your commitment is right you say, ‘okay, I’m ready, bring it on.’
Most people though only look at getting the goal if everything goes well. Sure, if everything goes perfectly from start to finish and there are not conflicts anywhere we’d all get our goals achieved in no time. It NEVER happens that way and your really don’t want it to because if it all gets handed out to you with a bow and everything you don’t learn anything and you don’t grow and you are basically where you were when you started. Chaos is where the exciting stuff happens, where you break through your limitations and achieve so much amazing stuff it blows your mind and people pay attention and go, ‘wow did you do that?’
So you need to get connected to the bumps as well as the glory and then if you still want it badly you know you have commitment right. If you don’t want to go through that pain you need a bigger goal. You need more motivation.
So I uncover all that with my clients and so some of the things that I ask them is: ‘What are you willing to endure? What are you willing to go through?’
If it’s a business goal and it’s a big objective that you’re wanting to achieve, are you willing to work really, really hard? And what I mean by that is, are you willing to wake up at 4:30 in the morning and sometimes work 16 plus hours a day? Are you willing to live on baked beans? Are you willing to sacrifice television or stay home and work when all of your friends are out doing all of these wonderful things and having fun and socialising? What are you willing to endure? And really get connected to that. Get connected to that upfront.
And then I’d look at pain versus pleasure when it comes to commitment. I look at pain, and I look and go, ‘What happens if you don’t show up? What happens if you don’t commit to your life or this goal?’
‘Where are you going to be in 12 months? Where are you going to be in three years, five years, seven years?’
And I really create a visual and auditory and kinaesthetic future by actually asking them to vividly imagine everything about those future places to see how their life will be if they stay where they are.
We get so comfortable being uncomfortable that it’s not until you project out to the future and realise how shit your life will be if you stay on your present track, it’s only then that you realise that doing the work to get to the goal is actually better than staying safe and playing out the same old thing over and over.
Because if you are not climbing you are sliding backwards, only it’s this gradual slide down and all of a sudden, you wake up in five years time feeling like you hate your life and wondering well how did this happen? And it happened all the way back at five years ago when you didn’t make the commitment to the change you wanted. That was the fork in the road that led you to sliding down or amazing success.
So I get people ready for that. I show them the different paths they can take and I kind of take them on a virtual journey down both paths and then I go, so which one do you want?
So I really bring up what does it look like, what does it sound like, what does it feel like? And I really get a person to that place and I make it so painful that if they don’t show up, this is where they’re going to go. And the next thing I do is ask them to look at the pleasure of that climbing fork. And the pleasure is always connected to a WHY or something bigger than us. That’s what makes the climb worth it.
You’ve probably experienced this in your life – if you stop and think about it right now you can possibly find where maybe two to three times in your life you’ve made a decision and you’ve been really, really committed and driven.
Often those decisions have preceded something that’s really, really negative. Maybe you’ve gone through a major crisis around your relationships and then you’ve made a decision, no more, no more will I be treated that way? Or maybe you’ve had major, major challenges around your finances. Maybe you’re about to go bankrupt or you’ve attracted enormous amounts of debt and then you’ve got to that point where you can’t get any lower and you get totally committed. No more am I willing to enjoy this financial situation. Or maybe it’s health. You’ve attracted a health challenge, maybe you’ve put on weight or a disease has been detected, and then in that moment it is so painful that you’ve decided no more.
The unconscious mind changes drastically with intensity, and that can be either intense negativity or intense positivity.
And so that’s what I like to do, especially in my “Live It Now” training, I really like to connect people to the reality that we only have a certain amount of time left.
There is no time to procrastinate and sit around with OneDayMaybe dreams.
The stats are we sleep for 30 per cent of our life. If you’re in a job that you hate. That’s almost 60 per cent of your life just spend getting through a day. The 10 per cent that’s often left is, can you believe this, used on devices!
So I like to get that message out that there’s not much time left, and let’s flip the thinking on these crises and get back up from them and get more out of the day. Those crises are opportunities, opportunities to wake us up, to ask different questions because the quality of the questions determine the quality of your life.
As we start to ask different questions, we move in a new direction and that’s what “Live It Now” is all about. It’s like shaking people up and going, we don’t have much time. It’s the decisions that we make that can take our life to the next level. It’s about switching on that no more will I take this mentality to get you moving towards something amazing.
People have all sorts of BS around not wanting to get committed to something. And often people want clarity before they start the journey or before they get committed and that can be one of the things that stops them from getting started is they say, ‘Well I don’t know what I want.’
And I’m going to talk more about this in my final blog on this three blog commitment series because there is a lot happening when someone says, ‘I don’t know’ and we’ll get to that.
Also, if you’re in that, ‘I don’t know what I want’ situation, we can look at it deeper and sometimes what it may mean is you’ve been on someone else’s goal plan for a long time.
Because let’s face it, that’s often easier to do that because if someone else can make all the decisions for me, then I don’t necessarily have to take responsibility in my life and I can easily blame them because I’m not getting the results.
But if I was to make the decision and I don’t get the result, maybe that could mean ultimate failure and then I can even take that business or health or financial failure personally and take it to a whole new level and say, ‘I am an ultimate failure’.
This is the thing, you can never fail, you can only learn or quit, those are your options so we need to find a way to get over it and not take it personally and see the lesson and keep moving towards the goal.
And this is one of the reasons why I created my company, Your Future Now. I did that because I was that person that was constantly on everyone else’s goal plan. I thought, ‘Oh, I’m making everyone happy’, but I was the one that was missing out.
So some people can be very lazy when it comes to their decision-making and just allow others to make decisions for them and the challenge is, if someone else is making decisions for you, you’re on their goal path. You’re not on your future, you’re on someone else’s future plan. It may feel good for a little while, but on a deeper level you know you are missing out and you know you want more.
Now if you don’t know what you want in terms of a goal, what I say to people is commit to being the best version of yourself. And everyone can do that.
We can sit down and we can design an amazing goal for that just by asking, ‘What is the best version of myself? Well, health would be this, relationships would be this, my financial situation would be this, and we build that picture and we commit to it and then get massively committed to it because that is a massive goal to have and so rewarding on so many levels and it’s one of those goals where everybody around you benefits from you success. So even people who like to do things for others ahead of themselves can see how much better family life and work life and finances would be if they were the best version of themselves and how much good they can do with that.
So we have that great goal and we make that decision to go or it. So the first part is we’ve got to commit to something and we’ve got to commit to something that is in the context of our own personal future and something that you want. Ideally we’re wanting to commit to something that has enormous meaning.
The more meaning you have, the more committed you will become.
The next part is we’ve got to kind of condition the psychology up front. As I said to you before, how you start is how you finish. And so we’ve got to look at this and go OK, this is the best version of myself or this is the business goal, health goal, relationship goal that I am absolutely committing to.
Then we have the conversation, what am I willing to endure? Am I willing to wake up early, am I willing to let go of things that are not serving me on that path, am I willing to make this a priority, allocate time and schedule time, over job, over relationships in some cases, am I willing to make it a priority because when you schedule it, it happens.
The next thing we do is weigh up those first two points and measure the pain verses the pleasure, which is, ‘Well, if I don’t have this, if I don’t achieve this and I don’t do it right now, what’s my life going to be like three, five, seven years in the future?’ and, ‘If I do commit to this what is this going to do for my life long-term?’ And this happens by building as much meaning as we possibly can and actually transporting mentally to those futures to get fully connected to them.
The next thing we want to look at is the structure because structures create outcomes. We can have a structure of fixing which is when you say, ‘Well, all I need to do is fix this, fix this, fix this, fix this, and then I can have what I want.’
There is another choice, a better choice and that is the structure of creating where we go out and we create what we want and just pass over or disrupt those obstacles that need ‘fixing’.
So a really good example of this is a person who wants to get fit before they go to the gym so they feel good about going there and doing exercise with other people. Before they can get fit, they need to fix their fitness. It’s going to be really hard to get fit if you stay in that same structure of what’s safe so already that’s a super unrewarding and motivating structure.
When you have a structure of create, instead of getting fit before going to the gym, we actually go and create and we commit to that creation right now by understanding that yes it might be embarrassing at first to go to gym it is going to get you moving and working so much harder and maybe you need a personal trainer to help you get those results and show you the right exercises.
Getting the right structure is about asking, ‘What do we need to change around your structure, your environment, so you absolutely commit?’
And this is the analogy of burning the ships. If we’re really committing to becoming the best version of yourself, if we’re really committing to these goals and outcomes that are your future, what would we need to do to be able to ensure follow through, to be able to ensure commitment?
If we were really committed and this was a priority, what would we do?
What things would you put in place? Where in your environment would you create change? Maybe it’s limiting your time with certain people that you absolutely know are not going to get you there. Would it be going through your cupboard and getting rid of everything that could cause bingeing or throw you off track. Could it be locking away finances and putting a structure in place? Could it be getting that personal trainer because you know in the past you haven’t necessarily followed through or getting a coach and working on your mindset?
And this is some of the things that I teach in my “Live It Now” training and I think it is so important.
Remember, we are going to switch off. We are going to sabotage. We are going to do those things, especially if the goal is a little bit bigger, but the key is developing the structure internally and externally to be able to get us back into action in the fastest possible time frame.
And what’s really exciting is, the more you do this stuff, the more you dust off and get back to it, you’re going to get back into present time or back onto your future a whole lot faster and s much easier every single time.
So make sure your goal is a big one and maybe you need help with that because it might feel unsafe or out of your comfort zone which is awesome – that’s when you know it’s a great goal. So If you need help come to my free sessions. Live It Now or if you are ready for a bigger disruption, come to the Disruption Tour. I do this for free so you can get moving and get loving life RIGHT NOW.
Kinest regards,
Matt Catling