10 Big Ideas to Optimize Your Goal-Setting (​​Best of Modern Science To the Study of a Good Hero)

Hi, this is Brian. I want to give you a little context on what you're about to watch. This is an introduction to one of our Mastery series Sessions. We have 25 classes like this as part of our 300 day optimized coach certification program in which we help people move from theory to practice to mastery so so they can master themselves, serve heroically, and empower others to do the same. Now, We've had nearly 2,000 people from nearly 70 countries go through our optimized coach program. About half of the people who go through the program are coaches who want to take their coaching practice to the next level, or they are aspiring coaches who want to become full time coaches. The other half, and it's weird because almost exactly how half want to do one or the other, are going through the program because they want to master their lives and become better executives, educators, doctors, entrepreneurs, moms, dads, and humans, even though they don't plan to be professional coaches per se. You can learn more about the program at Optimize Me Coach. For now, I'm excited to share the introduction to one of those Mastery Series sessions. I hope you love it and if you're feeling it, we'd be honored to welcome you to our Optimize Coach program. Let's change the world one person at a time together, starting with you and me today. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimize Mastery series. Today we've got module two, part three, Hero ology, the study of a good hero. That would be you. Today we're going to talk about scientific target practice. Looking at the big picture in the first session, second session, we got our arsenal ready with tools and supplies for our heroic quests. Today we're going to drill some more into the science. We've got 10 big ideas, as always. Let's take a quick look and then we'll jump in. The first big idea, the three quests I'm going to propose. We have a universal quest, a unique quest, and the ultimate quest. And notice those all begin with the letter U, which just so happens to be the perfect representation of the hero's journey. You start out all fired up and then you go through a little dip. Then you come out the other side and say, yes, a little bit tougher, a little bit stronger. The second big idea is target practice. Go back to the ancient philosophers in Greece anyway, and they tell us that we are teleological. We need to have goals, telos, targets. We want to get good at setting targets, setting goals and moving toward them with power and sustained Motivation. As Sonia Lybomirsky says, one of the leading positive psychologists, happy people have projects. We're going to talk about the importance of taking the big picture ideas into a specific project, getting into flow and all that good stuff. The third big idea, one of my favorite tools ever. Whoop. The science of making our dreams a reality. We wave the wand of what we want in this world, then we rub it up against reality and make a plan to deal with our inevitable obstacles. It's kind of like a GPS system. If we have a hope map, Whoop. Is how we navigate that map. The fourth big idea is motivation. The science of motivation. We got to sustain motivation over the long heroic quest. Scientists give us a formula. They say it's value times expectancy over impulsivity times delay. We're going to talk about what that means and we're going to add an important variable, energy, which we multiply times all of that. The fifth big idea we're going to explore is dynamic temperature, tension and collecting dominoes and micro winds. We're going to use a little rubber band as a little prop and pull our vision away from our current reality and feel that dynamic tension as we create micro wins. What's important now? That's the most powerful question we as aspiring heroes can ask ourselves. We want to collect those wins. What's important now? What's important now? Et cetera. The sixth big idea is dynamic equilibrium. Dynamic equilibrium. We're going to talk about Marcus Aurelius and Gumby doing some tightrope walking and the fact that we're never going to get there. There's no static equilibrium. It's always dynamic. The seventh big idea is grit. Angela Duckworth, the leading scientist on grit, says if she was ever going to get a tattoo, it would be fall seven, rise eight. Fall seven, rise eight. Stronger. We're going to talk about the science of grit. Intense passion plus intense persistence. There are four attributes to cultivating grit. Have a passion, have a practice, have a purpose, and have hope. We'll unpack that and apply it to your life. The eighth big idea is the courage quotient. There's one book I finally found on the science of courage. Robert Beeswas Diener, known as the Indiana Jones of positive psychology, has a formula, a quotient for courage. Your willingness to act divided by fear. We need to learn how to control our fear while getting ourselves to take action in the face of that fear. We'll talk about some powerful tools to boost that quotient. I'm going to encourage you to identify Your number one tools, while I share mine. The ninth idea is threat versus challenge. We actually talked about this in the very first idea in hero ology. We're going to revisit it and know that how you perceive stress in your life literally will change how you physiologically respond to it. There's a heroic challenge response and there's a threatened kind of victim response. We want to get really wise about the difference between those two and know that how we perceive stress matters. We're going to practice our bring it on chant along with. I'm excited. The tenth big idea. We're gonna have 11 today. The tenth big idea is the hero gym. What are you gonna find in your hero gym? The last couple sessions, we sent you off with a good hero sandwich, and then I think a hero bar. Well, this time we're gonna talk about the hero gym. In that hero gym, we have real weights, not styrofoam weights. We have buoyant barbells. We're gonna talk about both of those to become antifragile. And. And we have obstacles which of course, make us stronger. All of which leads us to the 11th big idea. In case of, as Mark Devine, the Navy seal would say, war. Break the glass. Get the Navy SEAL out. They're going to go to war for us. They're going to go toward the challenges. Well, in case of whatever you want to call it, extreme challenge, huge obstacles, break the glass, set us free. This is what we train for. We move toward our challenges. We don't avoid them. Approach versus avoidance will be a big theme today, and we're going to stare down the fear wolf. Talk about some more. Mark. Divine wisdom. That's a quick look at the top 11 ideas today. Let's jump in. Our first big idea. The three quests plus u, as in the letter U, happens to apply to you as well. But the three quests that start with you are the universal, unique and ultimate. Let's unpack that. Then we'll unpack the you. So universal Abraham Maslow tells us what one can be, one must be. That's a universal quest. We're all on the quest to become the optimized Equals optimus equals best equals eudaimon equals heroic. Best version of ourselves. That's a universal thing, right? So as Phil Sutts says to me often in our chats, it's almost like a coin. You can take a coin and say, look, we're all simultaneously the same. We all have that universal quest and. And flip it to the other side and we're also simultaneously all unique. So what must you be? What one can be, one must be. But what must you be? Because you will uniquely express that best version of you in your own idiosyncratic way. Which begs the question, what are you here to do? And one of the best ways to answer that is to play your role well. We've all been assigned different roles in our lives, and it's not about blowing up our lives and figuring out who, what we really want to do when we grow up, per se. It's about who am I, what's being asked of me, and how can I show up most powerfully? In our next session, we're going to talk about in my energy, my work, and my love. For now, start thinking about those quests that inspire you. If you could wave a wand and create that ideal within the constraints of your reality, what would it look like? In one of our recent coaching sessions, we have a great, we had a great interaction, I did with one of our coaches named Christy, who's in her 60s, and she finally realized going through the program that her role that she turned pro on was being a mother, being a stay at home mom was the role that she played really, really well. And she laughed and said, well, it only took me decades to really appreciate that that was my quest. So we each have different quests, we each have different roles to play.

And.

And we want to know that a good life, as Joseph Campbell says, is one hero's journey after another. Check out purpose 101, where we unpack these ideas in a lot more depth to help you get clear on what your purpose is. We've got a bunch of great journaling, reflection exercises in there as well. But those are the first two U's. We've got the universal. We've got unique quests. Now it's time for the ultimate quest. Can you guess what the ultimate quest is? It's a theme we've already come back to many times. We're going to come back to it again and again and again. The ultimate quest, as I see it, is this moment right now. Can you close the gap between who you're capable of being and who you're actually being? Boom. That's the ultimate quest. And how we move from the abstract to the concrete, how we move from theory to practice to mastery. It's right now. Those are our three us, the three quests that I'll begin with. Universal, unique, and ultimate. How you doing with each of those? Check in. And as you do, reflect on that, you. Here's A you perfectly represents the good hero's journey. You start out in the beginning. You see your destination. You can see the quest you want to go on. You're fired up. Yeah. Then what happens? Then you got to go into the dark forest. Oh, man. What was I thinking? Oh, pain. Then you come back up and you get to that place that you had envisioned. Perhaps a lot different place than you had originally envisioned. But you have that deep sense of fulfillment. You've spiraled up. You've turned that you into a spiral, and you've spiraled up into the next best version of yourself. But again, the good hero's journey, you're not sidestepping lizards, you're battling dragons. And that often takes the form of a you. Therefore, when you find yourself inevitably facing obstacles and facing challenges, no, that's a reverse indicator. You're on the right path. Get back to work. Move through that little dip up into the next best version of you. There you go. It's our first big idea. Hey, this is Brian again. I hope you enjoyed that overview of a Mastery series session and got some wisdom out of it. You can apply to your life today. What was it again? You can learn more about our Optimize Coach program at Optimize Me Coach. And here's a fun little video we put together featuring some of our Optymyze Coach graduates describing what they got out of our program and why they loved it so much. You can also check out hundreds of other testimonials at Optimize Me Coach. Have an awesome day and let's do this.

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That Brian simplifies a lot of the data that he has. Like, he gets the science behind it, but because he uses that every single day in his own life, he makes it really practical and very simple to apply it very easily. Like you feel if you listen to something on one day, you could be practicing on that same day, we start.

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