The original MindMillion book 2005 by Silvia Hartmann - Part 4

Real Goals

Phase 4

Real Goals

Now I can’t know just what you’ve heard about goal setting, or how often you’ve heard it. I don’t know if you done any of it – written down what you thought you wanted and what you thought when you were going to get this, stuck a picture of a yacht or a palace on your mirror and tried to visualise this a thousand times a day, or not.

Goal setting and understanding just HOW that is supposed to be working has been a hobby of mine for the past 15 years or so.

That was MY goal – how to understand goal setting.

I thought to own the magic lamp was more important than to own a palace made by a magic lamp, because if you own the lamp, all and everything is YOURS.

Even things you don’t know yet that you might want those in ten years from now.

State Not Objects!

The first thing we have to be clear about, and advertisers and marketers know this, is that we are NOT after a hard object of any kind.

It isn’t the Mercedes or the yacht or the villa which turns us on or that we want, but what it FEELS LIKE to USE these things.

This is about STATE and not about objects.

If you don’t quite understand this yet, I recommend you hire the classic “Citizen Kane” and watch it.

Here, the guy ends up with all the riches in the world, sitting in his own “Neverland” he built and is so miserable, he dies of it.

• People who tie STATE to material objects or relationships can never truly be rich.

Being a rich is a state of BEING, something you know, and feel, and carry inside yourself all the time, and it can’t be towed away like your big car, or run out of the door like the expensive model girlfriend, or be blown away in a hurricane like the beach bungalow of your dreams.

A rich is a rich, even if their latest business just collapsed and they are on the way out of the creditor’s court, already setting up their next deal as they’re leaping down the stairs.

A rich comes out on top every time, no matter what the economics are, whether there’s a war on or not, even in a prison camp they’ll be the ones with the resources, because making the best of the environments is WHO THEY ARE.

The difference between using desire and emotional states in goal setting and how they work, or not work at all, lies in the difference between WANT AND NEED.

Wanting VS Needing

A poor will letch hopelessly after a big Mercedes because they NEED some item of power like that to make themselves feel better, to prove to themselves that they’re worthy, to make other people feel jealous and all sorts of ego-gratifications.

A rich, on the other hand, might simply WANT one.

To get an idea and a feeling of how that is so essentially and fundamentally different, imagine you are standing in front of a fruit stall in a market and you point at an orange and say, “I need that!”

Now, do it again and point and say, “I WANT THAT ONE.”

• Need is desperation, and that reeks, energetically and practically.

Want on the other hand is a statement of CHOICE, and magically, that is a powerful attractor.

Have you ever met a person who really WANTED – you?

Have you ever met a person who “really needed” you?

And the way that makes you feel, respectively, namely one being extremely powerful and attractive, and the other resentful, negative and rejecting, is a universal constant for all things.

It works for all things.

People who “need” to be validated, don’t get any validation.

People who “need” money won’t get any.

Salesmen who “need” more sales are pitiful.

Things will actively avoid them, in the end even dogs in the street, and that’s actually true and not just a saying!

So our No. 1 exercise is to make a good distinction between our wants and needs, and to take the needs out of our empire building so that it may succeed.

>> Exercise: What Do I Need?

Make a list. Take your time and be REALLY HONEST, that’s essential.

If you really feel you need “your dead dad’s approval”, then put it on the list and begin to wonder what it is you are doing in your business life to try and fill that need.

I once knew a woman who felt she needed more friends – and tried to fill this need by taking on more clients. Now clients are NOT friends and of course, her business just couldn’t work like that. Further, people sniffed out the “neediness” and refused to hire her. And so her business life just became a mirror of her social life and it all went to pot from there.

If you have items on your list like, “I need a bigger house”, challenge that. Is that really a need? Do you live on the streets, or in the gutter? Is this not a question of WANTING a bigger house? Ah ....

Here’s a random example list of “What I need (desperately)...”

I need ...

... lots more money.

... support staff to do menial work for me.

... good accountants and financial advisors.

... better tooling and machinery.

... more marketing experience.

... more users.

... just one good breakthrough idea.

... an impressive temple like headquarters in the most expensive part of town.

... a flat in the Bahamas.

... someone who loves me.

Now, write your own list. Take your time and be really, really truthful. Don’t censor yourself. Allow all and everything to turn up, no matter how stupid it looks once it’s down on paper.

What I Really NEED ....

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13. ....

Next, go through the list and seriously challenge if that is really a need, or a want.

Use the relaxation technique from Phase 1 as you do this to help you think clearly and logically.

You will immediately notice that most of the items aren’t really needs at all, you just thought they were. They were in the wrong category and we can change our minds about those right away.

Cross them off the list and get a new piece of paper, headed with:

I WANT:

... and transfer the items to that new list.

What I Really WANT ....

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13. ....

Now if there are any items left that you “need”, ask the question if these things could or should be fulfilled by your work.

If the answer is no, that’s not a work problem but a personal problem, such as “someone who loves me”, put this on a very separate list and deal with this as it should be dealt with – namely by utilising the correct approaches, such as a dating agency.

This relieves your business of the burden of having to be some kind of sneaky self esteem machine for you and lets it function truly and purely – as a money making machine, as an empire under construction.

Keep this list open and keep an eye on “asking your business to give you things that it could not ever provide”. Write them down into the personal development page and clear your business of this extreme burden as soon as it becomes apparent.

It’s only fair, and logical.

Goal State Pictures

The wants/needs confusion is the greatest blockage to getting clear about what you want to accomplish with your business.

• For a single individual, this is always and only about feelings, and more specifically, about FEELING GOOD.

There are many different ways of feeling good.

There are orgasms. There is getting into a hot jaccuzzi. There’s the pure pleasure of driving a powerful luxury car you bought for yourself with your own money. There’s a sense of peace and homecoming when you step into your own house which is decorated to please you entirely. There is the energy of a hundred important people cheering and clapping for you. There’s the power surge that sweeps through you when you have made a breakthrough or solved an important puzzle for the first time.

Lots and lots of ways to feel good.

These are all states, and the most desirable of all states we have ever known I like to call “star states”.

People unfortunately get confused between these self experienced star states and the scenes and props where these occurred.

They may have felt especially in love and romantic on a moonlit beach, and so they think that you can only feel like that on the same beach, with the same person.

It’s understandable but structurally and practically, A TOTAL DISASTER.

It makes people endlessly repeat some scenes, replay the same old worn out movie, hoping desperately that it will “work again” and produce “that feeling again”.

States and feelings are not like that. They don’t replay like a CD you put in the drive.

I guarantee you that your first Mercedes will feel totally different from your fourteenth because you’re not the same person you were back then and it was new.

For everyone, you could say, there’s only ever ONE first Mercedes, one first yacht, one first time they stepped into their own castle.

As soon as this has happened and was experienced, they have to start to look for something else and something new, something even better still.

That’s how people are built, that’s how our neurology is designed – to never stand still but actively seek out BETTER AND DIFFERENT experiences, as long as we live.

The trouble with people is that they THINK if only they can get that first Mercedes, then EVERYTHING will be blissful and STAY blissful. This is the “happily ever after” delusion.

And the even bigger trouble with people is that there are parts of them which KNOW EXACTLY that this is a delusion, not real, and that if they run that one, they will only end up with horrendous disappointment on the “Citizen Kane” scale.

Best not to ever get these things, to save that final crushing blow ...

So we will need to do two things with our goals.

• Firstly, we need to set one (more of that later); and

• Secondly, we need to already now put FURTHER goals behind the first one so we get a dynamic, unfolding sequence of GOAL EVENTS.

This is in practice a lot more simple than it sounds in theory.

All we have to remember that we are dealing not with THE Mercedes, THE dream home, THE publishing contract, THE business, THE patent – but always with THE FIRST.

This goal is MY FIRST class car. THE FIRST of many to come, many different cars, different kinds of cars, probably planes too, jets, and if we live long enough, perhaps a space craft?

This goal is MY FIRST dream home. I will have more, and many others. This one is my UK base, and the next will be in Germany. I’ll get a flat in New York, and then ...

Do you understand how this works?

It doesn’t take anything away from the fun and excitement of the FIRST GOAL, in fact, it makes it much, much more exciting.

Now, the first goal doesn’t have to bear the burden of making you happy and keeping you happy for evermore; it becomes a step stone or a door that is now open and leads to whole new unfoldments.

Together with the Nothing Principle, we now have an evolution of goals that can start much smaller, become much more affordable and available; the goals become springboards to greater and brighter things, all along the way.

And they become achievable.

Let me give you an example.

An author might have had, before they came across this book, a goal of “writing the greatest bestseller that was ever written and winning the Pulitzer prize.”

Fair enough, but how does that help when the author has no publisher, no agents, no nothing at all to motivate them with success, with positive feedback, with unfoldments?

It doesn’t help at all as a goal.

It becomes a sad day dream and ever more unachievable; when you ask people about such “goals” after a few years they’ll tell you the goal is still there but it’s dimmer, further away, and they don’t really believe they’ll ever get there now.

With a “golden goal line”, on the other hand, we can start much, much smaller and GET SUCCESS along the way.

This is very, very important apart from “just” being highly motivational.

The author might make a first goal of getting a first article published in a magazine. That is right in line with the eventual bigger goals of Pulitzer prizes and such (after all, no-one who won those has ever come from nowhere, they were all practiced and published writers in one form or another!), but it is much more achievable and WORKABLE for right here and now.

How do you get an article into a magazine?

That is far easier to work out than “how to win a Pulitzer prize”.

This first goal contains activities beyond just sitting there and dreaming which our author CAN ACTUALLY DO – he can go out and look at some magazines, pick one that suits his style of writing, buy it, read the other contributions, find out who the editor is to submit to and so forth.

If our author keeps himself from getting stressed out, approaches the whole thing with good humour and dedication, and is willing to make changes if he finds he got something wrong along the way, he will succeed in getting his first article published.

Of course he will!

And the moment the first submission has been accepted, there is a GOAL ACHIEVED – there is a real, measurable SUCCESS. Now, he is a published author, and that’s a totally different level to the many thousands of wannabes who dream about Pulitzer prizes and never get any further than that.

Our author has proof that he CAN ACHIEVE HIS GOALS, he has succeeded, he is on a new level, and he doesn’t pause there but goes straight after his next goal.

This “golden line of goals” is once again, one of these laws of nature that works in relationships, in every conceivable form of business and even in working one’s way up from a flowerpot on the windowsill to a landscape garden surrounding a manor house.

>> Exercise: Golden Line Goals

So, here is our exercise.

1. Consider your business and your goals as they used to be. Are they achievable within a reasonable amount of time? Are they achievable with what you’ve got right now? Are they WITHIN YOUR REACH?

2. If they are not, we go back to the drawing board and re-define goals to create a golden goal line that powers you into the future.

Make sure that your next and upcoming FIRST GOAL is completely achievable, and that in achieving this you are paving the way to the next goal.

Make sure that your first goal is something that will make you proud and happy when you have achieved it.

Make a line of at least 3 goals in a row that follow from one another logically and quite easily and write them down across a piece of paper, with the beginning and easiest goal at the bottom, closest to you, and going up to the further, higher goals.

Notice how the WEIGHT of the greater goals are creating a strong motivational pull to get started on the EASY AND ACHIEVABLE goal at the bottom.

Can you understand this principle, FEEL how it works?

If you can, then you have just achieved one of the most crucial understandings on motivation and goal setting there is.

A Note: You can use this exercise for personal goals, for business goals, for relationship goals, even for personal development goals.

The golden goal line is a UNIVERSAL principle that works regardless of what the content or context of a goal might be.

Evolving Your Goals

Very important indeed is to remember that when you have achieved the first goal, to go back and ADD another goal to your line so you always have at least 3 goals in plain sight at all times.

If you don’t do this, your whole neurology will experience the sense of “ever decreasing circles” and the goals that are left will be slower in coming, harder to achieve and you’ll get more resistance as you are unwittingly trying to drag it out “so the game doesn’t end too soon”.

This is also a very good tip to remember when you seem to be procrastinating on simple, straightforward actions on the way to a first or intermediary goal.

You may need to add more weight to the goals BEHIND those you’ve already set to tip the balance and create the all-important FORWARD MOMENTUM that will pull you into the future and towards success.

Motivation & “Little” Goals

The fact is that we’ve been all entrained from the old 1950s schools of goal setting to think of goals as these massive things – castle on the hillside, huge yacht, the entire empire established and working as it should.

Those aren’t goals, but VISIONS.

A vision is a guide which holds a great many goals together under one umbrella.

Imagine you are King Arthur and you’re planning to unify the entire country. Your vision is a single empire, with yourself as the King, in the newly declared capital city, at your coronation, with everyone cheering around you.

That’s the vision.

Right here and now, we have civil war, no-one’s heard your name apart from a few friends, and there lies 25 years, 765 battles, and unknowable amounts of detailed problems of one kind or the other between the reality of now and that vision you have.

A vision is a wonderful motivator, but by itself it IS NOT ENOUGH.

• It is when a vision is supported by FEELINGS OF SUCCESS from “little goals” in the here-and-now that you get this powerful, amazing overall motivation that becomes quite unstoppable.

King Arthur got a powerful motivator in the here-and-now when he got his special sword. It served as a real time CONVINCER that the future vision can be accomplished; in moments of crisis, I’m sure he got that sword out to remind himself that it can be done and success can be accomplished.

A single sword doesn’t seem a lot when you consider all these battles to come and the cast of thousands that will eventually become involved in the endeavour, but it is exactly those sword of things which power us as human beings through the daily ups and downs towards the vision up above of the eventual goal.

If it is your vision that you will run a school, for example, that changes the world and has universities in every single country, with millions of students and there’s a picture of you on every single classroom wall, for hundreds of years to come, you will need to find yourself things that motivate you in the here and now – the so called “little” goals.

Only, they’re not “little” at all.

• When you’re there, and you’re Arthur who’s just got his special sword, they are MASSIVE in the way they feel, make you feel, empower you, lift you, inspire you to more and greater things.

You often hear old businessmen and women say that they fondly remember the old days, when they were still struggling, and they got their first (whatever).

How exciting that was back then, how they enjoyed it. How they celebrated their first sale with one bottle of beer that was passed around the whole group of them because that’s all they had and how wonderful a moment that was.

Cast your mind back to similar events.

These “little goals accomplished” are what you remember on your death bed.

It is because of the impact of success, joy, excitement and SHEER DELIGHT on our neurology, on our minds and bodies that this is so.

These “little goals achieved” are unbelievably motivational, and to find and set such goals, understanding that you are NOT looking for some societal template there but for what really TURNS YOU ON and lights you up like a Christmas tree, is the key to make YOU work FOR YOU many times harder than you ever thought possible.

Here is a simple examples of this.

There was an author who wasn’t that successful yet and money was tight; he had the problem of trying to write in a chaotic house with kids and telephones ringing, and people dropping in at all hours.

He set as a mini-goal to have a shed in the bottom of the garden where he could lock himself in and do his work properly, without disruptions.

To accomplish this, he had to write and sell five articles to various magazines.

He worked on this at night when it was quiet, made 30 submissions until he got his five articles and the payments for them, and had his shed build.

The first time he went inside and locked the door, he cried with joy because he “KNEW NOW that he would make it as an author”.

I’m sure this man had the Pulitzer VISION out there, but the shed was RIGHT HERE AND NOW and it served as a convincer, a motivator, a guiding star moment all rolled into one – you could say, without that little wooden shed there could be no great prize giving moments of the future with limousines and black tuxedo moments in the camera lights.

A cheap wooden shed, to 99.99999% of the population, would never rate as “a goal” at all – but to this man, it was King Arthur’s sword and all important.

He was happy. He had real success. He got what he wanted and his goal was the springboard to the next level of accomplishment and success.

So, now let’s think about your own desires, your vision and what’s right here and now.

Think about these “little” goals.

Forget all about grandeur and splendour, or “what other people might think” or what you think you SHOULD be wanting instead what you REALLY NEED to turn you on, to bring a smile to your face and a recognition that you really are on your way now and nothing will stop you from succeeding.

What is it that if you achieved it for yourself in the next month would make so much difference TO YOU?

It could be as simple as a cup with “Internet Nerd” written on it in which you make your coffee each time you make it.

Think about something that pleases you and will be a doorway opened on the way to your vision.

Find that, do it, fulfil it and once you’ve done THAT, you have understood how to set goals, use them to motivate you, and use them to steer your way towards the vision you have always had.

Multi-Level Goals Alignments

How do you know if a “small goal” from the here and now is actually supportive towards the bigger goals and the essential final “vision”, and beyond that, that the whole thing is karmically correct and in line with your highest potential and mission?

Here is a very simple and practical way to align all your goals and visions, from the greatest to the smallest, and make sure it all works together as it should to motivate you on all levels.

>> Exercise: The Split Screens

Instead of a single goal or vision image, we are going to employ the method of “split screens” – as many as you want but I would suggest four in total to learn the principle.

High up, and so high that you have to put your head back and look right up, place a representation of your higher self, your prophet or someone or thing to represent your highest outcomes for you whole life.

Below this, put the next level of split screen which contains your vision.

Compare the two and check that when they are there together, that neither dims or fades when both are present, and that they MATCH and work together.

If they do not, you have to do something to change your vision. Experiment and take as feedback when vision and higher aspects screen get closer, brighter, FEEL better. When they are in perfect alignment, you will feel a real “click” in your body and your mind and you know you have a good match.

Once these are in place, add a third screen, one that shows a major long term goal. You only need to align this major goal image to the one above, that of the vision. Are goal and vision compatible? Do they support each other, are they in alignment? When they are, move on to the next screen, which can show you a “little goal”, a here-and-now easily available thing that you can set into motion right now with the resources you already have at your disposal.

This simple exercise will give you a personal multi-level feedback device to both keep track of your goals and visions, as well as allow you to TEST new goals to make sure they are not inadvertently taking you away from your central vision and karmic path.

A Note: You can do this exercise as well by representing the four levels with writing or drawings on a sheet of paper that is divided into four horizontal segments to get you started. To hold the four screens steady in mind however is what works and keeps your life and work on track, wherever you go and whatever the circumstances.