Summary
Are you on pace to make your dreams for yourself a tangible reality – or are you setting fire to them each day through inertia and lack of focus?
Maintaining progress toward your goals requires daily diligence, ruthless focus, and a sense of your own weaknesses. Lying to yourself will only set you up for disappointment down the road.
It isn’t enough to set a plan – it requires continual follow through and an ability to examine whether or not it is getting the job done.
Read on to learn more about how you can ensure that your course of action is steering you in the right direction – and how to adjust that course when necessary.
Transcript
There’s an old saying that I try to always keep in mind: “If you aren’t moving forward, you are moving backward.”
Are You Moving Forward?
This adage serves as a reminder for me to be vigilant against complacency. If I am standing still in life – not learning new skills, making new contacts, continuing to develop my business – I am essentially regressing on my goals. Not acting with intention and a sense of purpose each day will very likely lead to your dreams going unfulfilled. Simply hopping in your car and driving off toward the sunset will not easily lead you to the coast – not as quickly as if you bring along a map and a GPS to guide your journey.
If you aren’t developing and implementing a clear action plan to achieve your goals, the dreams that you hold are most likely crumbling right in front of you without you even seeing it. As Jimi Hendrix put it, “Castles made of sand fall in the sea eventually.” You can’t entertain wishful thinking when it comes to making progress on your mission. It is nice to have dreams and fantasies, but these should be relegated to when you’re sleeping, not when it comes to your life goals. Be honest with yourself when you are plainly falling short at putting in the work and effort necessary to achieve big things. It is a rare but invaluable quality to be able to accept responsibility for yourself and to apply a clear-eye view toward what is not working in your approach.
A Holistic Approach To Planning and Priorities
What I have learned is that it requires holistically taking care of yourself in every aspect of your life – professional, personal, health – to be the best version of yourself and make your vision of tomorrow come to fruition. My very best and most innovative thinking has come when I was well-balanced and relaxed, rather than the harried and fearful state that far too many seem to unfortunately find themselves in due to economic pressures. We all go through periods in which we are working hard to meet critical deadlines, but we should generally strive to ensure balance and calmness in how we approach our vision for tomorrow.
One of the most impactful techniques you can use is to make sure that you are focusing your energies on the right priorities at the right times. With all of the demands on your attention out there, it takes a special type of skill to be able to filter out what matters from what is just sucking away time and capacity. The greatest majority of your time each day should be directed toward your unique capabilities that will produce the greatest results. That means directing more energy toward your own talents and less toward busywork, requests from others, meetings, and other activities that can be ideally delegated or automated. I would also lump distractions into this bucket. Surfing the web and social media have their place, but they can also suck up huge amounts of your concentration if you don’t rein this time in and remain mindful of how much time is passing by. We have real challenges today with navigating technology that folks in earlier times simply never had to contend with. I’m not one to swear off of technology entirely – there are too many benefits from being connected to disengage entirely, but there is value to taking regular breaks and “technology fasts” to encourage you to take a look at the bigger picture on where you want to go.
Try getting into the habit of recording a few tasks each day that you must accomplish in order for you to look back upon the day as a success. Start in on those goals as soon as you wake up in the morning and you will be launched on a great start to take control of the day.
One of these priorities each day should be your health. You really can’t be thinking of your exercise or recreation as a secondary activity that you’ll get to if you have time. Your health is the foundation upon which all of the rest of your work depends. This includes getting enough sleep, drinking enough water, and maintaining a healthy diet. Include fitness and health goals along with the other goals that you write down on your daily to-do list.
Write It Down!
As I’ve written before, this simple act of committing your objectives to paper makes it exponentially more likely that you will follow through on them. You also need to pay special care to frame your goals in an optimistic, forward-leaning manner. An example might be that your goal is “to maintain a healthy bodyweight of around (X number of pounds)” or “I am planning to earn a six figure salary this year from various revenue streams.” Having a firm sense of clarity of what you are working for will be the key differentiator between you and everyone else that is vaguely shuffling toward vague, unconnected goals.
Guard Your Time
Remember that you want your life to ultimately be about more than just responding to the fabricated crisis of the moment. Your goal in life is to not please 100% of the people you come across by meeting their demands or desires immediately. Developing a thick skin and allowing yourself to shake off the feeling of not conforming to others’ desires for your time will be a lifelong asset for helping you attain success.
Part of this involves ruthlessly expunging elements from your life that aren’t productive, enjoyable, or adding value. My motto is “garbage in, garbage out.” You don’t have anytime for individuals who make you feel harried or who try to bring negativity into your orbit.
Visualize Your Future
You can also use the power of visualization to vividly call forth an image of what your life will look like and how it will be different when you have met your goals. This might include images of yourself at your ideal body weight or in the type of home that you imagine yourself living in. Use that power of visualization to remind yourself exactly each day what it is that you are working toward.
Be Present
Always strive to be fully living in the present and completely cognizant of opportunities out there that can help you reach your goals more quickly. Strive to find the right balance with all of the technology at your fingertips to make sure that you aren’t overlooking obvious opportunities all around you – think of the people who miss glaring real estate and business opportunities in their neighborhood because they are too distracted by their telephones. Don’t get me wrong – there are a world of opportunities for revenue generation and networking that are expanded through technology. Just don’t let it become a substitute for living a real life.
What steps do you focus on each day to ensure that you are making your future vision a reality? How do you knew when you need to reset your approach to stay on track?
You can also learn more by visiting my website: tonyneumeyer.com and registering to receive free trainings articles and more. Also subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow me on Facebook. You can get your copy of The 7 Minute Millionaire and check out my other books here: https://tonyneumeyer.com/books/.
