How to Set and Achieve Any Goal You Have in Your Life - John Assaraf (Part 1)

Hey, everybody, this is John Assraf and I am coming to you live from beautiful, sunny San Diego. Tonight, we're going to be talking about really how you can set and achieve any goal you choose. Now, I really believe that this is possible for you. And I also know that most people do a great job of setting goals, but they don't do a great job of achieving their goals. And I've invested a lifetime and lots and lots of money trying to understand why I've been able to achieve goals, why I've been able to help people achieve goals. But more importantly, why is it so difficult for some people to really achieve and go after their life's goals and dreams and do it effectively and efficiently? Now, I made you several promises in inviting you to this live webcast. And no matter where you are in the world, I'm going to keep that promise. And here are the things that I shared with you. I shared with you why I believe that no matter how big your goals are right now, they're too small. They're way too small for most people. Now, I know some of you probably have big, grandiose goals and congratulations to you. Number two, I want to share with you several of the fundamental errors, mistakes that people make when they're setting their goals and how you can avoid them. Number three, I said that you can learn how to earn three to five times, maybe 10 times more income in the next 12 months. And I don't like to say in the next weekend or 30 days or 90 days because we need some time to, to help you really understand the goal setting process and the goal achieving process, two different processes. And then how do you attract through either the law of attraction, the right people, tools, resources and everything you need in order to really make your life the masterpiece that you want it to be. And more importantly, how do you feel proud of yourself that your life has purpose and meaning? After all, the reason that most of us want to achieve certain things in our life is so that we can feel like our life has purpose and meaning. And what I can share with you is that my journey to learning how to set and achieve goals came around 31 years ago when I was 19 years old. I was getting myself into enormous amount of trouble in Montreal, Canada. I quit high school when I was in grade 11. I hated school and they didn't really like me very much there either. But I knew that I had something within me that I really wanted to achieve success. My dad was a cab driver, my mother worked at a local department store. We weren't poor. We had food on the table, lots of love, but we never had more than enough. And some of you have heard me share this story before of how I used to watch Robin Leach on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. And I'd see these incredible lifestyles of beautiful cars and homes and vacations and clothing and people that were doing good charitable works in the world. And I wanted to become one of those people, but I didn't know how I could until I met one man. And this man's name was Alan Brown, and he was a real estate developer and the owner of several real estate companies in Toronto, Canada. And my brother introduced me to him. And my brother said to Alan, I said, listen, you know, my brother is having a challenging time. He's not doing the right things. He's not getting the results he wants. He's getting in trouble with the law. Could you help him? And Alan pulled me aside and asked me a few questions. And I'm going to ask you a couple of those questions today or tonight, depending on where you are. But the first question he asked me was this. He said to me, are you interested in becoming a millionaire and becoming a good person? I wasn't really a good person at the time. And he said, are you interested or are you committed to really achieving some grand goals and making something worthwhile with your life? And I asked him this question. After he asked me that question, I said to him, I said, al, what's the difference between whether I'm interested or whether I'm committed? And he said to me something that stayed with me for 31 years, that hopefully will stay with you for a long time. He said, the difference between interest and commitment is this. He says, if you're interested in achieving your goals, if you're interested in becoming wealthy, if you're interested in having a nice physique, if you're interested in having a great relationship, if you're interested in those things, you won't do what it takes. You'll do what's convenient, what's easy, and what everybody else does. He said, however, if you make the decision to be committed, then you will be able to achieve whatever goals you want to achieve, no matter what. He says, because you'll learn what you need to learn. You'll rehearse what you need to rehearse, you'll practice, you'll drill, and you'll do everything that is needed to be done in order to achieve success. He said to me that the people who are committed to don't have excuses. They Relentlessly give up all of the excuses and the reasons why their life or their circumstances are the way they are. They stop blaming other people. They start blaming their circumstances. They stop blaming their economy, they stop blaming their lack of knowledge, lack of education. They stop blaming all the reasons why and all the references and stories that they have. And they put all of their attention and focus on how they will and how they can achieve their goals. And with that, I want to really help you understand that at 19, I really didn't ever have anybody who taught me how to set my goals, how to create all the plans that are needed. I'm going to share with you some things tonight that will make it easier for you not just to set your goals, but to understand the different pieces of what you must do and must have in order to become a goal achiever as opposed to a goal setter. Now, I believe that 3 or 4, maybe 5% of the world's population really knows how to set and achieve goals properly. And I believe that because we've never been taught that most people hope that they achieve their goals. Now, I often say that most people suffer from a drug disease called Hopium. And I also say that hope is not a good strategy. I want you to have big goals, big dreams, but I want you to back it up with a process and a way to achieve those goals and dreams so that becomes more of a reality than a dream, more of something that's a probability instead of a possibility. So how do you do that? How do you really make the jump, the leap from a goal setter and hoper and dreamer and wisher to somebody who actually is an achiever? Well, one of the first things that Allen Brown said to me was that at the pyramid of your goals, you have to start with absolute precision on exactly what it is you want to achieve. So if you think about your goals as your bullseye, what is going to give you the focus of exactly what you're committed to achieving in the different areas of your life? So you look at what specifically do you want to achieve in your health? And so you can have spiritual health, physical health, emotional health. What is the bull's eye? How will you know when you've achieved your health goals? Okay, the reason I want you to be so precise is for two reasons. Number one or two reasons. Number one, when you are precise and exact in what you want, you're giving specific instructions to your brain on what to focus on. And we know that people who have learned how to fight focus on exactly what they want. Will achieve their goals significantly higher percentages than people who don't have clarity of focus. So what specifically do you want to achieve in your health? What specifically do you want to achieve financially? So how much money do you want to earn in the next six months? In the next 12 months? In the next 36 months? See, I want you to choose goal or a goal that you've never achieved before. The number one mistake that people make when setting their goals is they look at their present circumstances, like their bank account or the amount of business they have coming in, or their job, and they allow all of the present circumstances or their past history to dictate what they could do today, tomorrow, next week, or the future. So mistake number one is do not allow your past or present circumstances to control your thinking or your goal setting part of this process, you cannot do that because when you look at what you've got, or you look at the economy, you look at the past and you focus on that you are neurologically, physiologically, biologically and everything else you can think of creating more of the same. So what I want you to do is I want you to set a goal you don't know how to achieve. I want you to set a goal that actually scares you a little bit. How do I know? And how do you know when a goal scares you? You're going to feel uncomfortable, you're going to feel doubts and fears and maybe even a little anxiety, which means you're out of your comfort zone. That is good, not bad. So number one is you start with specific goals for health, for your finances, for your debt free day. What day are you going to be debt free? What's your net worth going to be? What about your spiritual goals? What do you want to achieve spiritually? What do you want to achieve in your business or career specifically? And precisely what are you going to achieve in your relationships? What are you going to achieve in your legacy, your charitable contributions of your time and finances. So when you start with setting goals, the number one most important part of achieving goals is setting the perfect bullseye of exactly what you want to achieve. What? When I was 19 and Allen Brown had me start with setting my goals for health, wealth, relationships, career, business, charity, etc. I had no idea how I was going to achieve it. I had no idea what I could put down on the piece of paper. But he said to me that just the act of writing down what you want to achieve will send a neurological message to your brain. And if you focus on that every single day and you walk through the Process, I'm going to show you in just a moment, you'll be able to get your brain, your emotions and your body in line with these goals. And then that's when the magic starts to happen. So number one is clarity and precision of exactly specifically what you want to achieve. It'll have amazing neurological implications. And for those of you who are into the law of attraction, at the end of this, I'm going to share with you something a little bit different than law of attraction. But it's the law of your brain, it's the law of how the universe responds to the hundred trillion cells in your body when you focus, focus, focus on what it is that you want. So step one is the clarity, precision of exactly what you want. And you never, ever, ever allow your old circumstances, your old reality to come into play when you're setting a vision for your future. So that's step number one. Now over here I've got ST&P. And that's not some company. ST&P for every goal that you want to have. I am not a big believer in just having the goal. The S stands for strategies, the T stands for tactics, and the P. Okay, P stands for process. Strategies, tactics and process. Now what does that mean? Every single goal that you want to achieve, no matter what goal it is, there's already a blueprint of what you can do and should do, which are the strategies and tactics. And there's a process by which you can follow. So for example, if you want to lose weight, there is a strategy that you can implement around what you should eat, how much of it you should eat, when you should eat it by. There are tactics that you can utilize every single day in order to accelerate your metabolic rate. There are tactics that you can utilize in order to speed up your weight loss process. By the same token, if you want to earn two or three or four or five times more income than you're earning right now, you have to a focus on that and you have to develop a plan of strategies, tactics and process. Now why do I say this? I say this because most people, when I look at their results and I look at their life and I look at what they do every single day, every single week. Very few people, excuse me, very few people have got any strategy. They're using a lot of tactics, some process, but they haven't really thought of a cohesive, coherent way to implement a strategy to achieve the goal. And without strategy, you're using hope. And hope, we know, doesn't yield great results. So let me give you Some examples of when I was 19, I'm going to take you all the way back to 19, not to now. People think, well, you're doing great now and you make millions of dollars, and that's easy for you. But I want to take you back to when I didn't make millions of dollars. All right? I set a goal back when I was 19 to make $30,000 a year. And my strategy selling real estate, okay, was to call 100 people a day. 100 people a day. The tactic that I used was to offer them a free home assessment and to offer them, you know, for us to bring our clients to them. And the process that I used was that every day I would cut out the numbers of people who were trying to sell their home privately or that homes were for sale that had expired with another real estate company. Or I would take the telephone yellow pages and I would go through name number one, the name number two, name number three, name number four. So the goal was $30,000 in a year. The strategy was the telephone sales. The tactics was to try and get in the house, to introduce our company, introduce our buyers there. And the process was 100 calls every single morning between 8:30 and 10:30, 11:00'. Clock. And so it wasn't a matter of rocket scientists. It was a matter of doing the right things in the right order every single day. And so you have to develop for every one of your goals, how specifically am I going to achieve them? Now, some of you may be thinking, I don't know how. If I knew how, I would do it. And that's not the truth, because you already know how you could be doing things differently. You already know what you could be and should be doing differently, but you're not doing it. That's going to lead us to the second part over here of what is it that you have to develop? So you've got to have your goals, you've got to have your strategies. You've got to have your tactics. So strategies are what you need to do, tactics are how you need to do it. And a process is just a system to follow over and over and over again. Hopefully that makes sense so far. Here is where I see that most people get into a challenging, challenging time. They have horrific, terrible habits around strategies, tactics and process to achieve their goals. And so they don't have the consistency or the right habits or daily rituals of two things. Number one, they don't have the daily rituals of thinking about their goals on a daily basis. Now, you may think about why does that make any difference? Well, it makes all the difference in the world, because as soon as you develop the habit to focus on what you've written down as a goal, you're creating a neurological pattern, almost a map of your new goal in your brain. And then your brain starts to see things in the physical world that match up with the goal. Most people never write their goals down, and that is problem number two. That's one of the second biggest mistakes people make. They don't take the time to write it down clearly and precisely, and so they think that they have some goals, or they write it down once or twice and they never look at it again. That's one of the biggest fundamental mistakes number two that people make. What I want you to do is I want you to write your goals down and I want you to develop a plan, a little blueprint. Think about this. If you were to get on an airplane and you want to go from where you live right now, and you want to go across the ocean somewhere, wouldn't you demand that first you have the destination, the goal, and then secondly, that the pilot and the airline would have the strategy for how to get you there, the tactics, how to get you there, and. And the process to make sure that everything was safe? And wouldn't you want them to have the habits of going through this checklist and focusing on exactly where they wanted to get you to and what the process was every single time? Well, what I found is most people don't have the right daily habits or rituals to achieve the goals that they want. They have hopes and dreams, but they're also locked in a habit loop. And a habit loop is something that you just get accustomed to doing every single day. Now, for the most part, yours and my brain is really lazy. And for those of you who know my work, I'm all around the neuroscience of maximum achievement, the neuroscience of how do we get people to think differently, how do we get people to behave differently? And most importantly, how do we get people to create the habits that are duplicatable and replicatable every single day? And one of the things that I can share with you based on the latest neuroscience research, is that the habits that you have right now are specifically geared towards helping you achieve everything you've achieved right now. So if you want to break free to two or three or four or five times more income or a different weight or a better relationship, you have to break the habit loop that is causing you to think and behave a certain way. And let me share with you a very simple process Every day when you wake up, whatever time it is, certain things are triggered. And you have the same triggers that causes the same routines that give you the same rewards. So you have a trigger, a routine, and a reward. Now, what is a trigger? A trigger can be waking up. A trigger can be the phone ring. A trigger can be you wanting, you know, coffee, okay, because you're used to getting coffee every single morning. Well, if you can learn that all habits are triggers, routines and rewards, neurologically, something triggers you thinking a certain way, something triggers you behaving a certain way, and that behavior gives you a reward. When you understand how to identify your triggers and you understand how to change your routine, all of the latest research suggests that we don't have to change the trigger or the reward, but if you can change the routine, then you can keep the ends of the trigger and the reward the same. So what does that look like? So let's say you wake up in the morning and the first thing you do is you look at your cell phone to see what emails you've got coming in. So why would you do that? Well, you've done that, or you do that because you're habituated to doing it. So there is a trigger, a routine, and a reward. So every time you look at it and you communicate, whether it's text or whether it's responding to an email or checking the news or a sports score that you like, something triggers it, you pay attention, you do the routine, and you get the reward of getting that satisfaction, that satiation point. Well, one of the things that we know you have to do in order to earn 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 times more income is, is you have to break the habit of being yourself. All of your habits you have garnered and gained over the last 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years. And so in order to achieve a different result, you have to break the habits that have got you thinking and behaving the same way every single day, every single week, every single month. If you set goals and you create the strategies, the tactics and the processes, these are all left brain we call deductive reasoning abilities or imaginative abilities. But the habits are what drives the behavior every single day. And so when we talk about achieving goals, this part of the equation up here is the setting of the goals and setting of the plan. Most people stop right over here, or they think that if they set their goals that habits are going to automatically follow. They don't for longer than a day or two or three or four, because all of the decisions and the behavior for a Day or an hour or a week is based on willpower. And most people don't understand that. Willpower and habits are tied together. And you create a habit loop, a willpower loop. And when those triggers are triggered and the routine is the same and the rewards are the same, you never break the habit loop. And so what you've got to do is understand what triggers your behavior. How do you change the routine? So let's say you get up every day and your reward is feeling a little bit of energy in the spot when you're drinking a cup of coffee. Well, what triggers it is usually you wake up and you go downstairs in your home or to wherever you go for coffee and you go through that routine and then you get that reward of feeling a little perk and a little bit more alive. Well, let's say you had that trigger for having coffee instead of going to get coffee. What you can do is replace the routine by going for a two minute walk somewhere else and still getting the reward of feeling invigorated by going for a walk. So you replace the routine to change the habit. If you do that for a day, a week, a month, you start to develop a new habit. Now what you want to do is develop the new habits that will make it easier for you to implement the strategies, the tactics and the processes. And you have to develop something called awareness. First you have to develop the awareness of what is the trigger, what is the routine that I am engaged in right now. If you don't develop that awareness, then you're going to be a creature of habit. If you're a creature of habit, you're just going to get more of the same. I hope this makes sense. So goals, strategies, tactics and processes, and you have to back it up by a change in behavior. You have to become the person who can achieve that goal in your mind, in your awareness, in your routine, and most importantly, in your day to day behavior. All right, that is part number three. Part number four is something that's a little bit more complicated but very, very understandable. And this is what we call your beliefs. Now, many of you have heard me talk about beliefs for the last several years because I've been fascinated with what causes our behavior, what causes our perceptions, what causes one person say, yeah, I believe I can achieve those goals, but they don't behave in line with achieving those goals. And they do this over and over and over again. Well, what I've discovered is that there's two types of beliefs. And I'll ask my team to get my pen over there. I'll write it down for you. There's two types of beliefs that we have. Thank you. The first belief that we have is called an explicit. Explicit belief. Now, an explicit belief is a belief that you and I could basically say to each other, I believe I can achieve that. I believe I can make two or three times more money. I believe I can lose weight. I can believe I could be in a happier relationship. I believe that I deserve success. I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe. That's explicit external. We can declare it, we can talk about it. But what we have found is that this is not the type of belief that drives your habits or your behavior. There's something else called your implicit. Now, your implicit beliefs are what, underneath your talking with your friends and telling people what you believe? On the surface, your implicit beliefs are underneath the surface. They are what you think about in secret. They're what you think about as true about yourself. Like, am I smart enough? Am I good enough? Do I deserve success? Do I really know what to do? Can I really do this? What if I fail? What if I try my hardest and I fail? Well, all of these implicit underlying beliefs cause a couple of things to happen.