The Key To Staying On Track: Making This Your Greatest Year

We're going to talk about staying on track. The main thing is, as you go through the new year, it doesn't matter what your game plans are. If you are not mentally organized about how to stay on track, it doesn't matter the game plan you started with, you just, it ain't going to happen. So we're going to be talking about organizing yourself for success outlook. I've been thinking about that a lot because of the ABI principle. How do you get from where you are to where you want to be? Why is it that some people can do it, some people can't, and you can't take them out of the crowd? How do you go from confusion to clarity about getting the job done? And here is the key. It's not what happens to you, it's how you respond to what happens to you. Because we all are going to have things that we have to deal with. The idea is this year, this year let me get myself tougher, mentally organized and definite about how I am going to respond. Because if you don't, you're going to find yourself just knocked off track. And you don't just always quit, but you get delayed, you get stalled, you wind up getting beat because you lose focus. As a result, you lose time and you miss your opportunity. So the picture is this. It's basically a teeter totter, a slide and a ladder. And here's what I'm going to show you as we go forward. We're going to go start the year off. We have certain things we want to have happen. The thing is, you may not be perfectly organized on this. You can move these around. But if we were to go down the list right now, put everybody on the spot and say, what is the number one thing you want to have happen in your life, your business life? Let's say this year is going to have something to do with growing. And so we talked about that last week. So what's going to keep you on track? We would love to just be able to go straight to it. Actually, what we would love is in the month of January to get on an elevator escalator and go, bam. And take the rest of the year off. But that ain't going to happen. So we can forget about that. This isn't going to happen. You never have a straight line of success. Reality will be, maybe you get off to a slow start. Maybe you get things going for a while, then maybe you flatline for a while, then maybe you go down here, then you got to make a heroic effort. Hey, it's going to be easy, or you have this incredible burst and in your mind it's like, hey, wow. So you visualize. As soon as you get this in your mind, you visualize, bam. We really are that good. It did work. But then what happens is the next month is reality gets in and you're back down here again. You know, you go with yourself and you say, what's up here? What's happening? Sometimes it's you. It's always a combination of things. But what can you do to keep yourself from. As you go through these roller coaster things? If you did this once, that kind of trajectory going up and you're down here, you got to say, I can get going like that again. I'm going to try and get going on that. And then maybe if it's not even perfect, I get going for a while, I can still win the game. You see it on the NFL, these football games, and that's the easiest thing. You see it in college, the quarterback's throwing three or four interceptions, they're fumbling the ball. But the deal is you got 60 minutes, you know, in a football game, you got the whole 60 minutes. And you see people, we've already did it. You know, we already won. Then the other team comes back and knocks them out in the last minute. You know, when you see. When you win, it wipes out all of these things here. It wipes out all of this. And all you'll remember is that you did it. When they come and they ask you to speak or they want to go call you up on the phone and ask your advice and everything, they're not going to be asking you that, how did you blow this? How did you fumble the ball here? How did you take all this momentum you had earlier in the year and stumble and fumble your way through? They're not going to say that. They're just going to say, how did you win anyway. Now they'll be asking you about your system and everything, but what caused you to win? The main reason is because you were mentally tough, you kept your focus. See, there may be people, and there probably are people who know how to run this play, this game plan. They may be better at all of those things than you, but if you're better at staying on track, using the time, turning slumps around, recognizing slumps than they are, you keep your focus better than them. See, one thing that can turn you into a huge winner and you don't have to learn one more thing, is that you start to recognize slumps before they take Off. And so the illustration there that I want to show you, the picture has to do with this Nick Saban, the Alabama football coach, how he bungled away the year he had won two championships, back to back, two national championships, unheard of. He was going for the third. He should have won it. But they got knocked out, they had two losses. The signs of disaster showed up earlier. Here's where it came in. There's two things. If you're going to win and you're going to go to the top, you've got to have to stop quitting and keep improving. You got to understand quitting, quitting is not necessary. And keep improving. Relentless improvement. You get down and you go into a slump. You know, it's not fun when you get up here. You go into a slump. But here's the moment. If you can recognize this right here, these critical moments where you have your upward momentum, and before it goes flatline, it starts to slack off. If you guys can get better at controlling the point of contact, control point of contact of quitting, basically, when slumps begin, if you can get where you can control that and turn it around, and instead of quitting, you keep on improving. The reason you keep going up, the reason these things happen, is you outgrow what you know how to do. You've had more success than ever, and you get off track. You get overwhelmed by success or by problems, and you get sidetracked. You're not doing the same things that cost you to have this in the 24 hours of the day. You're not doing more and more of this kind of stuff. You're doing less of this and more and more of dealing with problems and making excuse. Your eye is off the ball, either because you got too much good or too many obstacles. It can come from either good or bad things caught you. But the result is you get your eye off the ball. If you can control that and get back on track, and you do that by continuing to improve. So you have a choice at this point. These things right here can be the turning point to greatness. You know what this is? This is like if you're racing cars. This is the curve. This is the curve. Everyone does great in the straightaway. When everything's going great, everything's going perfect. You just stay on track. You're slapping each other in the back, you're laughing, you're happy, everything. You've got your momentum. But when it starts to turn, if you can control, settle down, transition and keep improving, you can keep it going, keep your growth going. What I wanted to do is to put a picture in here and show you. Here's quitting. They don't go the same. Quitting means you get on. You can't quit. Let's just say you start the year again. Nobody quits when they're down here. There is no quitting. No quitting. When you're on the bottom, pressure's too much. I quit, you say, what are you going to quit? You've already quit. Oh, sorry. The people who quit are people who've gotten out, they've made an effort. Let's just say they're personal, they've lost some weight, they've gone to the gym two or three, four weeks. They've been eating clean, they're getting results, they're all happy. But then, little stress at work, get a cold, get some comfort food, miss a few workouts, have a slump. And they say, ah, this is just too much. I just can't keep this up. Quit the quitting time, I lost my trainer, it's too crowded at the gym, yada, yada, yada. But here's what happens when you quit. It starts slow because what happens, you got growth, you got momentum, so your momentum slows down. You got to slow down in your momentum. What happens is just focus shift and then you give up. And here's what happens. You slide, accelerating to the bottom. Once you get on this thing and once you let it take off, it is yahoo. As soon as you jump on the slide, it's going to take you all the way to the bottom and you're going to be back where you started again. Now you're in worse shape, right to the bottom. The result, back where you started, in worse shape than when you started. And you don't have to quit. The thing you need to know is quitting is a totally different phenomenon because when you quit, once it starts, it starts to pick up momentum. You get a slow down in your up momentum and you start to pick up, you begin to pick up the quitting momentum. We need to regroup here. I need to rethink. We need to go back, we need to. All the reasons we started too early, we didn't think this through, okay, you make it all right for yourself. And then once it starts to take off, the problem is you can't stop it because you're out of control. Now gravity is going to take over until you get to the bottom. See, it's going to drag you, send you like a roller coaster right down to the bottom. That's why you've Got to watch your momentum as you go through the year. The other thing is climbing, growing, improving. Winning is step by step. It's like you're on a ladder and you're climbing that ladder, and you've got to go every rung. Like we said, it's not a straight ladder. Things cause it to have bends in it. But if you're here and you're climbing and you're walking up this thing, you've got to make the conscious decision to move up. There is no elevator. That's why everybody's on the bottom. You know, if you draw a pyramid of people, if you draw a picture of income, standard of living, quality of life, anybody do it, it's always a pyramid. There's always few at the top and most at the bottom. Why is that? Because it takes effort to go up. It's much easier to give up. See, this is easier, this is harder, simply because you have to make the effort. But that's why there's so much room at the top. That's why it's available to you. And all you got to do is stop this quitting. Be smarter than getting on this quitting slide. It's almost like at every step along the way, you get the chance to climb one more positive rung up the ladder. Focus your energy, stay on track. Deal with your issues that come up. Keep putting time, energy, and effort to keep yourself on track. And at every step, you've got the thing where, well, you could get overwhelmed. Things are going to happen at every point to give you a thing to either start flatlining, there's an exit ramp at every step. That's what I want to tell you. And you got a chance to start blaming other people, criticizing, making excuses, finding things wrong to where you get off track. And that's where you begin your slide. But the point is this. You. You can catch yourself. You got to realize there's a trap door in every step. And you can get all the way to the point of ringing the bell. You get it. But there's a trap door. You gotta avoid it. You got to be mentally tough. Avoid the tendency the trap door down, it sneaks up on you. You can be so happy about so much stuff. We all get arrogant when we're successful. Oh, yes. Nothing can stop us now. We're beyond that. And then a couple of things go wrong. I wish they hadn't done that. Why did they do that? You know, that's a shame. You start looking at that stuff and you stop focusing on moving up. You have to make a conscious decision to stay on track, is what I'm telling you, because you have to lift yourself up.