Brian Gubernick explains how your brain's reticular activating system filters what you notice and can be trained to help you achieve goals. He walks through five steps: set specific SMART goals, visualize the outcome, write them down and keep them visible, prioritize them, and review daily. Each action keeps your goal top-of-mind so your brain spots opportunities to reach it.
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Thank you for joining me today. It's Brian Gubernick, and welcome to the No Days Off podcast, where we believe that every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. Today we're going to get better at business, we're going to get better at health, we're going to get better at relationships, we're going to get better at life. This one topic should improve us in all aspects of our world. And the topic I'm talking about is goal setting, but specifically how to set goals by taking advantage of your RAS, your reticular activating system. So what is the RAS? What is the reticular activating system and how does it impact our goals? Well, the RAS is a neural network in our brainstem. That's responsible for regulating our alertness. It's responsible for regulating our wakefulness and our conscious awareness. The RAS, as many of us are aware, it acts as a filter for, for sensory information, and it helps us prioritize and amplify what we consider important inputs while filtering out kind of the less relevant ones. So RAS plays a very key role in selective attention, in directing focus towards some sort of stimuli that aligns with our goals or our intentions, just our mindset. It also— the RAS also influences motivation, emotional responses, our sleep-wake cycle, and a whole bunch of other stuff that's well beyond my comprehension. At the end of the day, especially as a sales guy, I've heard about the Razz. And I know that if I leave my office right now and say, I want to buy a blue car because nobody has a blue car and blue cars are on my mind. When I go out and drive and I hit the streets here in Metro Phoenix, what am I going to see? I'm going to see blue cars everywhere. Now, did the number of blue cars change? Absolutely not. But did my awareness change? Was my conscious awareness different? Yes, it was. And that, that's RAS. That's the RAS. So as I'm talking about your reticular activating system, I want to relate it to how we go about achieving goals. How do we leverage this system, knowing how it works, take full advantage of it and leverage it to achieving our goals? I want you to, I want you to think about this, right? Because we've all set goals before. We have achieved some. And we've missed others. I think a lot of us know technically how we should be setting goals, but do we honor it? Specifically though, do we know how to tap into the RAS and supercharge our path to achieving goals? How do we go about wrapping our RAS into all this? Number 1, when we set clear and specific goals, what do we mean? We got to define our goals with precise terms. Now, to me, That means make SMART goals. We've probably all heard of that acronym, S-M-A-R-T: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Now this clarity in our goals, it helps, and this is important, it helps our RAS focus on what's in fact important. Okay? Picture this, right? You've got a goal. Now, most of us, we keep this goal in our mind. I want to achieve, let's just say I want to lose 10 pounds. Okay. Now, if I want to make it a SMART goal, it's got to be specific. So I'm going to lose 10 pounds. That's also very measurable. It's achievable relative to where, what I weigh today. It's relevant to my health and specifically time-bound. I got to associate some sort of time with it. So if I, I want to lose 10 pounds in the next 60 days, Now I'm clear. There's clarity in my goal. If I could specify it the way I just, I just mentioned, it's triggering my RAS in some fashion. So number 1, set clear and specific goals. Number 2, visualize your goals. Now this is not hokey. I want you to really think through this. We're trying to trigger our RAS. Visualize your goals. Spend time visualizing your goals. As if you've already achieved them. Imagine the details, imagine the emotions, imagine the outcomes associated with the success. This visualization action activates your RAS. It reinforces your commitment. So using the 10-pound example, picture yourself 10 pounds lighter. Picture how you feel, how you look, how your energy may change, how your clothes may fit. Visualize these goals and do it regularly because this regular visualization activates the RAS. Again, I want to take advantage of, of our brains, of what's scientifically hardwired in our brains. In addition to setting clear and specific goals and visualizing these goals, I want to further activate the RAS by writing down these goals, Put the goals in writing because this only furthers to enhance the clarity and reinforces the commitment around those goals. Regularly review them. Keep them top of mind. For me, the bookmarks that I use are just cutouts of paper that have my goals written down on them. I know I'm going to read most every night. I know I'm going to look at that bookmark. And I don't have to study the bookmark, but just the simple fact that in this particular, using this particular example, if my bookmark said, stay focused on losing 10 pounds in 60 days, it would trigger me to think about it in a different way. It would trigger me to maybe avoid that late night snack. It would trigger me to maybe drink a little bit more water, whatever it may be. Next, We all have lots of goals. We got to prioritize our goals. Not all goals are equally important. So prioritizing the goals based on their significance and relevance to your life will trigger the RAS to be focused more on the areas it needs to be focused, the goals that are most important. The RAS is going to prompt us to allocate more resources to the goals that are more important. Lastly, I want you to review and affirm your goals daily. Make it a daily habit to review your goals and reaffirm your, reaffirm your commitment to them. This constant reinforcement is what's going to— it's what's going to keep your RAS actively searching for ways to support your goals. Now, this may all seem a little over the top. It really may. But I, I just, I think that this RAS being so hardwired into us and our desire to achieve goals, going through these steps of being more specific around our goals, visualizing our goals, writing them down, prioritizing them, and reviewing and affirming them daily, it's just going to make things top of mind. It's just going to make us want a blue car and then hit the streets and see there's blue cars everywhere. That conscious awareness is triggered. So the focusing question for you as you set goals, because we're all constantly setting goals, how can you trigger the RAS to work for you a bit more than you've historically done? What steps can you take? Can you use the steps I just provided, maybe one or two or all of them? Are there other things you could possibly do, like maybe celebrating achievements, which triggers the RAS? Are there other things you could do that works the RAS in your favor? This is something to be thinking around as we're all high achievers. All the listeners of No Days Off are striving to hit big goals. I want, I want your brains working for you. Actively engage your RAS with the strategies we've discussed. Harness its power. To help you focus on your goals, maintain motivation, and just become more attuned to the opportunities and resources that are going to support you in your journey, your journey to success. That's all we have for today, the No Days Off podcast. Thank you so much for listening. And remember, every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. So let's get after it. [MUSIC] [MUSIC]
