Getting into a goal "rut"

Let's face it, sometimes setting goals and going after them is just a boring process! Let's look at 5 examples:

Losing weight:
I eat five meals a day which average about 390 calories. I eat anything I want as long as I average those calories per meal. I have selected many meals that fall within that category range. I also walk 30 minutes on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings. Total time invested per week even thinking about this goal: About 2 hours.

The Total Money Makeover:
I have to make sure that everyday I don't spend money. This requires almost no thought whatsoever. I simply ask myself do I absolutely need this? If I'm honest the answer is NO! The time of opportunity comes on payday - once per week. I budget the money for the week and spend accordingly using the rest to pay extra on my bills. Total time invested per week even thinking about this goal: About 3 hours.

Increasing my job skills:
Job 1 in this area is to become Java certified. I am still struggling with this goal and don't spend as much time as I should on it. I need to just Do It Now and get it over with! Hmm. Writing this post has helped me see where I need to focus. Cool! Right now the total time invested per week on this goal: About 2 hours. That's it!?! That should be more like 8-12 hours. I really need to get busy!

Having great relationships with my family:
I do spend time each week, especially Sunday, working on this goal. The average conversation between a parent and a child per week is only 8 minutes. My daughter and I average at least an hour per week. We're talking about good conversation, not me lecturing her (though I do plenty of that) but listening to her.

I also talk meaningfully with my spouse about things each week although I would like to improve each area. Time invested per week on this goal: About 3 hours.

Becoming more spiritual:
I would like to get back to studying the scriptures more. I don't think just listening to the Bible and following along is enough. I mean deep thinking on the scriptures and internalizing (memorizing) them. Time invested per week on this goal: Sadly very little :(

In conclusion:
As you can see, I'm clearly not quite where I want to be on even my Phase 1 goals. By posting this re-evaluation post I can see that I need to devote more time and energy to at least the last three of these goals. Going after goals can be tough. Things that are worthwhile are often not very engaging or entertaining all of the time. The results are what excites and sometimes milestones are few and far between.

I have to remember that setting short-term milestones are important. For example. Could I just finish one 30-minute block of study time each day on my Java goal? How about one 30-minute block of study time on the scriptures? That is what the Daily Discipline means - getting a little progress in each goal each and every day.

I also need to ask myself the question - what is getting in the way? Blogging perhaps? :-)

Phase 1 Goals

There are a million opportunities out there to choose from so where should we start? I have begun with what I call the Phase 1 goals. I have 5 basic wants right now. You'll notice that these are spread across 5 major dimensions of a human being - physical, financial, mental, social/emotional and spiritual.

1. I want to be my ideal weight.
2. I want to be debt-free.
3. I want to have more skills for my career.
4. I want to have great relationships with my family.
5. I want to be a more spiritual person.

These are certainly not my ultimate goals in life but they are a rung on the ladder to my ultimate vision. There are many phases (progressions) of goals in each area until I reach my vision. The first physical phase is to be my ideal weight. I am working on this with dieting and basic exercise.

Phase 2 of this goal might be to be athletic by stepping up my exercise routine with weight training and more strenuous cardiovascular exercise as well as eating better quality foods.

Phase 3 of this goal would be to complete the P90X training program and have eight pack abs.

My financial goals would follow a similar pattern. Phase 1 is to be debt free. Phase 2 is to start replacing my job income with income from other sources such as investments, businesses and real estate. Phase 3 is building my wealth to a point where it pretty much takes care of itself and I am free to do what I want like engage in philanthropy.

As we graduate up to the next phase in each area of our life, we will begin to see new opportunities on the horizon. These will be things we couldn't have done at earlier phases. Imagine being at Phase 10 in your financial life. The dreams of phase 1 and 2 probably would seem ridiculously simple at that point even though they were tough and serious goals back then.

This post is basically talking about baby steps again, using progression for each area of your life until you've reached the goals in your vision. Of course, by then you'll see new goals up ahead that look even better.

Have a vision - part II

In Have a vision - part I I discussed creating a vision from a story. This is a pretty fun way of coming up with your ideal life and is an entertaining read when you want to review your vision and goals.

Another way of writing out a vision statement is to just list detailed major goals by human dimension. The six major human dimensions I have identified are physical, mental, social, emotional, spiritual and financial.

Physical

Your physical dimension deals with your physical health. It involves goals such as weight loss, exercise, running a marathon and having six pack abs to name a few.

Mental

Your mental dimension deals with goals of the mind such as learning to play the guitar, memorizing scripture and learning to program computers.

Social

Your social dimension centers around relationships. It can involve goals such as having one on one talks with your children each week, being more romantic with your spouse or working on smiling more.

Emotional

As the social dimension deals with your interaction with other people, the emotional dimension centers on your personal emotions and attitudes. Some goals in the emotional dimension might be to stop using "victim language" or working on being more responsible.

Spiritual

Your spiritual dimension deals with your belief system. Some spiritual goals might be to live your life based on your list of values, reading the Holy Bible regularly, meditating/praying regularly and helping others with your time and money.

Financial

This dimension focuses on money and possessions. It is the easiest dimension to make goals for in my opinion. Objectives like being debt-free, saving a million dollars or owning your dream house are just a few financial goals.

Balance

In order to have balance and the best chance for complete happiness possible, you should work on all six dimensions. Goals for these dimensions should be SMART. SMART is an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely.

The following is a vision statement in the format I've described. All dimensions have been addressed and all goals are written in good detail. The SMART goal process will be detailed even more during the plan process ( a future post). These are just a couple of goals, a complete vision statement would contain much more.

Physical:
I will weigh 189 pounds by December 25th, 2008.
After achieving this goal, I will never let myself become more than 9 pounds overweight.
After reaching 189 pounds, I will complete the P90X 90 day challenge and will get some six-pack abs.

Mental:
I will become a Sun Certified Java Programmer (SCJP) by December 31st, 2008.
I will become a Sun Certified Java Developer (SCJD) by June 30, 2009

Social:
I will internalize the 30 principles found in Dale Carnegie's "How to win friends and influence people" by December 31st, 2008.
I will meet with my family every Sunday and discuss the family goals.
I will meet one-on-one with my daughter every Saturday to help her with her goals.

Emotional:
I will form the habit of thinking before I speak to avoid negative habits such as criticizing, complaining and sarcasm.
I will spend 15 minutes each night going over a list of things that I am thankful for to consciously acknowledge that my life is really good.

Spiritual:
I will spend a minimum of 30 minutes each night studying the King James Bible and will complete the entire bible by March 31st, 2009.
I will work daily on my personal development in all six dimensions of my life.

Financial:
I will be debt free (except for my mortgage) by June 30th, 2010.
I will have a six-month emergency fund by June 30th, 2011.
I will save 15% of my gross income into my retirement accounts starting July 1st, 2011.
I will help my daughter pay for college starting August 1st, 2011.
I will pay off my mortgage completely by March 31st, 2015.
I will have my dream house built on May 1st, 2020.

This type of vision statement also gets into the specific planning of the goals. It describes the goals specifically and gives dates in which the goal will be accomplished. It is not, however, a complete plan. I will post about having a plan soon.

The best approach, in my opinion, is to have both a story-type vision as well as a goal oriented vision. This will make for some inspiring reading on the weekly evaluation process.

My big goals

I started thinking about how many really big goals a person can have in life and I was surprised when I discovered that there weren't very many. Here are some of mine:

The House

A nice house is probably on everyone's want list. I have a list of features that I must have in my dream house. They are:

1. A one-floor plan.
2. A bedroom that is at least 400 square feet.
3. With a huge walk-in closet
4. A master bathroom with a whirlpool tub for two.
5. Two other bathrooms minimum
6. Three other bedrooms minimum (1 at least 300 square feet)
7. A huge laundry room with plenty of space for detergents, folding clothes, etc....
8. A library with comfortable lounge chairs and lots of books!
9. A meeting room. (Sort of like a conference room - with a projector, white board, etc....)
10. Personal offices for my wife and I.
11. A Solarium to drink the morning coffee in all year 'round.
12. An exercise room with about 500 square feet and all the trimmings (mirrored walls, weights, machines, etc....)
13. An in-ground swimming pool (in-doors would be even better!)
14. It must be extremely efficient (Solar powered?, heavily insulated, heat pump, etc....)
15. It must have a humidifier built-in to the heating and cooling system.
16. A large kitchen with a buffet-length island.
17. A large dining room which comfortably seats about 15 people for those holiday gatherings.
18. A 3-car garage
19. Lots of Storage space

Health

Not taking medicine for any health problems
Being my ideal weight
Maybe even being athletic (muscle toning and cardiovascular).

Wealth

Being debt-free (including the mortgage) - No Payments!
Cool cars, trucks, boats, and other toys.
Having a large emergency fund though losing my job wouldn't be a problem since I wouldn't have one.
Large amounts of investment cash making me a comfortable living.
Buying what I want, when I want.
Eating out at our favorite restaurants.
Giving money away to church, charities, family, friends and even complete strangers (wouldn't that be cool?)

Education

Constantly increasing my knowledge of the world, people and God so that I am forever stimulated by life. Sounds corny, but hey, it's my goal!

Social/Emotional

Helping others achieve their dreams through gifts, education and just being a supportive friend.
Helping my community by giving back through volunteer time and donations, especially to the local library.

That's about it

Ok, so those are some pretty big goals, but my point is, there is not a lot of them. Several of these are fueled by achieving the wealth goal. Have I mentioned Dave Ramsey's Total Money Makeover?

The Ultimate Habit

The Ultimate Habit is to create new positive habits or break old negative habits every 30 days. Today I will be showing you some of my system for achieving all my goals. I will warn you, however, that this system is a work-in-progress and I don't consider it done by any means.

I wanted a master system that would force me to do all the things I needed to do on a daily basis to achieve all my goals and keep me from quitting. I use what I have called a Weekly Habit Worksheet. Here is an illustration of one similar to the one I use:

As you can see I list all of my daily tasks in the order they will happen and I have check boxes under the day(s) they should happen. Every line item is a habit that I want to perform on a regular basis.

They are not always daily habits. For example I only trim my nails, beard, ears and nose once a week. Ears and Nose? Yeah, I'm getting old.

Just about every item has been forgotten at one time or another before using the Habit Worksheet. Some weren't being done at all, like the trimming of the ears and nose. (Eewww!)

Now I remember to do everything on every day and it keeps me focused on doing the mundane little things that just make life a little better as well as the monumental goals I have set for myself. After viewing it you may ask how it keeps me working on really big goals. It really doesn't list out things a person might be trying to accomplish like building wealth, increasing education or losing weight. The Habit Worksheet is only one document in a complete system. Other documents I use include:

A goals list which is viewed when I Review OneNote Goals (W, M, Q). W=Weekly, M=Monthly and Q=Quarterly in case you were wondering. OneNote is a Microsoft product that is really cool! Click the link to check it out. All of the documents I list here are in OneNote and get reviewed when I do this one habit.

A Planning Calendar which shows upcoming appointments, birthdays, and events.

My weight management plan which is super simple and working very well. I'll blog on this later.

My vehicle maintenance plan. I also have habits to check mileage on our vehicles every Saturday. I can then schedule routine maintenance when needed. I have a separate entry for my wife's Jeep because she leaves early for work on Saturday mornings so I check the mileage before she leaves the house.

I have an ideas list. I review this when I do the Review cell phone recordings habit. My cell phone has a voice recorder and I'm constantly recording an idea when it pops into my head. I place these ideas into my ideas list. I have a one hour commute and am often thinking of new blog posts when I'm not listening to an audiobook.

My financial plan which is really Dave Ramsey's financial plan. I do have some tips and stuff that I list to help squeeze out every dollar while doing my six baby steps of the Total Money Makeover. I am now constantly challenging our budget and habits to see how I can speed up my makeover. I'll blog some of these things in a later post.

So I have processes and plans in place to

1. Be my ideal weight (and stay there for good this time!)
   
2. Be safe, debt-free and then mega-rich
3. Be a great father, husband, relative, in-law, friend and employee (and eventually business owner/employer)
4. Be generous and help others
   
5. Hopefully go to Heaven when it's all over

If life is worth living then it's worth living with Excellence. Whether you live it with excellence is entirely up to you. Have a great day!

How To Build Iron Self Discipline

Motivation is great but discipline is better. The Daily Discipline is a process I created to help me achieve some big goals and to also keep me doing the little things consistently that keeps my life and my family's life running smoothly.

The process I use is not rocket science and to some will be common sense and for others a bit weird. I believe in systems so I created a master system to control, as much as possible, every aspect of my life.

I am 38 years old and have spent my life looking for the answer. How to live an exciting, purposeful life filled with wealth, health and happiness. It is only now that I believe that I have found that answer. Now I need to use it. I need to get down to action because therein lies my problem.

I have been a planner for decades. I have created plans to achieve dozens of goals. The plans were brilliant but I never took action and therefore they were worthless. Planning without action is a complete waste of time.

The only time I ever made progress on my goals was when I was motivated. Those rare days when I had energy and a desire to make progress. The motivation fueled the action but only until the motivation, the feeling, wore off. I would then quit my goal and by the time I was motivated again I would have to start over only to repeat the "temporary progress-to-failure" pattern.

Sometimes I thought the answer was to keep myself motivated, but how could I do that? I thought about it one day (when I was feeling energetic) and asked myself what things motivated me? I came up with watching certain inspiring movies like Rocky, if I wanted to work out, or The Secret of my Success if I wanted to work on my success goals. I could also listen to certain audio books on goals and achievement that would get me pumped up. So there it was! My answer - I would simply listen to motivating audio books or watch inspiring movies when I needed to be motivated. That would certainly work right? Wrong.

The problem was I didn't have the motivation to watch the movies or listen to the audio books - unmotivated is unmotivated! What to do? Another day when I was energetic I again pondered the problem. Why can't I be disciplined enough to stay motivated? That's when the word discipline hit me.

My problem wasn't about staying motivated it was about being disciplined enough to do the things I needed to do to achieve my goals when I wasn't motivated. I needed discipline!

So, I started to study discipline on the web. I searched and searched until I formulated what I believed was the Best of the Breed explanation on discipline and how to build it.

Building discipline is like building strength through weight lifting or building endurance through long distance running. You must exercise your discipline to make it stronger. Neglecting this exercise will make you a weak-willed, often tempted quitter! Ouch! That's harsh, but true.

Anyone starting a weight lifting program doesn't begin by piling 400 pounds onto the bench press. That's a good way to kill yourself. The secret to weight training is progression. By starting small and adding weight over time, you gradually build up your muscle strength.

For example. You might start by pressing 100 pounds eight times and that's all you can do. On your next workout you press 100 pounds nine times. The next time it's ten times and then eleven and then twelve. After you reach twelve repetitions you increase the weight to 105 pounds. Your first attempt at this weight yields only eight repetitions. You're back to square one and your repeat the process until you can do the 105 pounds twelve times. Then you raise the weight to 110 pounds then 115, 120, 125 and so on....

After four or five years of consistently doing this, you might be pressing that 400 pounds we mentioned earlier. My brother and many of his friends accomplished this goal back in their high school and college football days!

Now for an example in progressive exercise of your discipline. Let's say that you get up at 7:00 AM every day. You actually get out of bed at 7:18 after hitting snooze twice - yeah, we've all been there. The problem is you're always feeling rushed in the morning getting ready for work. You would like to have time for a workout and a good breakfast but you just can't seem to wake up in time.

The next day you set the clock for 5:00 AM. You wake up at 7:37 because when the alarm went off, you turned it off without even remembering doing so! You scramble out of bed half groggy rushing to get ready to get to work without being late. You've just tried to lift 400 pounds right from the start. Not fun.

Here's how to do it progressively:

For one day resolve to do something simple. How about giving yourself an extra 10 minutes to get ready? You know that the snooze button is a deeply embedded habit right now and you're not even going to mess with it. So you set your clock to 6:50 AM. You know you'll hit snooze twice which means you'll be getting up at 7:08 AM, ten minutes earlier than before.

Everything happens as planned. That was easy! It was barely a change from you're normal routine. Should you try for twenty minutes? No. You should see if you can do it again. Can you do it for two days in a row? Three? Can you get up 10 minutes earlier every day for seven days in a row? If you can, you're now ready to increase the weight.

Now repeat the process except move the time up by ten minutes. You're now setting the alarm for 6:40 AM, you're hitting snooze twice and actually getting up at 6:58 AM. It should be easier on day 1 this time than on day 1 the first time. If you blow it, don't go back to setting the clock for 6:50 AM, you've already mastered that time. Your goal is to hit one day in a row (smirk) at the 6:40 AM setting, then two, then three until you reach seven days in a row. Then move it up by ten minutes again.

This example may seem a little silly, but remember you're not just trying to get up at 6:40 AM. You're really exercising your discipline. After a while you'll be getting up at 5:00 AM without even hitting the snooze bar once. You're pride will take over and you will not want to drop back into your old habits. You should do this every day including the days that you're off of work. You'll thank yourself for this habit when you discover how much time you have every day to get things done. When you've reached the ultimate goal, getting up at 5:00 AM, you should make sure you can do the goal for 30 days, not just seven. What do you do after 30 days?

Your goal is now a habit and with each new good habit you form, you lift your discipline level up a notch. You are now a more disciplined person than you were 30 days ago. What you need to do now is start over with a new habit. How about that morning workout? Using progression, it will be all too easy