How NOT to Set Goals

Hey, my friends, it's Brendon Burchard and welcome to a best of edition of the Brendon show. These best of episodes feature training that I have done live, sometimes on online to tens of thousands of people or live on stage where I was speaking on some stages across the world. Or these might be some of my monthly training programs and highlights of those that I do every single month with our monthly students. So I know you're gonna really enjoy these because these are a little bit more of a deep dive look at some of my training as a personal and professional development trainer. You know, I focus so much on helping you find that deeper level of motivation and start practicing some of those high performance habits when you. Well, you hear me talk about many of those concepts in these special episodes here. These are my best of trainings only and exclusively right here on the Brendon show. So I hope you enjoyed them. Please note that as you hear me speak in many of these, you'll hear me reference something because sometimes I'll have been training live or on video or on stage or through a broadcast. So you might not be able to see something that I'm suggesting or motioning to or maybe even drawing out on a flip chart or motioning towards on a presentation, but you'll get the gist of it. So but make sure you bust out your journal, take some good notes here because this is really valuable insights on the mindset or the strategies that you need to adopt in order to improve your life. And if you want to go and get more content like this, but much more deeper and have more of an interactive relationship with me in this type of training, make sure you join our high performance monthly training program. That's our monthly subscription program where I go live with you and our high performance students every single month and I train on a new topic or a new piece of research that we've created from the high performance institute and I train on that and then I do Q and A and actual live coaching, interactive coaching with people every single month. That's called high performance monthly and you can Access it at Brendan.com monthly. That's Brendon.com monthly B-R-E-N-O-N.com monthly to get deeper dive training similar to this. So if you like this, you would love that training program. But without further ado, let's jump in right now to one of the Brendon show's best of trainings.

It's scary to me how our culture got so wrapped up into smart Goals, you know, specific and measurable and attainable or realistic and time bound, you know, just very awesome left brain goal thinking stuff, you know. But I think the problem is we have this culture now where we're dominated by these very realistic goals and we're dominated by spreadsheets and checklists and all these great left brain things that maybe are supposed to help us accomplish things. And yet we have an entire culture now where setting too small of goals. You know, where are the moonshot dreams and ideas? You know, where's the walking, putting the person on the moon dreams? Where's the build a big business and empire that takes over the world dreams? Where's the things that says I want to serve millions of people dreams? Those aren't realistic. It was not a smart goal for Columbus to sail across the ocean. It was not a smart goal for Martin Luther King to say, let's march on Washington. It was not a smart goal for us to say, hey, let's put a man into orbit, or let's put a man and a woman into a container, a two metal container and four, fly them across the sky. These were not smart goals. There was nothing at all attainable or realistic or even necessarily timely about those types of things. They were impossible dreams. And we have to fire those up in our lives again if we're ever to experience the zest. There is no sexiness and joy in being. I'm a smart goal person. Like, come on. Yes, we have to at some point bring a goal down to earth and measure it out and think through it. But that's where people automatically go. They're scared to think about a goal that's measurable, not just in terms of can I get it done? Measurable in terms of their life, destiny, their mission. They're scared to think at that level that is ambitious and full of fire and dreams and hopes. So I'm here to tell you, set some dumb goals. The D stands for dream driven. Let's start there. Let's start way up here. What would be the ideal, the perfect, the magical thing that's even beyond maybe even your immediate comprehension? To think way outside the box, to think about something that fire you up and really feel like if I attained that, that would be my dream. Because you know what? Smart goals for most people, that's not a dream, that's just like, check. Did that moved on awesome. No, we want you to move like to a whole other level. A new stratosphere of yourself, of your work, of your contributions, of the service you give to the world. What would be so amazing? You know, Bill Gates doesn't say, well, I'd like to just, you know, accomplish. He says, we're going to eradicate malaria, we're going to eradicate these types of diseases. They're going to be gone. Now that is just not realistic. But soon as you set something huge like that, you have to start thinking, well, how would we put that together? Same way they did with saying, hey, let's go to the moon. We had no idea how to do that. We didn't have the technology, the tools, the materials. We had to invent things to be able to travel through time and space to get to the moon. I mean, it was unbelievable. So you start with the dream. The how will come later. It is the what, it is the why that fires the human soul much more than necessarily the how. We'll get to the how, but the dumb goal that's going to start with your dream. If you don't like the word dream, then implant destiny. What would you feel like at the end of your life? Achieving these sets of big things would make your life meaningful and alive and feel like you was like, that was something. That was something. That was magic, man. Because if you have none of those, all the goals, what are they? They're all distractions. Lots of people set lots of smart goals and they become distractions, alleyways of accomplishment in their life that never led to the boulevard of their dreams. They are distractions. They are detours. Yeah, they're accomplishing a lot. But you know, a lot of people, you know, they have a lot of busy work in their life. But there's a difference between busy work and knocking off goals and checklists, doing lots of busy work, achieving the things. But sometimes your busy work is not your life's work mission. A dream, a desire, something big and beautiful and bold. Let's get back to that dumb goals. Start with that. Dream driven or destiny driven? The view. Let's just put something in there. Let's call it uplift.

You know, a lot of people as.

They'Re setting a goal, even if they have a big. The wording and the labels they use for their goals, they're not sexy. It's like someone wakes up and says, I'd like to lose some weight today. It's like, come what? Lose weight? That is not uplifting. Right? It's not. It's deficit driven. It's the attention of the negative. It's like, I need to lose this thing. No, how about we gain something? How about we have a goal that it's attractive to us. Again, see, if your goal is a checklist, it is not sexy and you're not gonna do it. It has to be something that's compelling and important to you. An uplifting goal is something like, you know, I am going to feel so fit and vibrant that literally my skin and my aura is gonna shine to people. I'm gonna make myself so beautiful in who I feel that I am and how I portray myself to the world that I'm just gonna attract people. I mean, they're gonna be blown away. I am going to be a sexy person is a whole lot more than I'd like to lose my pounds. It's like, come on, what is uplifting? What will fire you up? Word it, phrase it, put it in a way that's so positive and compelling to you that you can't wait. When you look at that goal, you're like, man, here we go. Because it's attractive to you, it's fun to you, it's important and meaningful to you, and it's aligned with that dream. You'll get there. You're much more likely to take action on it than just a simple little thing that you have not connected to the dream. Make it uplifting, make it a positive. Label it and word it in a way that's focused. Not on loss, but on gain. Not on how hard it's going to be, but on how good you'll become because you do it. Not on, oh, my gosh, if I do it, it might not turn out well, but rather visualize and see what happens when it does turn out. That's a different way of thinking about all of it. And then m. I love to call it method friendly. Set a method friendly goal. What does that mean? I want you to think about if you're going to start on a path to something, how can you set up something that is friendly to creating a practice around it? A method, if you will. Right. Sort of a map, a way. I just like to use the word practices often. What practices can we create around this goal that makes it happen easier. Right. If it's to become incredibly fit. Okay, great. Becoming incredibly fit. That's uplifting. I like it because I want to feel vibrant and passionate and alive. I want to know I lived my life. That's the dream.

Great.

You want to be fully alive and vibrant. Great. Well, to get there, then we need to create a set of practices or a method that allows us to live in that goal consistently. That means all of a sudden, maybe your method is your method Is simple as, you know, three times a week you're going to be going to yoga and three times a week you're going to do a, you know, 20, 40 minute HIIT training, you know, high intensity based type of training, a weightlifting, a kettlebell, you know, a cardio blast type of thing. You're gonna do something very intense. That's method. There's great methods you can put all around that, right? You want to change the way that you eat. Great. Add a new method to how you're cooking. Add a new way of going about things, a set of practices that you repeat over and over and over again. That's what the method is. You do it over and over and over again. Let me give you a comparative example. People who want to become suddenly very skilled at not only defending themselves but being in total control of their body and their psyche. So they're studying martial arts, right? Well, in martial arts everyone wants to become very highly, highly skilled at martial arts. So what do they do? Well, they have this method or the set of practices that they do over and over and over again. They call it their form. Right, Their forms. They're going to practice the set of movements over and over and over again every day or every time they practice martial arts. That makes it automatic. It just comes up, it makes it more easy. They discipline themselves to do a set of practices, a method, forms that helps them accomplish their dream, their desire, that uplifting power. Not only to be in control of self and situations, to protect ourselves, but also to master our physical body and our mind. That's what they're doing, to have that big goal and that dream. They implant a method around it that they do over and over and over again that allows them to now achieve that thing.

All right, my friend, I hope that you enjoyed that best of episode. Was that inspiring? Were you fired up? Did you love it? If you did, make sure you do me a favor, go out on social media somewhere and share that episode. You know, just go out, post it somewhere, post yourself listening to it, make sure you hashtag the Brendon show. Because when you do that, I can look you up and we can find you on Instagram and post that on the social media. And sometimes we do all expense paid trips to people we find. We just randomly select people, we send them gifts, autograph books, swag T shirts, all expense paid trips to some of my seminars. So make sure you let us know, share what you thought about this episode out there on the social media worlds and then we can find you and celebrate you and also I would love to invite you to join us in our high performance monthly program. So just go to brendan.com monthly. That's brendon.com monthly. That's where we do deeper dive trainings like you just heard. But we do that every single month. And there's some live Q and A, there's and I do some giveaways and we give students in that monthly program tickets to my seminars and some extra special training on leadership. So make sure you check it out@brendon.com monthly. I appreciate you being part of this community of so many people dedicated to finding that deeper drive of motivation and practicing high performance habits so that they can become extraordinary in their careers, in your personal life, in your health. And you can live an extraordinary quality of life. And sometimes you just need a little bit more training and a little bit more nudge, a little more energy, a little bit more drive and consistency. And I'm hoping that being part of this community with the Brendon show, I'm providing that to you in some way. So thank you, my friend, for listening. I look forward to seeing you or listening with you on the next episode of the b r e n d o n show.

Sam.