How I'm Setting My Intention & Goals for 2010 - Episode #19

Foreign. Hey guys, what's up? Happy New year. It is January 1, 2010 at maybe like 8 something am. Let's see, what time is it? It is 8:30am had an awesome morning, great meditation practice. I'm committed to an hour every morning using holosync and I do transcendental meditation for the first half an hour and then some other forms of meditation. Anyway, so great morning so far and I have been working on some cool stuff for 2010. Just some of my own creative production ideas. This is a mind map of the book that I'm going to write in 2010 that synthesizes all of my the 1000 ideas from my 100 books and the 10 principles I'm working on. So really cool stuff. We've got the 10 principles there. Things like wisdom and goals and love and just doing it. Courage, optimism, which is principle number one. Spirit, self awareness, energy, all that kind of stuff. But what I wanted to talk about today was goals. So I'm making some distinctions in my own life around how I set goals and what I do. And I wanted to share just kind of a stream of consciousness journaling I was doing. And I love these new journals. Aren't they cool? They're really big kind of pieces of paper like this. I got this as a gift for Christmas from Gay and Katie Hendricks, which is awesome. I usually use my journal, but I've been really enjoying this big, big piece of paper. I don't deal well with lines and all that kind of stuff and boxes. So I decided to turn it over and use the blank page, which is much more exciting for me. So let's see what we can share here. So first, these are my creative production goals for 2010. I'm going to create 25 new philosopher's notes. I'm going to do 250 philosopher's notes, TV shows, the daily 10 minute shows. And I'm going to write the book and produce DVDs that synthesize these 10 principles. So. But let's talk about goals. So what I was thinking about was this. I. I think that too often people get too attached to outcomes, right? So we've got outcome. Wow, that's just not really very clear, is it? Outcomes. Can't really see what that says, but you can tell what I just said. Outcomes, right? We get attached to specific outcomes. Things like I'm going to make a million dollars in 2010 or I'm going to get on Oprah or whatever it is that the outcome is. I'm going to inspire a million people Even would be an outcome that's exciting. But in my world, in my view, that's a byproduct of a lot of other stuff. And we get stressed when we get attached to these outcomes. And we want to focus more on the processes that we're committed to and the creative production goals that we're committed to for a certain period of time, which is underlyingly influenced by our intention. So in my kind of model that I'm playing with and that I'm using in my own life, what I do is I start with my intention. So what's my intention for 2010? Right. So intention and we've got a little compass here. That's my kind of symbol for a compass. What's my intention? For me, my intention is to give my greatest gifts and greatest service to the world, inspiring as many people as I can as I have fun studying, embodying and sharing my favorite wisdom. That's my intention for 2010. Then I have processes or rituals, things that I'm committed to that are within my control that I'm going to do on a daily basis or on whatever basis you set up for yourself. So for me, my rituals include things like I get up before the sun every day. Thomas Jefferson, I think he didn't miss a day for 50 years. He said the sun never caught him in bed. I think that's one of the coolest things ever. So for me, that's an important ritual for me in 2010 is to not let the sun catch me in bed once. In 2010, I'm going to meditate for an hour. First thing on getting up. I've done it maybe 475 days in a row now, really excited about it and I can feel it transforming my life. I'm a different and better human being because of that ritual. I'm also going to move for at least 30 minutes a day, most days an hour. I am going to meditate for 15 minutes in the evening. These are my process or rituals. Right. So I'm going to focus on my intention, then I'm going to focus on my rituals and. And then I'm going to focus on my creative production goals, the things that are within my control that I'm committing to giving to the world. So creative production goals for me. I just mentioned there are 25 new philosopher's notes, 250 philosopher's notes, TV shows, a book and a DVD. Now those are stretch goals for me. Those are not simple slam dunk, total easy goals. And they're also not out of Control going to stress me out. Goals and oftentimes I'm all about being unreasonable. I'm all about creating my ideal life. But I'm also about not getting overwhelmed and being just kind of a dork about it. So Talbin Shahar talks about it in the Pursuit of Perfect. He says we have a comfort zone, right? And then we have a stretch zone and then we have a panic zone. Now he says we want to play in our stretch zone. You get too comfortable, you're not growing, that's not healthy. But if you set just totally ridiculous goals over a short period of time and then you're totally attached to them, you're in panic zone. That's not a good place to play. We want to play in our stretch zone where we have goals that are challenging us but not making us overwhelmed and panicked. Another big thing that I'm committed to in my life in general and specifically in 2010, this has been a focus of me, for me for a while, this idea of consistency over intensity. So too often, especially around the new year, we set intense, ambitious goals. We're going to do this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this. And then we crash within a week and all those resolutions we set don't happen. Well, one of the things I did about a decade ago when I first got into this, I studied personal fitness and I became a personal trainer just because I wanted to learn exercise physiology and all that stuff. And one of the things that they taught was the importance of consistency over intensity. It's way more, it's way better for us to go to the gym for 10 minutes a day, seven days a week than it is to work out once for 60 minutes a week. Way better to be consistent than intense for a lot of reasons. So we want to be consistent in our rituals, right, and create wonderful things and as a function of consistency, not some crazy intense, panic zone driven thing where we're just stressed out and then we don't achieve our outcomes and then all we do is focus. Here this is one of my concerns with a lot of the self development literature, is that it points here and that creates a lot of stress if all we're doing is outcomes. My belief is we want to focus on intention, as I mentioned, we want to focus on rituals. We want to focus on our creative goals and just diligently, patiently, persistently and playfully do this and this will take care of itself. It's a byproduct. It's not something. Hold it loosely, get excited about it, but then bring our attention here and really go off on the intention, the rituals, the creative productive goals that we have that are within our control and let this take care of itself, let the outcomes take care of themselves. So that's the big idea I wanted to share this morning. We have the idea of comfort stretch and panic zone. We have consistency versus intensity. Let's focus on consistency in 2010. And then my favorite thing right now is this idea of working diligently, patiently, persistently and playfully. I got that from SN Gwenka who I did a 10 day silent Vipassana retreat. He talks about, he says work diligently, diligently, work patiently and persistently. Patiently and persistently, you're bound to be successful. Bound to be successful. And he's talking about that in the context of meditation and learning to control our minds. If we work diligently, patiently, persistently, we're bound to be successful. I like to add playfully because I think life is to be enjoyed. But look, if we work diligently, patiently, persistently and playfully, we're bound to be successful. Too much though, too often we get attached to the outcomes and then we forget all this stuff. We have no intention, no clarity there. We have no rituals. We just get addictive behavior, negative stuff. We don't focus on the goals, we stop performing. And then we wonder why we don't get our outcomes. So this is a different model I'm working on. I'm going to really flesh it out in the book and in some more videos, but I wanted to share because I was really inspired. Hope you enjoy. I'm so excited about 2010. I hope you are as well and I'm really excited to share all the stuff that I'm studying and I appreciate all your support and wishing you an extraordinary 2010. Big hugs, high fives and here's in a great year. Talk to you soon. See ya.