Processes to Achieve Your Goals

Dr. Thayne talks about the low number of goals being set in most people's lives, much less stuck to. Join him as he dives into the importance of setting meaningful goals, letting others in on them, and setting up the processes that will make your goals the most likely to be achieved, even if you slip up. 

Transcript

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Talmage Thayne: 0:03

Welcome to the not by chance podcast. Congratulations. We made it around the sun once again. I'm Talmage. Thayne, Tim, Thayne son and podcast manager, you guessed it, Dr. Thayne, we'll be talking about goals today, the importance of having a plan and a goal for your life, how to get people involved in the importance of that, and how to set processes for your goals, so that you'll be able to stick with them and pick them up again, when you drop them.

Dr. Tim Thayne: 0:36

Hey, everybody, Today is January 2 2020. It's kind of fun to say 2020. It's easy. And two days into the year, many of us have probably thought a little bit about if not a lot about goal setting. And that's what this podcast is going to be about today. First of all, it's also January 1, I don't know about you. But what tends to happen in our home on January 1, is we have an open day. And we have this desire to do something better this year than we had before. And almost naturally, we start cleaning the house. You know, I'll go at first my closet and realize how cluttered it's become over time of neglect. And I'll dive into that. And then it moves from that room to the bedroom then to the desk over here in my home office. And by the end of the day, I've got a place that's clean, uncluttered. And now I'm ready to set goals. I'm ready to go forward and have a great year. I don't know what your routine is early in the year. But I do hope that goal setting is a part of it. I did a little search on Google. I was sitting here talking with Talmage. And and I asked the question, what kind of people set goals? Or you know how many people actually do set goals? What's the percentage and so I inquired of Google. If Google is correct here, the research says that fewer than or only about 3% of people will set goals and less than 1% will continue to follow that goal and track it on a daily basis. That shocked me. Honestly, I was stunned to hear that because my first instinct was everybody set sets goals, or at least a vast majority of people would set goals. It makes me really wonder why would someone not set a goal? Because there's this new opportunity, you know, the turning of the year? And in our case, it's actually a new decade? Because you could look at that and say, Okay, I got a fresh decade. I got a new year. What do I want to do with this my time? And, and if, as we get a little older that that little clock keeps ticking. And we know that our time is definitely, you know, we're spending it somehow it's going away. And so how can we use our time in the best way possible. And goal setting seems to always need to be a part of this, we're not going to look our way into something that was like, wow, how did I get here at a complex that in the time ahead. It's just not going to happen. We have to deliberately decide where we're going and have our eye fixed on that over a period of time in order to get to this place that we hope to be someday. So goal setting is really interesting. Another thing that I've recently been exposed to, and I may be one of the last people, I should have done this much sooner. Gary Vaynerchuk. This is a man that impresses me on a lot of ways, especially when we're talking about goal setting. He set this huge audacious goal that I'm going to tell you about in a minute. But let me give you a quick background about him first. He's an immigrant as a child from the Soviet Union. His parents brought him here, and he knew no English at the time. At this point you you'd never know that he's got that English language 100% down. But they brought him over I think they lived in the in the New York area. And early on, he went outside to play with some kids, and they were playing football. And they were probably dividing up on teams or something and they said, Okay, you're a Jets fan. And somehow that stuck in his mind. And he is probably the most rabid Jets fan you can imagine or maybe any sport you can imagine. But back then he had no money and he didn't have the money to buy the clothing or the gear or the jersey or anything else but his mother knitted him a Jets jersey. And whether it was that, you know the kids telling him that you're a Jets fan, whatever it was it sunk deep into his mouth. Mind and Heart. And he knew himself to be the Jets fan. And he claims to have never missed a single play. The Jets have made any kind of footage, not just games, but the actual plays, he's seen it all. Now, here's what's impressive to me. And I want you to think about this. Well how bold This is, he is decided that his goal, I think, is his number one goal is that he is going to buy the Jets franchise. And he's put it out there on his podcasts, and his is social media, you'll see him wearing his jets, gear paraphernalia, he talks about the Jets all the time. But he's put it out there that he's going to buy the Jets. Now, when I when I heard that, for the first time, I thought, wow, that's really incredible that he would share that with the world. Because a lot of us would go, Okay, I've got this big, audacious, crazy goal. And I'm just going to keep it to myself, I'm just not going to tell anybody because if I tell anybody, I'm going to kind of people are going to expect that I'm going to be making progress towards that, or what if I fail, and I've told all these people, millions of people are going to know that I didn't buy the Jets, or that I'm not even near close to being able to buy the Jets. But here's the genius in what he's done, in my opinion. First of all, by publicizing this, putting it out there into the universe, you really do create a level of commitment that you would never have without doing that. You also, I believe, from a spiritual standpoint, you really open yourself up to having help from unseen sources from God. And helping you get there where you want to be, it also definitely puts you in a position that you're going to have accountability to that you wouldn't have otherwise, you probably going to have support towards that you wouldn't have otherwise. And you're likely to actually achieve that goal, if you've put it out there in that kind of way. The other thing, that's interesting too, though, when you're talking about these big goals, that can't be accomplished in one year, this, this could be a decade long goal, or it could be maybe two, three decades, before you get there, you have to have an extreme amount of patience, you can't think that I'm going to set this big goal and out of whatever skills I have today, in a very short amount of time, somehow I'm going to achieve this crazy, incredible goal, it's really important to add to these long term goals, a lot of patience, a lot of willingness to take the long route if it takes that. And so I would say, you know, step one, have something way out there that is pulling you forward into the future, that's orienting you to those things that matter the most to you. For me, they tend to be more on the spiritual side, I have faith I believe in God, I believe in life after this. And and I believe that the journey to that actually is how to create joy in the here and now. And so one of the things in and many traditions of faith, let's say for example, there's there's baptism, something I thought of that's very public, actually, usually people invite others to their baptism. And it's, it's this public commitment to a change an almost a pivot in their life from one way of living to another. Maybe prior to that, a way of living that didn't have God in it. And then after that, it's me going forward with God and with this faith journey that I'm on. And to me that, again, that public display of commitment is part of the magic of how we actually achieve some of these goals. Well, let's back down a little bit from these lofty goals that are way out there and maybe decades into the future to something a little bit more proximal closer to us, and how we can actually achieve those goals. And maybe why we don't set goals in the first place, too. I think one of the reasons many people don't set goals is because there's the fear of failure, just as soon as we set a goal. Obviously, we've set a bar that we might not clear. And if we don't clear it, we have failed. And none of us like to look at ourselves in the mirror and say, you know, I failed at something I tried to do. So what happens to a lot of us is we might decide not to actually set a goal or we set really, really low goals that don't stretch us. Don't help us get up there. I want to read a quote to you from Theodore Roosevelt. So this is called The Man in the Arena. It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who actually is in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who airs who comes short, again and again, because there is no effort without error, and shortcoming. But who does actually strive to do the deeds, who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. I don't know about you, but that makes me want to set some goals, I want to be in the arena, I want to be moving forward in my life, I want to be engaged, even if I fall on my face. It's worth it. So let's set some goals. And now how do we do it in a way that we can actually achieve something? First of all, I want to tell you admit, admit to you that, in the cleaning of my office, I ran across multiple notebooks that I've started. And as I looked at them, many of them were the beginnings of years where I was starting to set a goal. And at first glance, I was really embarrassed because I thought, Okay, I'm setting the same goals that I did last year, or, and even the year before that, and even the year before that. And I almost hate to admit to you that that means that I am not necessarily achieving the goals that I've set. But at closer look at examination of my life, I can look at those things and say, you know, I really actually have grown in all of those areas that I've set goals in over the years, what's happened is my goals in those areas tend to, you know, in some ways I've achieved and then set the bar higher. In other ways, I'm still striving in some of those goals to achieve what I tried to do four or five years ago. But I think what I like about this fact is that I have tried every year, now someone who tries every year is going to grow. And you keep getting up and train again. All right, I mentioned that we have this fresh new year, we got a fresh new decade, and it's like clean slate. Start again. And it is a wonderful time to be able to do that. But here's here's the fear of trying to just set goals around these big year marks. Here's what the research says 80% of New Year's resolutions fail by the second week of February. And so if you think that, okay, all this last, I've messed up, right, you know, I'm not going to achieve my goal, you would stop right there and maybe wait to be motivated again, when the new year rolls back around, you get another fresh start. What I would say is, whenever wherever you're at right now, now is the best time to set a goal. If it's in February that you you don't achieve your goal and you realize you've you've lapsed in everything you're trying to do. It's okay, go ahead and set the new year's resolution again, right there, you might have to do it two or three times over the course of the year. But if you do, you're going to get into the practice of of coming back to something that matters to you. And pouring energy into that again. And each time that you do that, you're going to find yourself moving forward again with that momentum. So that's my encouragement to you today is that, let's let's set some big goals that pull us into the future. And then let's back down to what's the little steps, what's the goal we want to achieve this year. And now let's break it down into small steps. So that we can focus on the daily small steps and not worry so much about that goal. Because if you focus on small steps that lead to a goal, you have actually focused on the very thing that will be the vehicle to getting there. All right, everybody, here we go. 2020. Let's make the most of it. And as you get going, and when you fail, remember, it's okay, just get back up and make some more progress from there. Please post about this love your thoughts and your ideas about goal setting, how to achieve them how to stay motivated, how to help others achieve their goals. All of that would be very interesting posted on Instagram, Facebook, wherever and Let's support each other going forward from here