7 Behaviors To Become The Person You Need To Achieve Every Goal You Have
You’ve tried so hard.
You’ve written your goals down and affirmed them at 5am, and they don’t happen.
You’ve done 8 things before 8am and they don’t get achieved.
You’ve sat there Monday morning, staring back six months ago when you first wrote the goal down.
You put every ounce of will into it and came up short and you’re scared you’ll continue to come up short.
Eating healthy and losing weight for months on end to spiral back to eating junk food.
Writing down how much money you’ll save and trying your best until you can’t stick with it.
The answer in achieving goals isn’t what we’d intuitively think it is — having a result in our heads, writing that result down and then taking action to attain it.
The key to achieving goals is winning before the battle is won, and crafting the internal and external environment that brings out the result you’re going for — so the result happens naturally.
No monumental effort required, though you’ll become the super man or woman what you need to become to achieve the goal if you follow a few of the planning principles in this article.
A Story On How One Woman Lifted 2000 Pounds And Held It For 5 Minutes
On April 9 1982, Anthony Vincent Cavallo was working underneath his car when the jack slipped away leaving him clamped between the top of the rear wheel.
His mother Angela ran out and lifted the car several inches off the ground and apparently held it there for over five minutes until help arrived.
This extreme situation commanded the state of mind that created the physical strength to hold a several thousand pound car by a slightly larger than average woman.
This was a force function.
If you can use ‘force’ to implement a few specific behaviors, that cultivate skills to learn how to harness context and emotion, you can create both the conditions which ‘forces’ the state that creates the mental programming, you can become the person you need to become that achieves every goal they want.
Ultimately, the purpose is to change the way you perceive obstacle which builds strong emotional intelligence and resilience.
If you have the resilience and grit to last, eventually you can get addicted to states of peak performance and personal growth — thereby enthusiastically looking forward to embracing obstacle to be your best.
This is the dirty little secret of peak performance — the key is getting yourself addicted to building yourself up with ‘pain’.
The more pain, challenge, obstacle, the more you derive drive from it.
You reach a state of mastery that’s so good, you don’t even care about the ‘results’.
The results are already within reach, in your sights, you are in possession of them already.
Addicted to a growth mindset and getting high from learning? Not a bad addiction in my book.
It’s now been proven the most successful people have long been cultivating a growth mindset that not only looks forward to learning now, but has likely looked forward to learning opportunities for a long time since childhood.
These are the people who look forward to ‘force’ in the context of hard problem solving, learning opportunities, complexity to the point of chaotic game theory or instances where the big occasion commands them to rise to it.
Life’s a game to them and peak performance is their drug.
That’s when I broke out.
I broke out when I learned that joy and happiness are a result of being productive.
I broke out when I added that principal and applied it to creative output.
I sell enterprise software for a living, and I know there’s no way to sell this brand new software in a highly competitive market without creating the right context and situation that commands me to take the highly focused and effective action I need to take to win.
Goal Achievement and Happiness
The wealthiest people in the world are the ones who understand that principle and apply it to their lives, not the person who owns and acquires things. Everything you attain no matter what becomes boring once you become accustomed to it.
- If you’re flying on private planes and living in mansions all over the world, you become accustomed to it and it becomes boring.
- If you’re jumping off planes every day, even that will become boring.
Know anything you attain and acquire, you’ll become accustomed to so know it won’t bring you happiness. Practice visualizing yourself in the mansion on the 100th day. The same couch, same TV, same everything, every day.
You’ll get used to it.
I dreamed of living in a Manhattan loft, it happened and I wanted more (we always do) so bad that the experience itself ended up being resented. Thankfully I learned the hard way (I always do) how things don’t bring fulfillment.
Purpose, meaning, mastery and creative output — all free.
That’s real wealth. A state of love.
As cliche as it is, there’s a reason it’s cliche, because it’s true.
The Power of Enthusiasm — More Real Wealth
As I study and observe other top performers who are the best in the world at what they do, I observe extreme enthusiasm.
If we could measure the level of enthusiasm we have toward force and uncomfortable situations, we’d have a gold mine on our hands because being able to manufacture enthusiasm is the skill that produces high quality action.
Creating the right environment to create the right state in people is more important than learning itself — as it creates enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is rooted from the Greek: ‘possessed by God’, or ‘inspired’. Improve how you learn, the state of your learning, not necessarily what. The what then becomes the easy part — it’s the key to solving many of our individual problems.
I now get excited and embrace force because I know it’s an opportunity each and every time to grow. Though I’ve known this in theory for a long time, it’s taken me a long time to master this state with a lot of work. I know I have to over promise, over deliver, and report results to bring out the best in myself. I know I’m not superman, but I know I can bring out superman level strength if I put myself in the right situation that demands it from me.
You can as well.
Again, it’s about the state of mind created by the environment and context you create using force functions.
Application
Want to learn to pitch well?
Create a pitch outline and create the reason to book a meeting with a CEO and pitch. This creates the context that makes it matter and forces you to deliberately practice and focus deeply. You can’t do that with will-power. It’s when it matters that brings the right state for deliberate learning. Deliberate learning at a deep level.
Want to get your name out there and haven’t been writing or putting yourself in the news as you’d like because of lack of motivation? Spend money and invest in a PR firm.
Investing something you’re uncomfortable with always forces you to produce.
This is what force functions are all about. A forceful situation is anything you exalt yourself or someone into that pushes your comfort zone. Yes, this takes courage but after enough practice, you’ll look forward to it in the same way you do anything else if you keep doing it.
Here are seven behaviors to ‘force’ yourself to bring out your best to achieve every goal you want.
1. Force A Growth Mindset That Embraces Personal Growth
“Becoming is better than being” — Dr. Carol Dweck
It starts here.
If you can’t find the motivation to want to grow yourself, you have a problem.
The simple framework you should force yourself to have is that obstacle equals growth. The bigger the obstacle, the more the growth. Put yourself in situations where the potential for obstacle is high and you’ll grow accordingly. I’m trying to break into film making, so I’m trying to get a meeting with Ta-Nehisi Coates and the head of a major film studio. Think you wouldn’t prepare with two leaders in the industry you’re breaking into?
That’s what brings out the superman in you.
2. Force Keeping Metrics, Regular Reporting and Publicly Declare Goals
“the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred.” — William Hutchison Murray
Public commitment forces deeper focus and reporting what you measure produces accelerated results.
I report my email sign ups to my accountability coach every other Friday.
Every time I’ve set a goal for a sign up number for the next two week check in, I’ve beat it significantly.
I raise the bar each and every two week check in period and every time I’ve beaten it.
Declaring the goal and knowing I’m going to report it forces me to keep my publishing goals and forces me to be my best by putting the subconscious mind to work which takes nuanced action throughout that’s aligned.
3. Force Skills That Overcome and/or Let Go of Fear
“Emotions themselves are actually the cause of the basic fear that drives everyone to seek security constantly.” –Sir David Hawkins, MD
Notice the nuance. Don’t force things that necessarily scare you (but do that as well), but force the cultivation of senses and skills that teach you the ability to respond to the scary things better.
Cultivating a meditation practice is a game changer when it comes to managing emotions and fear. Start with 5 minutes a day and you’ll get hooked on longer sessions. Meditation is the keystone habit to so many skills and has so many benefits, it should be mindset/EQ skill #1.
Not mentioning attitude and improving communication, your stress levels decrease. If you can’t complete 5–10 minutes a day of meditation, that’s a deal breaker in my book. I shoot for one to two hours a day and it’s transformed my life.
Fear is the #1 destroyer of performance. We procrastinate, over think, stress out, over email and 100 other things out of fear. Most of our action is because of fear. FOMO is not just because of social media. We hop on Facebook while working because of fear of loneliness.
We get daunted by the huge project out of fear even though we should focus on the immediate next item to do or call to make but don’t because of fear. Meditation also helps control how our monkey mind reacts to fear. A deep present moment cuts through the fat and brings your best foot forward.
4. Force Yourself To Let Go Of Fear
Fear kills more dreams than failure ever will. — Charles Specht
Fear is with us every minute of the day and should be let go just as often as it is felt. Feelings are what create thoughts and fear, and a feeling that leads to the most thoughts and therefore actions.
Most of what we do is out of fear whether it’s checking Facebook when lonely or going on that date with the person we don’t like for fear of being single or having it block us from getting work done Monday morning. Fear is everywhere.
Let. It. Go.
As legendary Dr. David Hawkins says:
“Don’t fear the fear, feel it and sit with it, and then let it go.”
Feel the feelings underlying the fear, and let it go.
5. Force Undistracted Periods Of Work
“A mouse who fails to get the cheese tries again without kicking herself for being an idiot.” — Loretta Graziano Breuning
We chase dopamine all day.
Most of the action we take is driven by craving, fear and seeking hits of dopamine, the drug in your brain that releases from your reward center every time you satisfy a craving.
This is the dirty little secret of product development, they’re absolutely engineered to get you hooked on the resulting dopamine from the user experience to create a daily habit.
This is why I am constantly using the word addiction. Addiction has been transcended.
Checking our phones, emails and notifications have never felt so good.
You can feel productive all day long chasing dopamine hits as you email back and forth, read things, check your phone and make calls etc.
Taking conscious, prioritized and proactive action is what separates the top performers from the mediocre and it’s becoming more rare each day as our attention get’s fought for more and more.
Having the discipline to remove distractions and carry it out undisturbed is impossible, unless it’s forced.
I put my phone on airplane mode each night before I go to sleep so the first thing I wake up to isn’t my phone notifications.
Be aware of your action and force undisturbed work time.
6. Force Yourself To Simulate and Act Like Who You Want To Become
Success or failure depends more upon attitude than upon capacity successful men act as though they have accomplished or are enjoying something. Soon it becomes a reality. Act, look, feel successful, conduct yourself accordingly, and you will be amazed at the positive results.” — William James
If you want to become VP of sales, force yourself to walk around trying to physically act and think like one.
Simulate meetings where you literally act and talk like the VP of sales.
Force that mindset and the knowledge acquisition, behavior and deep experience will follow naturally.
This is the secret to ‘rising stars’ at a company who executives want to ‘groom’.
Executives see them subliminally ‘act’ and are able to visualize them in leadership roles in the future and invest in them.
If they look at you and see you ‘acting’ with the traits and character of the salesguy while you’re saying you want to become VP of Sales, you aren’t signaling correctly.
7. Force Yourself To Love Yourself, And Act It Out To Change
“Love yourself first and everything else falls into line. You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world.”
– Lucille Ball
So many of us don’t achieve goals because we don’t believe we’re worthy of them which is the exact thing that blocks us.
If you often feel like a fraud or don’t think ‘you should be here’.
Do what Kamal Ravikant says to do:
- Listen to the same song you like on repeat.
- Sit in meditation pose.
- Repeat “I love myself” until your subconscious believes it. Until you feel electric. Until you feel high on love.
Believing you deserve is the first and arguably first step in achieving a goal.
You deserve everything you want and have everything you need to achieve it.
Conclusion
Using ‘force’ doesn’t always sound good, but it’s our effectiveness in managing pressure that determines how big we’re able to become.
Our ability to create the contexts and pressure filled situations in relation to our goals will determine if they’re achieved or not.
Being and acting as though we deserve it is what will lead to the behavior that attracts the fulfillment of our goals.
Use that strategy for your goals and watch yourself become the person you need to achieve any goal you want.
