Reaching Your Goals

For some people, the initial efforts are more difficult. Once they are in motion, it’s easier to keep going.

For others, taking action is easy, it’s the long-term commitment they find challenging.

I belong to the second group. I’ve never had much problem throwing myself in the arena. But my interest quickly wanes and I get bored easily.

No matter if you belong to the first or second group, reaching your goals requires sustained effort. I think I will never say it enough; the MOST important success factor is PERSISTENCE.

Create the Habit

Taking action needs to become a second nature. It needs to be ingrained in your subconscious so you don’t even think about it anymore.

It needs to become natural to act, and the only way to change your habit is to do something repeatedly.

This is how you learned everything: from your mother tongue, to driving, to showering and to how you get dressed. Do you think about what leg you put in your pants when you get dressed every day? No, you simply do it by habit.

Do you remember when you started driving? How you had to focus on every task, on what to do with your feet, your hands, keep your eyes on the road. You couldn’t do anything else because driving required your entire focused attention.

After repetition though, you’re able to have a phone conversation, adjust the heating or change the radio channel, all while still driving safely.

This is because, with repetition, your actions are stored in your subconscious, your internal programs, so that your conscious mind is free to do other things.

We need to do the same with taking action. We need to create a habit that is ingrained in your subconscious mind and you don’t even need to think about having to act, it just comes naturally.

Wouldn’t that be wonderful if you wouldn’t even have to think about getting in motion? It would just happen naturally?

Well, that’s a definite possibility, but you will need to train yourself first. You’ll need to break the old paradigm that keeps you in inertia.

Ritualize Your Actions

In order to do that, the best way that I know is to “ritualize”. That means to incrementally add new activities to your schedule that you do over and over so they become second nature and you don’t have to think about them anymore.

We’ll start with something simple: your dream.

We’ll burn your dream into your subconscious mind so that it becomes a beautiful obsession to realize it.

You’ll need 2 things: a little 3 by 5 inch card and a notebook. My notebook is a beautiful leather-bound book that I received while attending Bob Proctor’s Matrixx seminar. I love using it because it brings back all the memories of what I experienced there.

Yours don’t have to be super fancy, but I find that having a nice one helps me write in it.

What matters for today is simply to start. You can always buy a nicer one later, as long as you start writing NOW.

Also, it MUST be handwritten. Sorry for all the computer lovers who keep an electronic journal, but we need to be old-fashioned for this.

The reason is that your handwriting is directly connected to your subconscious mind. You know how difficult it is to copy someone else’s handwriting. However, you don’t have to think about your own handwriting; it comes completely naturally.

You also probably heard about graphology, the analysis of handwriting that tells about your personality. Your innermost persona can be analyzed as it comes out on paper.

Well, the beauty of it is that it also goes the other way: you can program your subconscious mind through handwriting your desires. This is exactly what we’ll do with your dream!

Using 100% of Your Mind

We’ll work on focusing your entire mind (both conscious and subconscious) towards reaching your goals.

Did you know that 95% of your daily actions come from your preprogrammed subconscious mind, while only 5% come from conscious decisions?

By journaling daily, we occupy some of the 95% of our subconscious mind to the realization of our dream… without any other effort than taking 2 minutes daily to write it!

So, think about your dream again and condense it to a single sentence.

It should be written at the present tense as if you have already accomplished it.

It should also have a completion date and be very specific.

Here’s my dream as an example:

I am so happy and grateful now that, by April 16^th 2018, I own a beautiful beach house in Mill Valley, California and a penthouse in Quebec City, Canada and that I give personal development conferences around the world and live happily with my two kids and boyfriend.

So, every day, until the dream is realized, we’ll copy the sentence in our notebook to burn the desire into our subconscious mind.

You also need to write your dream on a 3 by 5 inch card to carry it with you and read it when you wake up and go to bed. Of course, the more you read it, the better.

But for now, that’ll be enough. We don’t want to overwhelm the mind and try to change our habits too quickly.

Our best ally is PERSISTENCE.

Small efforts done on a persistent basis are worth way more than massive efforts done only over the course of a few months.

Take the time to make your first entry in your journal and to write on your card.

How to Increase Productivity

When I was first introduced to the power of visualization, the Law of Attraction, the book The Secret and similar concepts, it felt like all there was to do was to focus on the goal and it would automatically be attracted to me. After an intense year of visualizing and hoping, I concluded that something else was required.

It is true that hard work is not required, but persistent and productive work definitely is. For a long time I felt trapped between the need to work hard and return to my past filled with anxiety and the desire to achieve big goals which require a lot of energy. The solution progressively came to me as I witnessed more and more the power of focus. When you concentrate all your attention on a single task at a time, you become a lot more efficient.

Remove Distractions

It has become counterintuitive in our era to focus. Most of us have the impression that multitasking and doing more yields the greatest results. In fact, this only results in a lot of ineffective busyness. I was impressed by the feeling of peace that came over me after I disconnected Facebook, Gmail and Twitter from my phone. I’m not only relieved from the time I was wasting on social media, I’m also free from the perpetual anxiety that was caused by the constant interruptions. I now check my email and Facebook only once a day. When I respond to my email, my mind is clear, focussed on what I write, I remember things more and I feel that I am truly sending quality messages to people who deserve it. My “likes” on Facebook also have more meaning now that I take the time to really read or watch what I “like” instead of simply liking by reflex.

Break Down Your Work Periods

This is one I still sometimes struggle with, but when I do it, breaking down the work periods really helps to increase my productivity. There are many possibilities for this one, such as the 50-10-50 technique which consists of working 50 minutes, taking a 10-minute break and working for another 50 minutes. During the 50-minute work periods, make sure to follow my previous advice on removing distractions, in order to really make it an intensely focussed period of productive work. The 10 minute break is also very important as it will make your following work period more productive too. I sometimes find it difficult to stop when I’m on a momentum, but experience has shown me that taking this break allows me to be more consistent. Otherwise I feel overwhelmed after working 3 or 4 hours non-stop. Taking the 10-minute break is also important so that I finish my productive work periods with a feeling of satisfaction and freshness instead of feeling exhausted and empty. Ending on a positive note motivates me to go back to work the following time.

Have strong SHORT-TERM goals

My BIG dreams are what I’m really in LOVE with. They are the exciting part of my life and they feed my motivation to keep me working on my projects. But when your dreams are big – and they should ALWAYS be! – they will take some time to realize. Probably years. In order to keep yourself motivated, you need to break them down into weekly and even daily goals. Your mind probably gets bored quickly so you need to show it quick results. After you accomplish a weekly goal, and even a daily goal, make sure you reward yourself. Realizing any big project is always done in breaking it down into small easily digestible steps.

Be accountable to someone

I already talked about the importance of having an accountability partner. What I just recently discovered though is a powerful technique that uses fear to create motivation. Although I definitely believe that fear should not be used as a main motivational tool, the technique that I came across is very interesting. It simply consists of creating a situation that is worse than NOT realizing your goal. For example, in my case I wrote a check to a friend and told him to cash it and spend the money on himself if I didn’t achieve a goal by a certain date. I was so afraid of losing that money – which was scarce at the time! – that it really motivated me to keep working on my goal. Of course, the fear cannot be too crushing either, and this technique should be used in combination with rewarding yourself. But still, I found it to be very effective.

Meditate

I already gave tips on how to make your meditation sessions more enjoyable and efficient. Once again, meditating or simply taking a few minutes of nothingness greatly enhances your working periods. If you want, you can also use meditation to visualize your work already accomplished. This could help your mind find shortcuts that you wouldn’t have seen without taking a break.