TES 048 - Setting Your Year up for Maximum Success
15 Dec 2015 · 23 min
Mel Abraham walks through the Success Maximizer, an eight-level framework to set up your year. Reflect on wins and lessons, choose your attitude, list what you're grateful for, remove three burdens, commit to 90-day chunks instead of just goals, schedule disconnect blocks, and calendar the whole year.
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Hey there, real quick before we jump into the episode, listen, if your earnings treadmill hasn't set you free yet, running faster won't either. Listen, hustle without principles just going to burn you out. So here's what I want for you. I want you to join me for my money machine experience live. It is three free trainings. Deep dive into how to escape the treadmill and build a money machine that actually works for you. All right, grab your spot here by going to moneymachinelive.com and I'll see you in the free training. Hey there. I'm Mel Abraham, the author of the number one best selling book and the founder of Business Breakthrough Academy where we teach you how to design a business and create a life, a life of financial freedom and peace of mind. And welcome back to this episode of the Entrepreneur Solution show. And in this episode we're going to continue on the theme about success. And part of this is because we're getting close to the end of the year here and I want us to start to think back, think back on this year, but think forward on what next year could be like. And the process that I walk through in there in the framework which I call the Success Maximizer, that'll give you an opportunity to start to understand and put some things in play that will shift what your success will look like. And so in order to get the Success Maximizer, you want to go to melabraham.com session04 or if you're not by your computer, just text me. Text mylegacy one word, no spaces to 38470 and you can and I'll send you the download link so you can get access to the tool. And so right after this brief introduction we'll jump into it and we'll talk about the Success Maximizer. Alright, talk to you soon. See you soon. Bye.
Welcome to the Entrepreneur Solution where highly successful entrepreneur Mel Abraham becomes your entrepreneurial mentor. Here, Mel Mel reveals his business building strategies and even gets a chance to answer your questions. Mel Abraham, a CPA by education, but an entrepreneur by exhilaration and a true believer in the entrepreneurial way of life. It's through entrepreneurship that we create community, support society and live our dreams.
It's where possibility meets reality again and you can have the life and lifestyle you want. One of freedom and peace of mind. Welcome to this episode of the Entrepreneur's Solution where it's time for you to be bold, dream big and live life your way.
Alright, welcome back and I'm Mel Abraham. Welcome back to this episode of the Entrepreneur's Solution Show. And as I said, we're going to continue on this journey about success and some of the concepts of success. Now, some of the stuff has come from my experience as an entrepreneur, as a business person, as a father, as a parent, as a husband, as a brother, and as a son. Some of these were lessons that I've learned along the way. Most of the lessons I've learned is because I stepped in a pothole, twisted my ankle, skinned my knees, stubbed my toe, broke my nose. I mean, most of it was because of the mistakes I made. We learned most of our greatest lessons out of the mistakes that we make. Others, though, are from my clients or from my mentors or successful entrepreneurs that I've worked with or I'm friends with and watching them, and what are the things that they do to increase and accelerate their success and elevate their success and escalate their success at a greater rate? What are the processes that they put in place? And so, given where we are today, considering that we are getting towards the end of the year, we're looking at. And I know what happens, you know, at the end of the year, we start talking about New Year's resolutions and all that. And those New Year's resolutions, we put them in place and they last for like a day and a half or something like that. But how do we get something in place? What are the areas of focus that are going to change and shift our life for maximum success? And I think these are the eight levels of focus that when I look across my life and my experiences, as well as the entrepreneurs that I've worked with over the years, the decades that I've worked with them and other successful entrepreneurs that I'm friends with and seen them. These are some of the things that I think will shift and change things over the next 12 months as you move forward. And the first thing is, really, as you sit here today, is to reflect, to look at what the last 12 months have been. You know, what has happened, what's transpired. Good, bad, the ugly, the indifferent. Whatever it is, go back and relive it. And one of the things I want you to extract out of that is, what were your wins this year? What were your wins over the last 12 months? You know, as a society, we are brutally, brutally great, celebrating people's losses, people's lessons, people's challenges, people's problems. And we're horrible at celebrating their successes and their wins. And what I want to do is I want to create a habit, a habit in your life of celebrating your wins, no matter how small, no matter how small they are, to celebrate those wins. Because those wins are the stepping stones to bigger wins down the road. But we fail to see them in, in many cases. But not only to celebrate your wins, celebrate those around you, their wins, your children, your loved ones, your spouse, and find the wins and everything that come about and celebrate those wins. Now what I don't want you to do is just sit back and think about it. I want you to write it down, I want you to journal it. So next year when you go through this process, you get a chance to see what happened the year before. So get a journal book. I have a journal book around all the time and I'm journaling. And if I'm not journaling, I'm writing it in my iPad and doing it. But I think the effort, the exercise of taking an actual regular pen and that thing called paper and writing is totally different. And I would invite you to do it the old fashioned way and journal it, allow it to just flow. What are the wins? Maybe you lost two pounds this year. Maybe, you know, you put, I don't know, you finally started your retirement fund this year. Maybe you've changed your diet this year. Maybe you got into a relationship this year. Little things to big things, it doesn't matter, Maybe you hit the jackpot, you had your product come out and it, I mean, one of my wins this year clearly is my book, the Entrepreneur Solution. We put it out and within two weeks we sold over 17,000, 16,000 books. Within two weeks, hit number one on Barnes & Noble and USA Today best seller. So it is truly a win. It's been an incredible journey, but that's one of the big wins. A lot of small wins along the way, certainly challenges too. And so we're going to look at those too because in the next piece is really understanding what were the lessons that came out of these year. What were the lessons? What are the top 10 lessons from the past year? What were the things you learned? And I'm not talking about just business when I'm talking about success. I'm talking about a holistic approach to success. We can be really successful in business. And I have some friends that are truly successful in business. They're extremely wealthy. I got one that's got five airplanes. But he is miserable as hell. He's got crappy health, he's got crappy relationships.
He'S not good to his team, he's not good to his employees. And I look at him and I go, that's not success. Maybe in his eyes it is, but it's not. When I talk about success, I want it to be holistic. I want you to be able to look at your relationship and say, that's going pretty good. Now, I can make it better, but it's going pretty good. My health is going well, my wealth is going well, my work is going well, my business is going well. I want it to be holistic. So what are the lessons that you learned this past year? And look at the holistic view of lessons, Lessons in your relationships, lessons. And trust me, and I am learning daily, in fact, just this morning, some lessons out of my relationship with my beautiful bride. And you know, when you put people together, there's lessons to be learned, and we need to take those away so we grow as a person. So what were the top 10 lessons that you learned in the past? In the past year? And write those down. Journal those into the journal also. And that way those lessons don't go unlearned. They will stay learned and you will continue to move forward. When we allow and say, I got it, we don't write it down. We don't have a chance to ever look at it again. Because there's plenty of times that I'll go back to my journals, I go, I forgot that. Oh, yeah, I got to do that more.
Next is your attitude.
And this is an interesting one, but it's the attitude in which you approach the year with. It's the attitude in which you're approaching today with. It's the attitude in which you're approaching the moment with. And I'm not talking about 100% of the time. I'm talking about the majority of time. When you look at your attitude for the last year, the majority of the time, was it optimistic? Was it persistent? Was it pessimistic? Was it negative? Was it positive? What was it? Because that attitude is affecting your success, that attitude is affecting your results. If I'm constantly focused on pessimism and negativity and the wrongs and all that, I'm never going to grow. It's going to poison me in the process. But by reflecting on the wins, by understanding the lessons, and by being aware of my attitude on an ongoing basis. Now, I'm not saying to ignore, look, bad stuff happens and we got to deal with it. But if we live in it and we live in the crap of the bad, then that's the life we end up with versus saying, how can I reconstruct it? How can I find something Better. How can I improve upon this? What can I do to move from here? So what's the attitude that you brought to it for the last 12 months and what's the attitude.
That you're going to bring to it in the coming 12 months? And again, I want you to journal this and I want you to look at all aspects and contexts of your life. Health, wealth, relationships, business, team, or leadership if you want. But those are the five aspects I would look at, including maybe spirituality too. Let's throw that in there in that context also. Once you've done that. Now let's look at gratitude. What are the top 10 things that you're most grateful for the last 12 months? If we get a chance to celebrate the wins, what's the things that you're grateful now? What are the things that you're grateful for and what are the who's the people you're grateful for?
And I'm going to invite you to do a couple things here. I want you to journal it for certain. You know, what are the things that you're grateful for? Because we can't live in negativity when we're grateful at the same time. We can't have both of those coexist at the same time. But those that you're grateful for that have had an impact on you that maybe you haven't talked to in a while or maybe you just haven't expressed that gratitude. It's a perfect time, as you're journaling, to just pick up the phone, reach out and say, you know what, I've been journaling or reflecting on my last 12 months. I just want you to know how grateful I am to have you in my life. And here's why.
It's not about just the gratitude. I want you to understand why you're grateful for the things or the people that are in your lives. Journal that. Because you're going to see a shift in your emotion as you start to go up this ladder here in this process. Now, once we've looked at that, we're going to cross a line now. We're going to start to look at what's next year going to be like? What, what do we want to look for in next year? And one of the first steps that I want, I want to look at is what can I simplify next year? What are the three things that I can let go of to simplify my life next year? Maybe it's getting rid of some of the technology, getting rid of the complexity of my business. Maybe it's hiring Some virtual assistant or a personal assistant to simplify the things that I'm doing so I don't have to do all the stuff that I'm doing. I know that I've got to do some simplification in my life to do it. And some of it is might be, you know, shuttering some portions of my businesses to offshoot them and outsource them into other people to allow other people to run them more directly than having myself involved in it in order to simplify the things in my life. So what are the three things that.
If you could simplify, would simplify your life, that you could get rid of, let go of that will simplify your life? It's, in a sense, getting rid of the excess, if you will, that may be dragging. Dragging you down or holding you up, or creating complexity that just doesn't need to. Need to exist. I was looking at a video. Every once in a while these videos come up, and here's this little boy, this little boy who got his head stuck between two rails in a railing. And someone came in and they were trying to get him out, and they're trying to push his head back out the other way. And they were figuring, well, I got to take him out the way he came in. And then someone comes up and looks at it and says, now wait a second, he's a small enough kid. And instead of trying to push his head back the way it came in, they just pulled his body through the way his head came in. So they just looked at it differently. They looked at it more simplistically and solved the problem without hurting the child and giving them a way out. So one of the things that I want you to think about now is what are the three things in areas of your life that you could let go of that would simplify your life and give you a little more relaxation, a little more peace of mind in doing that? Then the next piece is, this is what's the process now everyone does. A lot of people will do New Year's resolutions. They'll do goal setting. And I truly do believe in setting goals. But what I believe more importantly is that we set process to getting those goals. I want to commit to a process to achieving the goals versus just the goal itself. Putting a goal out there is one thing that's there. It doesn't necessarily create the process. So I need to consciously create a process that moves me to those goals. And so the idea here is to set the goals that I want to achieve in 12 months, but then build the process that it's going to take to accomplish those and commit to the process. And when I say build a process, it's really about building, building down, chunking down, if you will, to what I call 90 day accomplishments. What do I need to do each and every 90 days to get me to that goal in a year's time? What's the process that needs to happen? And then I break those 90 day goals into weekly projects and focus on one to three projects a week. That's it. To move me forward. But that's the process that we need to commit to and not the goal. If we commit to a goal without committing to the process, we'll never achieve the goal. So what I'm going to ask you to do is say, all right, here's the goal. I want. Maybe it's, I want to increase my income. Maybe it's, I want to increase my vibrancy, whatever it is, in a year's time, my intimacy. Great. That's the goal. What's the process? What do I need to do every 90 days during those 90 day periods to move me closer and closer to that goal? And then commit to the process again. In your journal, I want you to write this all down. I want you to write down what the goals are. I want you to put the dates there. I want you to then say under each goal, here's the process that I need to go through. Here's the, the things, the steps that I need to do. Here's what I need to be each 90 day, at each 90 day timestamp, and here's what I'm going to do each week in that 90 days. And each 90 days, you're going to reflect on it. You're going to look at it again and say, am I moving? Do I need to adjust? Do I need to tweak? Where am I in the process? But commit to the process. Once you've committed to the process, I'm going to ask you to do this. Set a minimum of three times during the year for you to disconnect. For you and your loved ones. We need time to rejuvenate. Many of you that have heard me talk about the three Rs of Reflect, Reconnect and rejuvenate.
This is what I'm talking about. So what I want you to do is intentionally block out time on a calendar that says, this is time for me. This is time for my wife, my husband, my kids, my family, my loved ones. And you're going to block it out. And it is not movable. Unless there's a death in the family, it's not movable. You've locked it in, you blocked it in. You're not going to move it. Give yourself the gift of disconnecting and unplugging for anywhere from. I'm going to tell you a minimum of three, three days each time, but I'd say three days to a week to give you the time to reflect and re energize. You cannot run at breakneck pace 12 months out of the year. You're going to break your neck in the process. There's a reason they call it breakneck pace. So what we need to do is stop, disconnect, unplug, reflect, rejuvenate, and then reengage in the process. So we're going to set at least three, three time blocks throughout the year. Now I do it, we do it at least every 90 days. So we in correspondence with my 90 day rule is we do it at least every 90 days where we'll disconnect. Now, if I get through a big event or I'm doing something that takes a tremendous, I maybe just recently testified in a trial, I'm going to do something to allow me to rejuvenate. I'm going to block it in and make it part of my day, my week, my month, my quarter to make sure that I have the ability to operate at peak potential in that process. And then the last piece on this, schedule it, schedule it. Put all your time blocks in. Book your process, book your 90 days, book your, you know, your 13 week sprints, book your disconnect time, book everything in a calendar, make it real. Book an appointment with you for your life, block it out. So schedule everything in your life for the next 12 months and now doesn't mean that we're stuck, doesn't mean that we're not going to, we're not going to change it or shift it. Except that I don't want you to shift the disconnect blocks because that then once you start to shift that, you'll start moving it around all the, all over the place. That's the one thing that I'm going to not give you a lot of latitude on the rest of the things you may have some latitude on. But in this process, if you take and follow these eight levels of focus and you do it in writing and you do it with conscious intent to perform differently and to have this as your roadmap for the next 12 months, I promise you that when we sit here and we look at, at your life 12 months backwards, 12 months from today, things are going to be totally different. You're going to be far more energized. You're going to be far more vibrant. You're going to be far more successful in your mind and in other people's mind. And you're going to be at far greater peace with yourself because you know that no matter how much the struggle was, you're on your journey. And that's what this is about. So that's my Success Maximizer. You can download it, you'll go through and use it as part of your. Just use the journal to do it. But either way, do it because it's going to make a huge difference. This is far greater than just setting some mundane New Year's resolutions or goals that are impotent, that really have no drive behind them. So commit to the process and use the process. It works. It's not just something that I've done. It's something that many of other entrepreneurs I've observed, served, have done, and even clients and folks that I've worked with have done. So I hope you found this of value to you. And as always, if you haven't subscribed yet, subscribe. Just click the button. Click it right now. Make sure you subscribe. And do me a favor while you're doing that. Share it. Share with a friend. Love to get some of these tools of success and wealth and business and into other people's hands. Listen, I believe that my purpose is, is here to serve and to support other people's journeys, to allow them to bring their dreams to life. So why don't we share it? You know, go ahead and share it with some friends and let's give them some of this information as you move forward. And if you have you have a question or a challenge that you're dealing with in business or in success or wealth or in any aspect that you think that I can support you go to askmelnow.com leave me your question. I'll make sure that we, we answer it on one of the upcoming episodes as we go forward. And to get the Success Maximizer, remember to go to melabraham.com session048. That's melabraham.com session048 or just text me. Text me mylegacy one word, no spaces to 38470 and I'll make sure I send you the download link. And so here's to your success. And until we meet again, may your vision be grand, your journey epic, and your legacy significant. See you soon. Cheers.
Bye.
We hope you enjoyed this episode. Make sure you subscribe so you get access to all of Mel's business and success tips. And if you like this episode, share it with a friend. If you have a specific business or success question, you can ask it at www.askmailnow.com. remember, it's all about being bold, dreaming big, and living life your way because the world needs you. Until the next episode, may your vision be grand, your journey epic, and your legacy.
Significant.
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