Achieving Your Goals
How many of us wake up in the morning, and before we do pretty much anything, we reach for our phones and we check our emails, our messages, our social media. Now we all know this is an unhealthy thing to do, but I would wager a bet, that most of us either do this regularly or have done it. I’m certainly not going to start lecturing you about what a negative start to the day this is, BUT, I am going to explain what happens when we do this.
When we check messages, emails etc, we go immediately and naturally into ‘responder’ mode or ‘react’ mode. This means we are looking at things that others have asked of us, and we are considering how to respond, or we are responding to those people. If that’s the first thing we are doing every morning, then it starts us off on the back foot, in the subordinate position, it’s not helping us take charge of our day, rather it is putting other people’s needs above our own, before we have even decided what our needs are for that day. If we start in responder mode, it’s really hard to leave. When we are in responder mode, we are not in control.
Now I use the word control here in a particular way. I don’t mean that we should be obsessive, controlling everything that is going on, but I do mean we need to demonstrate to ourselves, that we are in charge of our own life and journey as much as possible. Let me try to illustrate this to you.
Imagine for a moment: You wake up in the morning. Your phone is outside your bedroom. You get up, get ready, go downstairs. Still ignoring all technology, (Has anyone got palpitations thinking about this?!), you sit for five minutes. Either meditating, or reading a book. Then, coffee in hand you open your notebook and you draw two columns: In the first column you write; 3 things that you are going to achieve today in a work context, 3 things you are going to achieve today in a personal context. Those are things you will achieve today at the minimum. And you are in control of that.
What would that feel like?
Well, it feels like you’re in charge of your life. It feels like even if you have an enormous mountain of tasks to do, that achieving the six on your list will feel amazing. Because you can cross them off. And by achieving 6 things a day you are going to be climbing that mountain of stuff pretty quickly and making continual forward movement. When we feel overwhelmed it can be difficult to feel like we are achieving anything. But if we break it down to this small action then look at this:
6 things a day, is Monday-Friday, 30 tasks a week, and over a month that is 120 ticks off your to-do list. How quickly would we feel that we are making progress in achieving our goals?
So have a go!
2 columns, 3 things for work and 3 things for personal life and you can email me to let me know how you get on. I read every single email I get.
Now consider what it would be like to change this exercise a little and add in two short statements:
These are the behaviours I will bring into my day today.
These are the behaviours I will not bring into my day today.
It might sound crazy, but by being intentional about our behaviour, we can be much more in control. When we are in control, we make better more logical decisions and we are more powerful in ourselves. When we are like this, people listen to us more, we have more influence. Choosing not to behave in a certain way is one of the most powerful things we can do for ourselves and others around us. By being the change we want to see in others, we are much more likely to see them respond in a positive way. Because we can only change our own behaviour. We can’t change other peoples. (However much we may sometimes want to!)