Transformation Tuesday: Big Goals

On this episode of the podcast we have our Transformation Tuesday webinar.
  
This week, we talked about how to building grit and setting the goals that will shape us.

For more information, and to sign up for our private coaching, visit tesh.com

Our Hosts:
John Tesh: Instagram: @johntesh_ifyl facebook.com/JohnTesh
Gib Gerard: Instagram: @GibGerard facebook.com/GibGerard X: @GibGerard

Transcript

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Gib. Hello and welcome to another episode of the podcast. I'm Gib Gerard here with another special transformation Tuesday episode. This is where we take our transformation Tuesday webinar. We pull the audio from it, and we give it to you. If you're interested in joining transformation Tuesday, you can learn more about that@tesh.com we got a Facebook group. We're talking to you guys all the time. It's a great place for us to connect and a great place for you to get from the place you are to the place you want to be. Now sometimes, most the time, it's me and John, sometimes it's just me this week that I'm playing for you now is an example of a week that's just me. Sometimes it's just John, but folks, here's without, here, here's with, here without further ado is me. Hello and welcome to our transformation Tuesday webinar that we do, interestingly enough, every Tuesday, we are so excited to have you guys here today. I know I say this every time I am a little bit under the weather today, but I am excited, and I am jazzed and I'm energized by what we have for you today. No, John, today, it's just me, me, but we are we have a lot to cover. I pulled a lot of stuff. We are staying with our theme of of creating our best selves by creating by creating the habits that will make us our best selves six months from now. So that is our theme. That is the thing that I have opened this year with that I would like for us to continue in how we frame our decision making, whether it's our health choices, whether it's our habit choices, whether it is our goals, right? We have the ability in the next six months, to form the habits that will turn us into the person that we have been wanting to be for a very long time. There's a tremendous amount of power in that. And the adage that I always come back to is, if you live with any kind of regret, any kind of wish for how you would have handled things differently in the past, things you wish you would have done. And you think if I could just go back and change that moment, my life would be so different, so much better. Okay, I don't know how to make a time machine. And if you do, if you do know how to make a time machine? You probably can't go back and make a change that would that would affect exactly what we're talking about. But in some sense, we do have a time machine, and that is the person we are today. Has the ability to do those things for the person for us six months from now, the person we become six months from now, we have that ability. So we sit and we live with regret. We ruminate on things we wish we should have done. We wish that we had done. We could have done but we did it, opportunities that we let slip through our fingers, things we said no to, we wish we'd said yes to, and vice versa. And we think, ah, and it for some people, it keeps them up at night. For some people, it makes them turn to drugs. For some people, I mean, I know people who have, I don't know them personally, but I've read all the articles about people who I personally, actually heard about Bitcoin when it was $1 and I didn't even have kids. So, I mean, I had, you know, any money that I spent was I could have skipped I could have skipped. My money was not going out the door the way it is now. If I just put 100 bucks into Bitcoin, the first time I heard about it, I would be a billionaire right now, easily, just, it's, it's crazy to think about, right? I wish I would have done that. I know people who bought into bitcoin early, but when, when you had to have, when you had to have a digital wallet, and that digital key to open the wallet sat on a hard drive, and they forgot about Bitcoin, and then it started making the news. And then they realized that Bitcoin, that that hard drive that they can't find anymore, is worth, like 250 $300 million $800 million there are tons of stories about that, if you want to go even to spend time looking My point is that we all have regret. We all have things that we wish we would have done differently. We all have things opportunities we wish we would have we would have capitalized on. What is that for you right now? And how can we capitalize on it now so that in six months, you're not wishing that you would have done something differently. You are instead celebrating that you have become this person that you would like to be, that you have become the best version of yourself, that you are happier, that you are healthier, that you are more productive, that you are living a better version of yourself. This is going to come as a huge surprise to none of you. We're going to open with a little bit of Tony Robbins about how we frame things. Shocking. I bet you guys didn't expect that today. So the reality is, the quality of your life has nothing to do with what's happening around you. There's two worlds to master you. The external world and the internal world. If you're really good at manipulating and directing the external world, you'll have external success on the surface, but you won't have fulfillment. And if you master the inner world, you don't have to worry about the external world, because if you can master what's going on inside of you, you can handle anything in the external world. But our society, Western society, at least, focuses on the outside world, the consumer culture, becoming something, acting like something, achieving something, nothing wrong with that. When you go to the eastern side of this earth, Eastern philosophy is more about the inside. Someone's sitting there. They own anything. They're in a loin cloth, and they're dying and they're joyous. I've experienced this and said, What's wrong with this person? To one day, I went, What's wrong with me that I can't find joy either. By the way. Could you have be sitting in a chair, have all help breaking loose around you and still have a great life feel alive? Yes or No, could you be joyous? Could you be an ecstasy while Hell was breaking loose around you? Yes or no. Yes or no. Of course, you can, but we live in a western society, if you just sit on your ass to do nothing, people come and take your furniture. So we want to master the external world as well, and then master those two worlds, we have to understand how our brains distort, delete and generalize. If you're going to fight with somebody, go, you always do that. How many get pissed off when someone says you always do something because you know you don't always do anything, not even good things, because we gent that's a generalization. Sometimes generalizations are good if they encourage you, but generalizations that mess up a relationship, that mess up your own identity for yourself, that keep you from taking action, those the ones get in the way, distortions get in the way, right? So what we're going to talk about today, what I like about we I played you versions of Tony Robbins saying that before, and it's not, it's something that Tony you talk about recapitulation. Anybody that watches Tony Robbins, anybody's read his stuff, or watched any of his stuff, you know that that is the essence of what he talks, about unleashing the power within yourself, right? And unleashing that power means you have to first control what is happening inside of your own brain. What I like about what he says there is that we have to work on both things. We cannot merely live inside of our own heads, at least in Western society. I mean, maybe, maybe you have enough money squirreled away, you can go and, you know, live in a retreat in Bali for the rest of your life and just focus solely on what your internal narrative is about your life. Maybe that works for you, but for the rest of us, for me speak for anybody else, we've got to work on both, and both are important. Both have a real impact on how we feel. So we are going to talk a little bit about how to take those external goals that we have and use our internal mindset and the work that we've been talking about doing on our internal self. What are those things? A gratefulness practice, right? Consistently, getting quiet with prayer and meditation, looking for positive journaling about our gratefulness and looking for the positive things that happen throughout the day that will begin to reach begin to reshape our inner monolog about ourselves. It'll begin to reshape our inner monolog about our life. And we've talked about this over and over and over again, and if you're not doing it every day, and you're still not seeing results in your life, there's nobody that we can talk to, nobody we can blame but ourselves for that, right? We got to be doing it every day. Are you praying every day? Are you meditating every day? Are you focusing on gratefulness every single day? Does it seem like a bunch of hooey? Does it seem like a waste of time? It does until it doesn't. But it's not enough to just be doing that inner work, that inner work is important, that inner work reframes our narrative about ourselves, and it sets us up for external success in a myriad of ways. It sets us up for being able to handle external distress in a myriad of ways. He talks about, can you be in a situation where all hell is breaking loose around you and you're still content, you're still happy, you can be and that comes with these practices that we talk about every single week. It comes with these practices that we emphasize. If you guys are interested in the Thursday call, join us@tesh.com you guys can join the Thursday call. It's much more interactive, but we talk about these practices twice a week. I typically twice a week, and I struggle to do this four days a week. I mean, I literally, I literally, I'm lecturing you guys right now, and then Thursday, we'll talk about it again. And I struggle to meet a goal of being grateful, journaling, meditating, praying, three, four days a week. It should be, you think the way that I talk that I'm doing it seven days a week, I know that we're supposed to do it. I know that it has intrinsic and extrinsic and extrinsic benefits, but at the same time it is, it is simple, but it is not easy. Let's do the simple thing. Let's do it with consistency. In order to do that, we have to set goals. And in order to set goals, I've got a couple of things that seem like they are in conflict. I'm share with you right now, but they are actually I will reconcile. On them, I promise. Here is Andrew Huberman talking about the importance of how we decide what goals we're going to set for ourselves, and what the neurological impact is of the types of goals we set and how we accomplish them. Because this is important. If we want to change the external we cannot just sit there and will it. We have to get involved. To get our hands dirty, we have to get into the muck, into the mire, and actually do the work. And that comes you can't do that if you don't know where you're going. You can't sail a ship if you don't have that point on the horizon that you're sailing to. Otherwise, you are adrift in a giant Pacific Ocean of life. Turns out that when people set goals, some attempt to modify their behavior. Turns out that if the goal is too easy. It's too within reach. It doesn't recruit enough of the autonomic nervous system to make pursuit of that goal likely. So it turns out that when goals were moderate, when they were just outside of one's immediate abilities, or that one felt that, yeah, that would take a lot of effort, but it's within range, or maybe in range, like, maybe I can do it, maybe I can't, then there was a near doubling of the systolic blood pressure in the good sense it didn't go into the unhealthy range, and a doubling or more of the likelihood that they would engage in the ongoing pursuit of that particular goal, right? So it needs to push you. It needs to be hard. It needs to extend yourself. It's so easy to create the things that you're doing anyway, right? And we'll talk, we've talked we're gonna have, I'm gonna have a little BJ Fogg in a little bit. And we've talked before about how we can use the easy stuff to inform and create bigger, better habits, right? But if we are not pushing ourselves every day, if we are not competing with ourselves to where we are pushing ourselves five or 10% better today than we were yesterday, then we will stagnate. And if we stagnate and we just choose the easy goals, oh, just today, I just got to make it through the day. Now that doesn't mean that you don't have days where you just got to make it through the day. We all have those days, and we can anchor new habits and goals to the simple things that we do every single day that make getting through the day easier. Let us use less mental energy, all of that stuff. But if you would like to begin to create the dopamine cycle that has been co opted by, you know, five companies to make you complacent and to do the things that they want you to do. If you can hijack that, take that control of that dopamine cycle back and turn into the person that you want to be, you do that by setting big goals and forming easy habits. So I know that those seem in conflict, but you need to. You need to pick a goal that stretches yourself and get habits, anchor habits the things you're doing anyway. So those seem again, I know we've said both things many times, and they seem in conflict. Wait, am I doing the easy stuff? Am I making stuff easier, or am I doing stuff that is hard? It makes stuff harder? And the answer is, you kind of doing both in order to form habits that change your life, anchoring them to the things you're doing anyway, the simple act of making your bed in the morning, of doing 10 body weight squats every time you brush your teeth, right? You're anchoring it to the simple things, and you're doing the small steps, but you're also setting goals for yourself that push you out of your comfort zone just a little bit every day. And we're going to talk about a great key to get out of your comfort zone a little bit, from Mel Robbins, which we've which we've dealt with before. But here is Angela Duckworth now. Angela Duckworth, for those who don't know, she's a TED speaker, a researcher. She wrote the book about perseverance, the book about the correlation between grit and success. The name of that book is grit. It is a great book. John and I both read it. It's phenomenal. And here she is talking about how we can develop grit in ourselves and how we can pick those goals. So humans said we got to pick the goals that push us. How do we pick the goals? How do we set that destination that best fits us? Marie Curie said at the end of her life, what really made her different as a scientist is that she was so interested in what she was doing, the first spark of passion for long term goals is curiosity or interest. That's what you're doing today and yesterday. If you can have dinner every night and say, you know, I learned something interesting today, then you are very high on this aspect of what leads to grit. So that's the first thing I would suggest. If you don't say that, then you should think about, should I join a book club? Can I find a way to make learning a daily part of my work? How can you add things to your life that when you sit at the dinner table? Now, I have, I have three kids. I talk about this all the time, and we try to have we've talked on the show, on on this show, but on the radio show, on the podcast, many, many times about this fact, one of the big key indicators of long term emotional health and academic success in children is sitting down and having dinner as a family every single night. Now there are a myriad of factors. That correlate with that, that are probably just as important, right? But you know, having dinner every night means you are, you know, not food insecure. You have a family home that is safe and a regular schedule that involves parents being home, like all of that are also those are correlative factors that lead that are part of having dinner together every night. But the reality is that those check ins are important, and so when you are trying to decide, was today a success? Imagine you are sitting at a dinner table with five versions of yourself, younger, you, older, you, current, you, maybe you from yesterday, you from tomorrow, all of that. How are you able to justify to everybody at that table about that you, that you grew today, that you accomplished something today? Hey, you tomorrow. I just pushed the bar just a little bit me yesterday. Thank you for what you did. Here's how I took what you gave me and I improved upon it. Me from, you know, years ago. Thanks for what you've thanks for the groundwork that you set and the books that you've read. I have. I'm taking that. I'm using it. I used it today. You from the future. I just planted seeds that will grow into trees that will help us in the future, but make sure that you're able to to lean into that and able to tell a story to yourself every single day about the passion and interest that you have and the way that you have learned and grown in the day. And if you're unable to do that, like she's saying, find it. Figure it out. Find that place where you are in that zone. I'm not going to tell you what to do. I'm not going to tell you what that is. I feel like I often feel like curly in the movie city slickers, and, you know, he's talking to Mitch, and he goes, What's the what's the secret to life? Curly goes, one thing. And Mitch goes, what is that one thing? That's what you got to figure out. That's the thing, though. That's the thesis. For those of you that don't remember scissors, great movie, but the thesis of the movie is you got to figure out that thing that gets you out of bed in the morning. Mitch lost it, and he finds it when he goes, when he goes to the dude ranch, that's the thing. There's jokes, there's great stuff in that movie. It's funny. But the one thing, what is your one thing? What are you passionate about? What are you able to sit down at the dinner table, at this Algonquin round table that you're having with yourself, and are you able to talk to future? You, tomorrow, you yesterday, you years ago, you and you're able to say that I am I am honoring everything that we have, that we are all working for. I did it by doing this today. And if you can't do that, figure out that one thing. All right, here is Andrew Huberman with goal specificity. A lot of people will set a sort of title goal or a goal state. They'll say, oh, you know, I want to be rich or I want to be smart. It's really important that you put additional specificity on your goal. In fact, it's important that you put a lot of specificity on your goal, and that you focus mainly on verbs when defining that specificity. So what we are talking about here is really defining the goal on a piece of paper. And I do think that's important. You should write this down. So when we are talking about generating verb specificity about your goal, it would look like the following. So let's say I want to, quote, unquote, get more fit. I would recommend that you literally write down I'm going to go to the gym three times per week for a minimum of 60 Minutes, where 50 minutes of that are carrying out hard work. Okay with, of course, rest between sets. And I should mention that setting specific goals and clearly defining the verbs that you're going to engage in to pursue those goals, and defining how long you are going to try and engage in those verbs each week to achieve those goals has significant impact on the probability of success. So you've got to be specific about what it is that you're trying to do. You've got to be specific. You cannot just say I want more money. You can't just say I want a better job title. And you can't just say I want to be in better shape. I want to I want to just read more. I want whatever you have to be specific in because we know, we know there's no, there's no what's the word I'm looking for. So secret to what gets you in better shape? I mean, there's drugs that help. We had GOP ones and HGH and steroids and all that stuff. But we know that what, what the thing that gets you into better shape is doing the things that get you into better shape, it's eating better and it's working out, it's exercise and moving your body. You want your body to be better, you got to use your body in the right way. We know. So you can't just say you want to earn more money. You know you got to do stuff you've never done before. You know that you want to change your job title. You know what you have to do, change your job title, go out and look for jobs. You got to, imply, apply internally. You got to create the job that's not there for you. If you don't have it, you got to do it. We know that. But if you don't get specific, it's in the it's it's in the ether, it's dancing. You can't, you can't set a goal for it. You can't set. Your target if you don't make sure you know what that target is. So if you want to get in better shape, I got to go to the gym four times a week. You got it. You want a different job, you've got to you've got to commit to doing online courses or job training. I can't tell you what to do. I would recommend, in this day and age, that you spend at least 10 to 30 minutes a day learning about AI practice with one of the the free models. Spend the 10 bucks a month because it's coming. You want to, you want to you want to prepare yourself for the future. 10 minutes a day. Just tell yourself 10 minutes a day. I'm going to interact with AI and try to figure out how I can use it. Work on better prompting. Try to take one task off of your plate for the day, see if you can do that. I mean, that's, that's, that's something I've set for myself, right? Because it's coming. I don't love it. There's things I really don't like about it, but whether I like it or not, that's outside of my control. I've got to know how to handle it. So I spend 1030 minutes a trying to get it to do tasks and with mixed results. And then I work on, how do I prompt it better? One of the things I've heard said is your job won't necessarily get replaced by AI. You'll get replaced by somebody who knows how to make ai do your job. And then, you know, five people get replaced by one. That's so be that guy, be that person. Okay, so we're talking about goal specificity. We're talking about goals that extend ourselves. But we also have talked a lot about the importance of anchoring to our habits, right? How many times have I mentioned BJ, Fogg, how am i How many times have we talked about taking the small habit and making it bigger and making it just a little bit better a lot is the answer. Here is BJ Fogg, really quickly, talking about, and I'm going to reconcile what we've been talking about, talking about how to build the habit, with those small, tiny steps. A lot of people feel like they want to read more. So read more is the aspiration. Break it down and make it into a very tiny version of that. So it might be just read one paragraph in a book. The idea is, you don't read a whole chapter every day. You just read one paragraph. If you want to do more, you can. And this is something people don't understand about the tiny habits. Method is, if you want to flush all your teeth, you can, if you want to do 20 push ups, you can but you put the baseline really low, one to two push ups one paragraph, and if you only do one paragraph, that's a victory. Why? How does that reconcile with what Huberman was saying about pushing yourself? How does that reconcile? Because it seems like they are, they are against each other, right? That they are in contradiction. We have to do, we have to commit to goals that push ourselves. In order to get to goals that push ourselves, we have to build habits. In order to build habits, we have to take these baby steps. So while it seems like what BJ Fogg is saying, Aim small and what Andrew Huberman is saying, aim to stretch yourself, are in conflict, but they are not because we're going to aim to stretch ourselves, and in order to do that, we are going to make incremental commitments to improve ourselves. And what he's saying there is when we set those bars, that bar low for the habit, not for the goal. The goal is to go to the gym and exercise at a minimum for a certain amount of time every single day, the habit gets built incrementally. Okay, so the habit is, I know that I want to get to I'm going to the gym, and I'm doing sustained cardiovascular exercise for 50 minutes a day. But that psychologically, while we know that's good and we know that's a habit that pushes us today, that may be impossible for some of us. So how do we get there? Well, we start by saying, I'm just going to literally go to the gym and walk on the treadmill for five minutes four times this week. Now everybody has time for that, right? If the gym is, you know, 10 minutes out of your way, it's a five minutes, and then 10 minutes back to your house. We can do it. We just choose not. You can also just do that outside. Do the drive to the gym. Get your body moving for five minutes every day. If you feel like it, you go further. If you feel like it, you push yourself just a little bit more. But the reality is, to build the habit, we have to set that small, incremental change. We have to get it going. We have to get it started. So that's not in conflict with the goals that push us. It is about creating the habits that let us create the goals that push us. Does that make sense? That little that little change? Because it feels they feel like they're in conflict, but they really do support each other. So I'm going to do 10 push ups a day. And I feel really good to do 20, do 20, but the goal is to do the 10 push ups a day. And the overall goal is that we're going to, you know, you want to look good in in pictures, on your on your vacation, to the keys, or whatever. You have that motivator. You have the. Bigger goal that pushes yourself, which is, I'm living a stagnant life, and I want to I want to get out of my comfort zone. You got to do that. Now. This is something that I know we all struggle with. I know what I have to do. I know where I want to be. I kind of know what the goals need to be. But then I talk myself out of the thing that I need to do, that phone call, that phone call, I got that contact, and I'm nervous about making that phone call. I have, I have the I signed up for the gym membership online. I just, I really don't want to go to the gym and be judged. I feel like I'll be judged and that, and we talk ourselves out of doing those small steps. We talk ourselves out of the very goals that when we sit, we sit in our bed at night we wish that we were accomplishing. So here is Mel Robbins, no relation to Tony Robbins, I don't think talking about her five second moment. She's written a book about it's a massive bestseller. She's got like, five podcasts called the Five second rule. At this point here she is talking about it. So the five second rule is super simple. It's a hack you can use for instant courage or motivation any moment where you have this instinct that you should do something, whether it's speaking up at work or it's getting out of bed or it's putting the phone down and actually stepping outside for a walk, whatever it may be, just start counting 54321, you got to count backwards. Does not work. If you count up, 12345, does not work because you've been taught to count up your entire life, so it's already recorded in your subconscious. The trick works, because if you count backwards, 54321, it requires a moment where you have to focus on the counting, and that pulls the front part of your brain, the prefrontal cortex, online, so now you've just activated. It's like a little cheat code the part of the brain that you need to change behavior, or to like be strategic, or to actually push yourself to do something. You're now in control for a moment. And the other reason why it works is because it's like the first domino. Counting is an action. And if you've actually decided to count 54321, you've already decided to do it, that's it. Give yourself that give yourself that tool, that permission to do it. Count down. I don't want to walk in the gym. I'm going to be judged. 54321, who cares you walk into the gym. I want to make that phone call because I could get rejected. Well, if you don't make the phone call, you're definitely gonna get rejected. 54321, make the phone call. I don't want to ask that person to go to dinner with me, because I could get rejected. 54321, and then you do it. You do it anyway. That's the thing. You do it anyway. You do it scared. Stop making excuses for yourself. Start giving yourself permission to accomplish those things that you know you want to accomplish. Start giving yourself permission do it. Blast off, and once you start the countdown, t minus five. It's happening. Send that risky text message, send that email for that sales lead, whatever it is, reach out to some friends if they want to invest in your food truck. I don't know what your thing is. Whatever the thing is, it's a tool that gets you putting one foot in front of the other, and gets you closer incrementally to that place that you want to be. We all signed up for this. We started this because we we heard from people that they wanted to get to a place that they never been before. I want to get we've said on the radio, we're here to help you get from the place you are to the place you want to be. And now we've taken our decades of work on that show, the experts that we vetted, the content that we are aware of, and we put this together to help you get specifically from the place you are to the place you want to be. We want that for you. I want that for me. It's not this is not impersonal. I want that for me. But these are the tools that help us get there. What are you going to do this week? Figure it out, talk to me in the in the Facebook group. What choices are you going to make to move that needle incrementally, have that conversation. And here's the thing, write this stuff down. You know, CS Lewis has this great stuff about prayer, where he talks about, you should be praying out loud. We think we can just do it in our head. And he's like, yeah, yeah, but do it out loud. You think that you have these goals in your head. Write it down. Do it out loud. Make that your reality. It engages more parts of your brain. So from my from a neurological standpoint, it is really powerful. It's more powerful. Um, it also just puts yourself. It puts yourself out there. So do that? Do that work this week? Write down those goals. Figure out what habits you're going to anchor to get yourself there. Start working on that interior monolog with everything that we've talked about, the tools that we've been talking about. But really do it and have that conversation like a crazy person out loud with yourself, where you talk to the version of you tomorrow, the version of you yesterday, the version of you in the distant future and the version of you in the distant path past, and talk to those people, the different versions of you, about what you did today in order to honor what your past has done for you and set yourself your future self up. That's it. It's been our half hour Happy Tuesday, everybody. I will see you guys next week. That's it for the show today. Thank you guys so much for listening. If you like the show, please rate, comment and subscribe on Apple podcast. Spotify wherever you get your podcast. It helps us out a lot when you do that, we also try to respond to every mention the show, every DM about the show. You can tell us what you think about it, because ultimately, we do the show for you guys. So thank you so much for listening. You.