There’s a lot of talk about commitment, but what does commitment mean? Commitment is an exciting topic for me. If you’ve been to my events, you will know that commitment is the first step of my incredibly powerful Five Steps to Rapid Change. It’s step number one for a reason. If you don’t have a positive commitment to something it’s not going to happen. Which is why no matter where you are on your journey if I can see you are not fully committed I’ll stop what you are doing and work with you to determine what will get you reconnected and willing to stop at nothing to reach your goal.
When you do that, when you get switched on and get in line with your passion – your inner compass- then you can smash any goal in a much shorter time frame than you could have predicted. I actually think any goal can be completed in 90 days if you are motived and have the right commitment in place. Imagine for a minute what you could achieve in your lifetime if every 90 days you set and achieved an amazing goal?! That’s four incredible opportunities to build your dreams EVERY YEAR!
I’ve been working in this field and delivering my courses for 20 years and I have found commitment is THE key foundation every time, not just for my personal success with my programs but also through observing and recognising the success of others who have achieved big goals and incredible success in life and business.
And it’s getting to the point now where the connection to commitment is really obvious. Now, if you look at a lot of studies that are coming out and you listen to the front-runners in business or read their books or there’s Ted Talks on this topic, commitment is kind of THE buzzword.
And what I mean by that is if we look at determinants of success, commitment has become the primary element.
So what is commitment actually about? I think it’s important to talk about the function of commitment because a lot of people have negative ideas and beliefs around this. They think commitment it is something that you are tied to in a painful way or it’s something that will hold you back. That stops a lot of people from even setting great goals in the first place and just kind of wandering around waiting for something amazing to happen.
Commitment is actually designed to propel you forward very, very quickly. So if you are feeling weighed down I’d challenge you to look at your goal again or talk to your coach about flipping that negative and getting a positive association with your desired outcome.
To me, commitment is being able to show up. I say that 90 per cent of success is just showing up, and the key to showing up is to show up when you don’t feel like it.
It’s very, very easy to show up when you’re feeling confident, passionate and excited, you’ve got clarity and drive and all of those things. But what happens when you’re out of the game? What happens when you’re in a place of significant challenge, and every part of you feels like giving up, going back to safety or going back to old patterns that aren’t necessarily serving you?
That’s the time when showing up will actually make the biggest difference so that’s when you need to be there more than ever.
So to me, commitment is something that isn’t instant, commitment is something that we need to work on and keep working on over and over. People sometimes think they need to be perfect and that means they think that they find their commitment and never waiver, but we can’t be perfect all the time. We will be tested and our paths will be bumpy and we come up against things we could never have planned for that have us second guessing or doubling back or having to start all over again. And when that happens then you commitment might waver and you need to build it up again and we do that by showing up, even when we are feeling like it’s a waste of time. Show up and get more information and your commitment fires and you get back on path.
What we can do to make this easier is develop some strategies to be able to get us back into action very, very quickly. When it comes to falling off track normally what happens is a self beat-up session and that beat-up session can then go into all of these other specific patterns, whether it be addictions, bingeing, all those types of things, big and small that keep us off track. So let’s develop some strategies to bypass that beat-up so we learn from what happened and get stronger rather than go into old patterns that leave us feeling weak.
Personally, I love finding that commitment over and over again. To be tested and have doubts and then get to fall in love with your goal and where you are going and that certainty all over again is so affirming.
So let’s look at commitment and how do we really build commitment into our life.
To me, commitment is simply this, a decision. A decision to let go of whatever it is that is holding you back and to show up and get onto a new path.
And so how do we do this? How do we make that decision?
You start strong. You start will total commitment because how you start is how you finish so the way you set up your goal will determine how well you go with it. A lot of people set goals they’re really not committed. They set them because on a conscious level it looks good or seems logical or it’s what they should want to achieve because someone else is doing that or someone else told them that’s what they need to do but unconsciously they know they don’t really want it, not badly.
So they go into the process of setting a goal or an outcome that they don’t really want and usually they will put in an exit strategy. And the exit strategy can be something like; if I don’t achieve this goal, I can go back to what I was always doing. Like back to work or back to being unemployed or back to living at home.
And as long as that exit strategy is there you will probably take it as soon as things get tricky, because that’s what you know is safe. And you think, I won’t need to take that exit because nothing bad will happen, and a challenge pops up and then it’s over.
When you are really committed then you block off all exits and you knuckle down no matter what and you show up no matter how you are feeling.
So there are things to do to make sure you are committed and I share them with you in my Disruption Session podcast 4 and also in the next couple of blogs about commitment that are connected to the podcast. There’s a lot of information because I feel it’s important to get it right if you want to set successful goals in anything part of your life.
There are things that are going to help you, like your goal structure, your environment and the support you have that will get you to the next level quickly.
It’s about the habits the decisions and the belief systems in those specific areas that are going to take us to the next level and they each need work and more work as you go through your life and make changes.
I’ve got so many examples of working with clients with this. One example was this guy that I was working within Melbourne. He sat down with me and we set this goal, and we did the traditional smart goal setting process, and his objective was that he wanted to build 40 clients in his consulting business, which would’ve returned about a 120K. This goal was set over a 12 month period.
As we set this goal and I was looking at his sensory acuity, and what I mean by that is I was looking across at his body language, his breathing, his tonality to pick up on things he wasn’t saying.
He was saying that he wanted this goal, he wanted those clients and he wanted the 120K for his business, but that’s not what his body language was telling me. I really got that he wasn’t committed and I trusted that because 93 per cent of communication is non-verbal.
So I challenged him on it and I said, “Let’s stop for a second. Tell me the truth. How do you really feel about this goal?”
He said, “To be honest Matt…”
…and by the way, when someone says, ‘to be honest’, that typically means they’ve been lying to you up to this point
“To be honest Matt, it feels like a lot of work”.
Now at that moment, I knew we were going to have troubles in the process of working with his goal long-term. And so I said to him, “What we need to do is create more meaning in this. We need to connect you to the MUST. We need to make this have so much meaning that you’d be willing to jump up at 4:30 in the morning to take action”.
And so I said to him, “Tell me why this is important. What would inspire you, what would motivate you?” And I just kept cycling that question. What would inspire you, what would motivate you, what would inspire you, what would motivate you, and then suddenly he started to cry and he said to me, “Matt, well, what would really, really inspire me is if I could move to Sydney and I could be with my son and I could spend as much time as I want with him and I could be the father that I’ve always wanted to be. In fact, I could be better than my father was to me”. He bawled his eyes out and his whole body changed and that’s when I knew he’d found his commitment.
It wasn’t about his business success, he had something much more important to be committed about.
So the goal started to change because we started to add more meaning to it and the goal was to be a father, to be the best father, that he could possibly be, and the secondary component was the business.
So this was the same 12-month goal, only with a bigger outcome, getting the clients and getting that 120K would get him to Sydney.
You know what happened? He went out and he achieved that goal in ninety days. It’s the same goal, the same ‘hard work’ he was afraid of at the beginning and he smashed it in ninety days. Why?
Because we created so much meaning that he was willing to commit. He was willing to endure any pain, he was willing to show up, no matter the obstacle. We got rid of the exit strategy. We burnt the boats and we went for it. And so it commitment isn’t something that comes to you, commitment is something that we need to condition and exercise and come back to each time there is a setback.
And this is what I’d love to help you do. This is why I run “Live It Now” because I believe that if we don’t make these decisions now, we can miss out. Miss out on time with our kids or time with our partners or times of abundance and freedom or travel or the training you really wanted.
We can miss out on so many opportunities that life has available to us right now when we are stuck in the fear of the past or the anxiety of the future.
The key is to start out strong with a goal you are totally passionate about. Don’t take any next steps until you unlock that total commitment, to know you will show up and to follow through with everything you have.
It might take a bit of a journey to shake you up out of the place you are now, to see where you want to go, and that’s what Live It Now is for, so if you need that help and support we have it for you and we give it to you for basically free and we set it up with everything you need in that one weekend. You have that strong committed start, that big goal or dream you want to discover and a support team that will get you through it.
So I’ll go into those things in my next blogs or you can listen now to the podcast with that goes through having a big enough goal and getting the support you need.
Come to Live It Now and uncover your passion, set I’M SMART goals and get success in any area so you can stop missing out and start living the life of your dreams.
