The Art of Goal Setting: Pathway to Great Achievements

Gary Smith Show Ep 002

"The Art of Goal Setting: Pathway to Great Achievements"

Welcome to the Gary Smith show. It's great to have you along for the ride. Just want to take a couple of minutes and recap last week's show. We talked about, first of all, that this is your show. I want this show to be about you and your needs in personal and business development. So regardless of the topic that we're talking about, Please feel free to give me your input on, on anything that you want to talk about related to either personal or business development.

Also, if you have any ideas for further shows, specific topics that you would like to see us address going forward, you can send those, requests to me at questions at optechs.com, and, we'll take a look at those and incorporate those things, as part of a discussion for a future show. Last week we were laying the groundwork for personal development.

Thank you We were talking about things like success is not instantaneous, success is a process, and we need to learn to work through that process. We talked about the need for personal and business development when we look at the economy the way it is in this country, and the unemployment rate, and the number of people who are really struggling financially.

Personal development not only plays into solving our financial problems, but it also deals with. How do we fix our emotional problems? How do we deal with the, the feelings of despair and hopelessness, that we face in our lives? And how do we cope with the stress that, not being able to pay bills and things like that puts on us?

So the need for personal and business development is really, there. we also talked about personal development beginning with personal responsibility. and that you are where you are because of the choices that you've made up to this point in life. So if you want to move forward and take your life in a different direction, it begins fundamentally with making different choices.

We also talked about success and its relationship with evangelical Christianity, and as Christians we tend to, we tend to look at life and sometimes, we, we don't realize that success in life is tied to our relationship with Christ and, doing the things that Christ wants us to do.

We talked about, and we actually had a little segment, by Zig Ziglar, on your attitude and its impact on personal success. And we wrapped up the show by talking about the lion and the gazelle and how many of us are just up every morning and off and running and we're fighting for our survival. and, that becomes a real, real issue because that's why so many people burn out is that they're just running the race and running the race and it's, like the hamster, in the cage running on the wheel or running, running, and not really getting anywhere.

Question for today that I'd like you to ponder is what is the greatest obstacle to your personal success? What do you think is the main thing that's keeping you from getting in life where you want to go? Last week we were talking about some of the stage setting things to, to get to a point of, understanding personal development, the need for it, and in the show today I want to start dealing with a little bit more of the mechanics related to personal development.

And I want to start off by doing some stuff that I think are like precursors to goal setting. And one of those is answering why set goals. Why is, the goal setting process so very important? And it's interesting. I was mulling that over in my mind as I went to bed last night and then this morning after I got up, I was having one of those thoughts while shaving and I went back to the Bible.

Go all the way back to the Bible and the chapter of Genesis where God created the earth. And if you read that creation account. God had a plan. He had a plan for what He wanted to do with the earth, and He had it set up in stages, in logical sequence of how the creation was going. And then, as you read through the Old Testament, look at the number of prophecies that have come true from people like Isaiah and Daniel, who were talking about things that were going to happen in the future, and many of those things have already happened.

And when you look at it that way, it really brings home to you the fact that God has a plan. God has a plan for all of eternity, and he had that plan in mind before he ever did anything as far as the creation of the universe. So if that's the case, if God has a plan, then is it not incumbent on us as believers and as people who have been created in God's image to also have a plan for our lives?

And, I'm here to tell you that the plan, having a plan can make a huge difference in your lives. And I want you to, stop and think for just a minute with me as I tell you this story. and it'll give you a frame of reference for why goal setting is so important. Back in 1979, there was a study done at Harvard University.

What they did was they took all of the members of the graduating MBA class at Harvard, one of the best B schools in the country. And they asked them this question, how many of you have written goals and have developed a plan for their achievement? Of that graduating class, only 3 percent said that they had written goals and a plan to achieve them.

13 percent said that they had goals, but the goals were in their head and they had not written them down. And 84 percent of the graduating class of 1979 said that they had no goals at all. Let's fast forward to 1989. They went back to that same graduating class and they took a look at what they had accomplished.

Now the 13 percent who said that they had goals in their heads that had not written them down were earning, on average, twice what those in the 84 percent who said they had no goals were earning. But what about the 3%? The 3 percent who said that they had written goals and had developed a plan for their achievement We're earning, on average, 10 times the remaining 97 percent combined.

And we can look at that and we can say, gee, that's a really interesting set of statistics, but being an engineer, I went back and made some assumptions and ran the numbers. And I said, alright, let's assume, just for ease of calculation, that the graduating MBA class in 1979 was 100 students. And let's say that in 1989, the average earnings of a Harvard MBA student was, 50, 000 a year.

If we use those numbers, then that means that, 84 percent of students or 100 students were earning 50, 000 a year, and 13 of those students were earning 100, 000 a year. So if you go through and do the math, that means that the 97 percent or 97 students combined were making about 5. 5 million a year. And if the remaining 3 percent were earning 10 times that much, that means that the remaining 3 percent made 55 million that year.

So the question becomes is which category would you like to be in? Would you want to be in the 97 percent where you're earning an average of 50, 000 a year, or would you rather be in the 3 percent because 50 million divided by 3 is something like 18. 7 million? that demonstrates the power of goals.

We also talked last time about understanding where you are and why you are where you are and that we all are ultimately in life because of the choices that we've made and ultimately the people and circumstances we've blamed for where we are. But the next step we have to take is to learn how successful people think because success does in fact leave clues.

There's a model that I use in a lot of the stuff that I teach called the effective efficient model. And basically, what it does is it deals with the differences between effectiveness and efficiency. Most of the time, though, when I sit down to do a goal setting program with people, whether it's a group or individuals, everybody's concerned about being more efficient.

We gotta get more stuff done, because we already, because of the lives that we live, have plates that are just absolutely overflowing. And it's just crazy. So everybody's concerned about doing things right. But one of the questions I always ask is, what if you're not doing the right things? What if you are not focused on doing the things that are going to move your life in the right direction?

If you're focused on doing the wrong things more efficiently, doesn't that mean that you're ultimately going to get to the wrong place faster? And that's one of the things that separates successful people from unsuccessful people, is that successful people first focus on doing the right things. They want to make sure that their focus is in the right place, that they're focused on doing the things that are going to be beneficial for them, and that are going to take them in the right direction.

And then, once they understand what the things are that they're doing that are the right things for them, then they focus on doing those things as efficiently as possible. the bottom line is that successful people, first of all, know what they want. They have a focus. Secondly, they know why they want it.

They know at a gut level what is driving them and why they want to do the things that they want to do in life. They know that what you want begins with who you are, that it's very, important to understand who you are as an individual. They live balanced lives. They know how to put first things first, and they know how to break their dreams down into manageable chunks.

And once that's done, they're organized, they're action takers, and the bottom line is that they have created a system that works for them, so they plan their work, and they work their plan. I've created a system that I call the Optimum Performance Achievement System, and what that does is it, covers four components.

The first component is a goals module. Which is, as you would expect, the process is for going about setting goals and what are the components there, and the goals module actually deals with defining who you are, and we'll get into that discussion here in just a few minutes. The second module is an organization and time management model that says, once you've defined your goals and you know what you wanna achieve, how can you organize yourself and how can you manage your time to be most effective?

At achieving the things that you said you want. The third module is what's called the execution module. Because the bottom line is you can plan until the cows come home. But until somebody takes action, nothing happens. And then the final module is that of celebration. We all need to learn to celebrate the small victories in our lives.

And so it's putting a plan in place to not necessarily spend tons of money on celebration, but to put yourself in a position where you pause for a moment and you reflect on the things that you're accomplishing. And you take time to, to relish the things that are, that are going on in your life. we're going to try and cover some of these things in our conversations today.

We'll see how far we go with this, and whatever we, we don't hit, we'll pick up next week. We started talking about, the goal setting process, and so we're going to jump in right now to the goal module. And as we do that, I'm going to let Zig Ziglar introduce the importance of goals, and the goal setting process to you.

Zig is, is one of my mentors and one of the favorite people that I have in the world to listen to, because He is so simple, he's so basic, and yet he's so insightful in the things that, that he says. take just a couple of minutes now and let's listen to this, short clip on goal setting by none other than Zig Ziglar.

I want to talk a little bit about goals on the line of how do you lose 37 pounds and write a book. I'm just going to give you that as an example. For 24 years of my adult life, by choice, I weighed well over 200 pounds. I say by choice because, I have never accidentally eaten anything.

it's always been deliberate. And when I choose to eat too much today, I have chosen to weigh too much tomorrow. You can choose to set goals. and realize your potential. Or you can choose not to set them. Now, if you choose not to set them, you've got to understand that the consequences are not going to be good down the road.

For 24 years, I was going to lose that weight. As a matter of fact, in 24 years, I lost several thousand pounds of weight. How many of you already know exactly what I'm talking about? But it wasn't until I wrote it down Put a date on it. Listed the obstacles I had to overcome. Identified the people, the groups, the organizations I needed to work with.

Spelled out a plan of action. Set that time limit in there. And identified all of the benefits to me. It was only when I did That the goal became a reality, and I lost the weight. For 10 or 15 years, I was gonna write a book. anybody who's gonna do just a whole lot of things, folks, I was gonna write a book.

But it wasn't until I got busy writing the book, and writing the plans first, before the book ever materialized. Now, if it sounds like I'm trying to sell you on having goals, how many of you are getting close already? How many of you are becoming convinced right quick that you need to have those goals?

There's no question about it. The immortal J. C. Penney many, years ago said, Give me a stock clerk with a goal, and I'll give you a man who will make history. But give me a man without a goal, and I'll give you a

Now there's Zig Ziglar on goal setting, so if, if you can't pick up from Zig the importance, then I guess there's nothing anybody can do to help you. He is so on target with what he says. The goals are so vitally important, and I relate to part of what he was talking about there, because my first book, called The Shepherd and the Princess, is a book that I had been intending to write probably for 20 years.

I had given it as a talk a number of times and it wasn't until January of 2013 that I was talking with my friend Phil Jones and you're gonna actually get a chance to hear a little clip from him later on in the show. But I was talking with Phil and sharing with him, the story of the Shepherd and the Princess, and he said, you've always wanted to write a book, why haven't you written it?

And he really put it on me and said, come on, let's get this thing done. And as a result of that, I started writing the book the 1st of April, and had the first printed copy in my hand at the beginning of June. And it's just amazing how you can really do things if you focus on them, and if you break them down into manageable chunks and, Realize that nothing in life is as difficult as our minds make it out to be.

great lessons from Zig Ziglar there. But in the goal module, I want to talk about who you are as a person first because there needs to be a congruence between who you are and what you do. And in my mind, starting out, figuring out who you are begins with your mission statement. And your mission statement is nothing more than completing this sentence.

My life will be successful if, fill in the blank. A number of years ago, I think it was back in 2006, I was in Kazakhstan in the northeastern part of the country, and I was teaching at the Kazakh American Free University. And the university there, was created by a former minister of education in Kazakhstan shortly after the Russians pulled out of Kazakhstan because he realized very insightfully that there needed to be training for the up and coming generation who was going to be responsible for managing and growing businesses within Kazakhstan.

Also, very wisely, he made a decision that he wanted the students at the university to be taught the American business model. And so he wound up partnering with a number of organizations in the United States to actually bring professors, bring businessmen to Kazakhstan to teach classes there to help the students understand the free enterprise capitalistic system that we have here in the United States.

I had the pleasure of being there for a while and I taught two classes. I taught an undergraduate class in strategic planning. and a, graduate level class in Corporate Management. When I first went into the Strategic Planning class, these kids thought that they were going to be developing a strategic plan for a multinational organization that generated billions of dollars in revenue and employed hundreds of thousands of people.

But the first assignment I gave them was to develop a personal mission statement. And one of the young men in the class said, how does that relate to strategic planning? And I said, it's very simple. If you can't develop a mission plan for a person, an individual, a company of one, what credibility do you have to be able to do it for a multinational organization where you're going to be affecting the lives of thousands and thousands of people?

And he got the point. To my surprise, the students really got into the process of developing a personal mission statement, and on a Friday afternoon they came to me and said, listen, we realize that The class is not open, the school's not open on Saturday, but if we could, would you be willing to meet with us somewhere?

We'll bring coffee and pastries and stuff like that. We just want to sit and talk with you a while because we have a lot of questions. And so we got together, sat in a circle, had coffee, and talked through the process of goal setting. Now, as you can imagine, in the development of an admission statement, because these kids came from pretty humble financial backgrounds.

Most of them wanted to make a lot of money and that was the focus of their mission statements. They wanted to make a lot of money, they wanted to be successful, they wanted all of the trappings of success. The big homes, the cars, the yacht on the Mediterranean, world travel, all that sort of stuff. And I finally interrupted the conversation and said, guys, I want to try and focus you in on something here and I want you to think about this for just a minute.

And I gave them this scenario and I would invite you to do the same thing. I said, the first thing I want you to do is just close your eyes and I want you to picture this in your mind. And Envision yourself being at the end of your life. You're perhaps 90 or 95 years old. You're bedridden, you're in the bed in your home, and your doctor has just left your side and told you that you have less than 24 hours to live.

Paint that picture as vividly as you can in your mind. And then ask yourself this question, at that point in your life, what will be important to you? Will it be the seven bedroom, seven bathroom home that you live in when you can't even get out of bed to go to your own bathroom? Will it be the 150, 000 or 200, 000 sports car that's sitting in the driveway that you can no longer drive?

Will it be the yacht on the Mediterranean? What will be the most important thing? And the message I was trying to get across to these kids I guess two messages. One is that you have to live your life in balance. And number two, you have to realize that in the final analysis, life is not about money and things.

It's about people and relationships. And when we stop and think about that from a Christian perspective, isn't that what Jesus Christ was all about? Jesus Christ would not have been successful by today's standards, by the way we tend to measure things in our secular society. Because He didn't have a home.

He didn't have a lot of money. But his focus was on people and relationships. That's all that really mattered to him. And as a result, here we are over 2, 000 years after his death, and still people follow him because of the way he cherished relationships with others. And if that's not success, I don't know what is.

So take some time as you think about this. Take some time and actually jot down some thoughts about What's really important to you in life? And then as you go back and you examine those things, you'll begin to find the threads of who you are as a person. The second thing we need to talk about is once we have a mission statement written down, we need to talk about what underlies that mission statement.

In other words, what are the values that are driving you to be the person you are? And I, recommend doing something that is a combination. It's identifying what your values categories are and then creating some clarifying statements. And I'll, get to that in just a minute here. But examples of values categories are things like spiritual, marriage, family, financial success.

Business success, leadership, physical, patriotism, giving back to the community, achieving balance in your life, learning, mentoring, humility, those sorts of things. And I recommend that you go through and you think about those things and there may be some categories that I haven't covered here that you want to come up with.

But pick maybe six or eight or ten of those categories that really. underlie and undergird the mission statement that you've created, and then write a clarifying statement about each one. So as an example, one of my core values is learning. And the clarifying statement I have for that says that I'm committed to being a lifelong learner.

I actively study to keep myself abreast of and constantly advance my understanding in the spiritual, marriage, family, financial, and business areas of my life. So just in a couple of sentences there, you get a sense for learning. And part of my mission statement says that I want to have a positive impact on the lives of others.

So you can see how learning undergirds that. Because by constantly learning and staying abreast of things that are going on and constantly feeding my mind, it gives me the ability to have the tools at my disposal to be able to have a positive impact on the lives of other people. once you have your mission statement, and you have your values and the clarifying statements, then we need to look at the balance of your life.

And I use a tool called the Wheel of Life. If you go out and Google it on the internet, you'll find that there are tons of examples of the Wheel of Life. But basically, what it is it looks like a bicycle wheel. It has a hub in the middle, and it has a tire on the outside, and it has a number of spokes radiating from the center to the outside.

And, I've labeled for my purposes anyway, and for the purposes I use in teaching, I have created, eight spokes on my Wheel of Life, and each one of those spokes is labeled. And so I have categories that are spiritual, social, career, financial, marriage, family, physical, and personal development. And what I encourage everybody to do is create, just take a blank piece of paper and draw that, and put eight or nine or ten spokes on it, and put those values that you have on the, the perimeter by a spoke of the, wheel.

And then go through and from zero at the center of the wheel to ten on the outside of the wheel, label where you are in each of those areas, 0 being, I don't do anything about it, haven't done anything with it, and 10 being, I couldn't do any better if I tried. So if you do that, and then connect those dots, it gives you an idea of just how round the wheel is.

Now in a perfect world, every area of our lives would be perfectly balanced, we'd have a round wheel and we'd be able to get on the bicycle and wheel, wheel down the road and everything would be fine. But none of us are perfect. We all have areas of our lives that we need to improve in, and we have some areas that are better than others, but by connecting the dots, we begin to see, number one, just how lopsided our wheel is, and number two, it begins to give us an idea that if we want to live a balanced life, what areas of our life do we really need to focus on improving?

So now we have our mission statement, we have values and clarifying statements, we have the wheel of life that indicates where we need to be working to balance things out, Now it's time to begin the goal setting process, and I recommend using, a principle called the SMART principle. And SMART is an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time Based.

Specific means that your goals need to be well defined. So it's not sufficient just to say, I want to make 100, 000 a year. What is specific is to say, I want to be earning 100, 000 a year by December 31st. That's a very specific goal. The next letter, M, stands for measurable. If you have a specific goal, you have the ability to measure.

If I said I wanted to be making 100, 000 a year by December 31st, Does that give me a stick against which to measure my progress? And the whole key behind having things measurable is you can't achieve what you can't measure. In businesses, many times I talk with business owners and I say, you're not moving the business in the direction it needs to go in because you're not measuring the right things.

You get exactly what you measure. So you have to have the ability to measure your progress towards your goals in order to be able to achieve them. The third letter in the acronym is A, and that stands for achievable. And achievable means that it stretches you, but it's attainable. Many people tend to look at achievable and use that as an excuse to set the bar way too low.

But the whole idea behind achievable is that we not only want to accomplish a goal, but we want to stretch ourselves in the process. Because as we learn and as we grow, we achieve goals, but then it gives us the capability to set goals. Better goals. Loftier goals. To continue to raise the bar and pursue those things and to learn and grow in the process.

The R in the acronym stands for realistic. And realistic means it's an objective towards which you are both willing and able to work. It's something that you, that is in the realm of possibility. It's achievable, but it's something that you have or can develop the skills to get to. And the things, and something that excites you enough, that gives you enough drive, that gives you enough of a why that you're willing to get out there and actually work for it.

And the T of the SMART principle is time based. It just simply means that everything has to have a deadline. So when we look at the elements of our goals, The goals have to be supported by our mission and our values, because that's what creates the congruence in our life. I often make the comment that you cannot consistently do what you are not, because it creates a conflict in your life, and you'll either accomplish something and not be satisfied with it, or you'll be miserable in the process.

make sure that the goals that you set are congruent with who you say you want to be and you want to become as a person. They have to follow the SMART principle. They have to be written down, like back in the Harvard study we talked about. The 3 percent who wrote their goals down achieved so much more.

Write them down. They have to be broken into manageable chunks, and we have to review them often, frequently during the course of the year. I sit down and review my goals for the year at least once a month, and that keeps me on track, and keeps me focused on doing the things that I said are, most important to me.

The second thing that we want to talk about as part of the four modules is the whole concept of time management. And time management is a great misnomer largely because it leads us to believe that we can somehow control time, and we can't. Really what time management is, not controlling time.

It's not controlling time, it's controlling how we choose to invest our time. And I want to tell you just a real quick story here about Charles Schwab. And I, I apologize because I always get the location of this story messed up, but I realized that it happened in 1903, and I believe that, that Schwab at the time was the head of Bethlehem Steel.

He had just taken over the company. and was striving to make it a profitable going concern. And Charles brought in a, gentleman named Ivy Lee who was an efficiency expert. And he sat with Ivy Lee and said, listen, I have to find a way for me and my staff to become more productive at what we do. If you can show us a way that we can be more productive, I will pay you within reason whatever you ask.

Ivy Lee gave Charles Schwab this simple process. He said, number one, I want you to take out a blank piece of paper, and I want you to write on it the six most important things that you have to do tomorrow. Schwab took a few minutes and wrote down the six things. And Ivy Lee said then, okay, here's what I want you to do now.

I want you to take your pen again, and I want you to write a number next to each one of those six things. Number them from one to six, with number one being the most important thing that you have to accomplish, and number six being the least important. And Schwab took a couple of minutes and wrote the numbers down, put them in prioritized order.

And Ivy Lee then said, here's what I want you to do. Fold that piece of paper up, put it in your pocket, and take it home. When you get back into work tomorrow morning, I want you to take that piece of paper out and I want you to start working on number one. And I want you, as much as you possibly can, to continue working on it until number one is done.

I realize you're going to have interruptions, you're going to get phone calls, there's going to be meetings that you're going to have to go to, that's fine. Stay focused on number one until you get it done. Then go on to number two and number three and so on. And so I'm telling you that for two important reasons.

Number one, if you can't get all six of those things done tomorrow using the method that I've just given you, you can't get them done any other way. And number two, by doing and using this philosophy and this approach, what it does is it constantly keeps you focused on those things that you claim are most important in your life.

that becomes the foundation of time management, is once you have your goals and you've broken them down into manageable chunks, and my definition of manageable chunks is breaking it down to a point where if you have a goal 12 months in the future, what do I need to do today in order to achieve that goal?

And then prioritizing that, it takes you in the direction, it keeps you focused on the things that you, need to do. I've got an email here that I'd like to respond to. It's from, Donna. in Hanover, Pennsylvania. And she's asking, Gary, is it possible that some people don't become successful because they are afraid to succeed, yet they're not aware of this?

If they realize it, how can they overcome this? Donna, the answer to the question is absolutely yes. There are tons of people out there who don't become successful because they're afraid of a number of things. I guess the way I would categorize it is there's two phrases that I use, FOF and FOP.

People are afraid because of fear of failure. They're also afraid sometimes because fear of people. Because if you're trying to be successful, you're not successful in a vacuum. It requires that you get out and interact with other people. And so people can be a part of the feelings of failure too. If you're not the type of person who really enjoys getting out and interacting with people.

But failure is, failure because people are afraid to succeed is absolutely true. It can be because you're afraid to succeed. It can be also because you're afraid to fail. There are two sides to that coin, and I think most of the time it's fear of failure that's more the problem than the fear of success, but definitely that does come into play.

Sometimes people aren't aware of it. I don't know that it's so much that they aren't aware as it is that they just don't want to accept that's the way it is. And so they tend to, as we talked about on the first show, they tend to blame, Other people and other circumstances for their failures.

But let's deal with the bigger issue, and that is if they realize it, how can they overcome it? Fear is one of those things that can either be your best friend or your worst enemy. It depends on how you handle it. Fear, in and of itself, Fear is neutral. It's neither good nor bad. It's one of those things that if God didn't want us to have that emotion in our lives, He wouldn't have given it to us, but it's neither a good or bad thing.

It's all in how we either respond or react to fear that makes all the difference in the world. If we react to fear, then we let it win. We let it beat us down, and it paralyzes us and keeps us from taking action. And then we lose. Then we ultimately fail. That's all. But if we look at fear and see it for what it really is, it's just another obstacle in our pathway that needs to be overcome, then we have the ability to get the courage to take action in spite of it.

as an example, if I were to say, in order for you to be successful at XYZ, you need to read this book and you need to apply the principles in it. For the most part, if it was learning how to do something, would you not be willing to do that if you wanted to be successful? why don't we do the same thing with fear?

We need to reach out. We need to take action in spite of our fear and realize that in so doing, not only do we conquer that particular fear, but we begin to build an emotional muscle that says, you know what? When I got on the other side of fear, it really didn't seem like it was as bad as my mind made it out to be.

So the next time you get into a situation where you're fearful, it becomes a little bit easier to take action. And then you get to a point after you've done it for a number of years where it's yeah, I see fear. I got to act anyway. Let's just go and get this thing done. Donna, thanks very much for writing in.

I appreciate your comments there, and I hope you found the answer helpful. So we've talked about goal setting. We've talked about time management. Now let's get into and have a little bit of a discussion about execution and how important that is, because Nothing happens until somebody takes action, and as Donna said in her email, the problem that we have is that a lot of people are facing fear, and that keeps them from taking action.

But action is really, important, and I want to introduce this topic. I want to go to a short clip by Tony Robbins talking about the importance of taking action. What changes our whole life is action. Why don't we take action? Fear. What do we got to do to get ourselves to do it? We got to make sure that we push ourselves through it by making a decision.

The point in which change happens is a decision. Every change in your life that you want will come from something simple, a decision. What does it take to change? Decide. God sounds so simple and so basic. Was that easy? You'd already have done it, Mr. Robbins! No, it is that easy and you're still not doing it.

Because you are not putting yourself in a state to decide. See, a real decision is not like a preference. It's not like when you say, I'll try it and see. That's not a decision. Decision comes from Latin. It means, incision, to cut off from. Decision is when you cut off any possibility except the thing you've committed to.

It's that is it. How many of you in this room have ever smoked cigarettes, and then one day you finally decided, no more, really decided, and you've never touched again, and you're not even tempted to? How many made that decision at one time? Say, I. You know what a real decision is. If I came to you today and I said, Would you like a cigarette?

Would you go, What brand is it? No, you'd probably say to me, No, I'm not a I want you to hear that. You normally say, I don't smoke. You'd say, I'm not even that kind of person. You literally divorce yourself from being that kind of person. So it's no effort. When you really decide, it's not an effort. Once you've cut it off, it doesn't take effort.

Deciding takes effort, but once you've decided, it's over. You don't think about it anymore. It's like it's easier to fast than it is to diet. Because when you're fasting, somebody offers you something you don't even think about. You go, no, I'm not eating. When you're dieting, you're like, maybe I could have a little more.

This is a little piece of cake. Not that many calories. Pretty soon you're back to where you were again. a real decision is what you've got to make. When you make a real decision, life changes. But, it's a real decision, you burn your bridges, you only move forward. Tony's talking about action is driven, first of all, by a decision.

It's a decision, as he was saying, to cut off. You cut off all other avenues of possibility and determine that you're going to go ahead and you're going to do something. make that decision first. That's where action begins, but then action continues beyond that. And I'm not trying to minimize this.

Taking action is one of the most challenging parts of the achievement process. But it doesn't have to be as bad as our minds make it up to be. I had the opportunity to do a presentation to a multi level marketing group. And one of the guys came up during the break and was talking to me, and he said, he said, I realize that the success of my business is surrounding my ability to be able to pick up the phone and invite people to come and see this particular opportunity.

But he said, man, I'll tell you what, that phone gains a hundred and fifty pounds every time I go. And he said, what is it that I can do about it? And I said, the main thing for me is, number one, do you have a strong enough why? Is there something, what is it that's driving you to do this business?

Because you look down the road and you say, I want to be at this income level by this point in time. That's the destination that you're headed to. The multi level marketing business that you're in is the vehicle that you have to take you where you want to go. The problem that you need to think about is what's the fuel in the gas tank of your vehicle?

That's your why. And your why needs to be strong because it needs to be propelling you forward. And then it comes to, as Tony Robbins was talking about, the point of making a decision. And we decide that we are going to take that action. But then there's another thing that we can do, and that gets back to the whole and ties into the whole goal setting process, is that if we have taken our goals and they've broken our goals down into these little tiny baby steps, that's not looking at it and saying, gee, over the next, six months, I have to make 573 phone calls in order to be able to get where I need to be.

If we look at it from the standpoint that we just need to take One baby step that's using that prioritized list that we were talking about with Charles Schwab to say all I have to do is one thing and then one thing after that and then one thing after that. And what happens is that we break it down to a point where mentally we see the next step that we have to take is not being any kind of a big deal.

And also it allows us to start building that massive action muscle that we need. to be able to get out there and take that persistent, consistent action every day. Once you start executing, monitor your progress. And look and ask yourself one very, important question, and that is, are the actions that I'm taking, me closer to or further away from my goal?

Make whatever adjustments are required. One of the stories I use is a story about the airplane, an airplane leaving Los Angeles and flying to Hawaii. Do you realize that in the process of that journey, that aircraft is off course 95 percent of the time? But there's an autopilot system on the plane that triangulates with the satellites and it's constantly looking and saying, oops, off course, adjust, oops, off course, adjust.

And sure enough, several hours later, that plane lands right in the perfect spot on the runway in Hawaii. That's what we need to look at life as. That's the way we need to do things. There's another little clip that I want to play that addresses the whole concept of fear and how we need to take action in spite of it.

It's by a dear friend from mine, a sales trainer over in the UK. His name is Phil Jones. So let's see what Phil has to say. I read a great quote once. It said, Only if you're prepared to fail greatly, will you achieve greatly. And that is so true in so many ways. So many people are afraid of taking action, afraid of moving forward, afraid of taking decision, of fear that it won't work out.

So what they do is procrastinate, sit on their laurels, take no action at all. Yet it's the actions we take, the decisions that we take, that move us forward. The downside is, when you take actions and you go all in, only sometimes does it pay off. So many times it ends in disaster, ends in failure. However, you have to not be afraid to fail.

There's a big difference between a failure and a mistake. A failure is merely trying something you've never tried before. Having a go, playing all in, and not getting the result that you perhaps hoped for. That's called learning. That's called growing. A mistake, however, is doing something that you know you shouldn't do or doing something wrong because you know there's a better way of doing it.

And those should be avoided. My lesson or thought for today is be prepared to fail and make failures in your life and learn from them and grow. Take decisions, take action, play all in, but avoid the mistakes. Learn and grow. See where it takes you. Powerful words by, by Phil Jones about, about taking action in spite of fear.

And when you do, yes, you'll have failures. That's part of life. You can't have success in life without having failures along with it. I often make the comment to people that I have learned much more from my failures in life than I have from successes. Going back to an old, saying by Tony Robbins, one of his favorite sayings is, when people succeed.

They party, but when people fail, they ponder. And so pondering is a good thing, because it teaches us some very, powerful life lessons. we set our goals. We've taken some action. We have a time management system in place to help us get to where we need to be. Now, it's time to celebrate the little accomplishments.

One of the things that I always say is that, is that, be happy, but don't ever get satisfied. Keep pushing, but celebrate the little things along the way because joy in life comes more from the process than it does from the destination. that's it for us today here on the Gary Smith Show. Thank you very much for being with us, this week.

We look forward to, having you join us next week. And next week, we're actually going to do something a little bit different. We're going to be dealing with the subject of Finding a job, the whole job hunting experience. Until then, God bless you, live life with passion.