Lesson 12

Step 1 – Get Your Doorman working for you.

Start by writing out three goals, one for your career, one for your personal life and one for health or finances.

Your doorman will filter out some 2 million bits of information a second

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do, so throw off the bowlines, sail away from safe harbour, catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore, Dream, Discover.” —Mark Twain

Back to The Future

Marty McFly comes from a dysfunctional family; his dad is bullied by Biff an old school enemy. His mother is a bit over weight and smokes like a train. Then he gets whisked back 30 years in a DeLorean Time Machine created by his buddy ‘The Doc’. Once back in 1955 he has to make his parents fall in love to ensure his own survival. But his dad George is an utter wimp famous for one-liners such as ‘you are my density’. Marty sets his own mother up in a parked car and plans for George to save her. Unfortunately, Biff comes along and attempts to assault her. George stumbles on them and finds a ‘new belief and confidence’ knocking Biff to the ground, with an Ali like left hook he rescues his future wife. However later at the ‘Enchanted Ball’ some dude tries to step in and dance with her, at first, he capitulates then realises his newfound self-belief!

Well, Marty eventually gets back to his present-day life and awakes to find his family life completely changed. His brother was wearing a suit, His mum and dad looked fit, healthy and confident. His dad George had a new book published and outside there was Biff waxing Marty’s new pickup truck. The tables had turned George was the confident one with a great life!

And that brings me nicely to the point. Your past was created a long time ago and has resulted in where you are in life right now only you don’t have to go back in a DeLorean Time Machine to change it.

Where you are today is more important, the past is the past. Your memories are probably distortions of what happened. What you create in your mind today will become the seeds of your future even if you are 80 years old.

One of our delegates Kim told us that one of her favourite sayings was, “A ship may be safe in the harbour but that is not what it was built for.” And anyway, when it’s not moving through water, the barnacles gather on the vessel.

Ok, so we know the ship should be sailing somewhere but to which destination? The crew set the exact coordinates of the port into the navigation system, rather than letting it drift aimlessly. The same applies to us and that is why it is important to have a purpose and set goals.

The Goal Setting Process

I have been using a goal setting process for some 30 years. Over time I have wondered why some goals worked out with a fantastic result, while others seemed unachievable and some fell by the wayside. I have drawn some conclusions, which I will share with you.

There have been many books written on goal setting from ‘Think and Grow Rich’ by Napoleon Hill to ‘You can have what you want’ by Michael Neill. They share common themes that seem to have been passed down over the last 150 years or so. My first experience of a goal setting process came from Lou Tice and involved; writing affirmations, self-talk and trusting in your filters (Doorman) to open up with information.

I am not advocating a goal setting methodology or stating that you can have everything in life that you want so don’t rush off to the Bentley dealership! What I am proposing is some simple techniques that I use which are based on the NLP goal setting process.

My own observations of successful goal achievers is; that they work extremely hard. They focus on a task, they work effectively and efficiently, they do not procrastinate, and they will do the least favourable task first so that they are not thinking about it all day.

So, I set about using the methodology in Lou Tice’s ‘Investment in Excellence’ programme. The first major achievement I experienced occurred whilst facilitating the cause of a quality problem we had with electro-mechanical components becoming rejected by our customer because of contamination; it was only 10 in a million, but we wanted it to be zero! This problem had been with us for a while and following a reorganisation it was given to me. Buzzing with enthusiasm from my course I wrote a goal out as if we had achieved it already. (See the process, which follows) I read my goal every day on a little card and after a few weeks I noticed I was talking with people about it and gathering information – My ‘Doorman’ at work! On one occasion it was with someone outside work whose company had access to technology, which could identify extremely small particles. Well that’s what we did and a few weeks later the Production manager in the factory identified two potential root causes.

I want to go through a few steps in goal setting and we will discuss what works and when it does not and the possible reasons why. Before we start there are two schools of thought regarding setting goals. The first is that it should be time bound in other words we set a date when we want it to happen. The other view is not to set a date because it could take longer or may even happen sooner. I do both depending on what the goal is.

In summary here are the steps we will cover in later videos:

Have Confidence in your Doorman

We know that our doorman and filters open up to information when something is important to us. So, we can set more stretching goals in the knowledge that when we start working towards them ‘information’ will be all around us. In fact, what I do is make notes under my goals when things happen which demonstrate progress towards the goal. It is not always obvious what is happening; yes, you will find yourself talking with people, reading new information and noticing people who are doing similar things. Some of what may be happening will be under your conscious radar, it may only be when you look back over a few weeks or months that you will notice a pattern of things occurring.