John Carlton: Goal Setting

The Action Seminar is all about taking action, and we kicked it off with a challenge to set verifiable goals and reduce them to specific action steps that will get you focused and started off in the right direction.

We also had our first hot seat, with Brian from Strategic Profits, Mary Ellen from ETR, Kevin Rogers on the panel. Watch it with an eye toward how you can use this advice in your own business.

You’re about to learn one of the little known secrets of Hot Seats & Mastermind groups…

… often, the folks watching a good “break the problem down and solve it” Brain Cleanse get more from the experience than the dude in the Hot Seat.

This isn’t a game. This is real, hard-core, live Hot Seat-style consulting, performed without a net on the stage…

… so you can see how it’s done by the best in the biz.

Envisioning what you want is not goal-setting. It is dreaming and setting yourself up for failure.

The kind of goals successful people set are different from most other people.

Read Think and Grow Rich and do the Goal-Setting exercise.

4:40: Breaking things down

If you want a million dollars it is not enough to want it or envision it.

You have to break it down into steps ($100,000/mo, 3 scores of $333,000, or build it up month by month.

You have to have a plan for how you are going to get there.

2 things that stop people from setting goals:

1. Don’t know what to do first,
2. Don’t know what to do next.

Operation Moneysuck:
Concentrate on the actions that bring in income rather than other stuff.

7:40 How to set reasonable (reachable) goals.

Stan: Write down 3 to 6 things that you want to accomplish this year.

For the most important goal:

What are the 3 to 6 steps that you need to take.

Eg. If you want to make a million dollars from your website and don’t have a site yet, creating a site is one of the steps. If you are worried about SEO and don’t have a site yet, stop worrying about that and get the site set up.

If those steps are complex, list 3 to 6 substeps for each.

This is the fastest way to get set up. You need to get down to steps you could complete in one sitting.

You have to eliminate the “what do I do next” syndrome.

AT the end of each day of teh seminar, distill your notes to one page. This keeps you from beine overwhelmed. Put a star next to the ones that best support your current goals.

17:50 Kissing frogs: You will make mistakes along the wway. Put themm aside and move on. Learn what you can from it.

Don’t worry about taking a few steps down a path to find if it is the right path. Give yourself permission to stop if it is not right for you.

20:15 Joe Polish: You have to treat reading materials like all their purpose is is to serve you. If they don’t, stop reading and move on to something else.

Understand your time is important. All you have is time, money, and energy, and you have to be careful that you don’t waste any of them.

Think and Grow Rich: Read the 31 causes of failure

26:43: Elizabeth Donati gives an example of her big goals and steps to achieve it

30:00: Productivity
Key to Productivity: Know what you have to work on and work on it to the exclusion of everything else. Focus.

Create deadlines for each deliverable.

Miltitasking is not a good thing. You have to focus, have discipline.

Focus on what’s important and ignore the rest.

43:25 Hotseat
Brian Johnson from Strategic Profits, Mary Ellen from ETR, Kevin Rogers

On the hot seat is Mike Singer: His website is WhyFly. WhyFly.com is inactive now.

It ihas content by writers in the aviation niche and is a membership site.

It is like a blog you have to pay for. It has a high-passion index but doesn’t solve a problem.

Kevin: It is a common battle between casting a wide net with free content or have a paid site with exclusive content. He thinks the former is a better idea.

Mary Ellen: Collect names even if it is a paid site.

He is struggling with his partners over the format of the site and whether they should be getting advertising

He needs clarity and vision.

52:00: John: Push vs Pull: Build a website and they won’t come. You have to have multiple contacts in order to get people to sign up.

Brian: Can go back to the vision of the company to answer questions about whether they should start doing something.

Should have them self-select whether they are private or commercial pilots. Start with a lot of free content to earn trust.

Start affiliate relationships with related companies.

55:50: John: You have to be the authority figure, the one that will get them information that they otherwise would not have access to.

Stan: The first thing you have to do is get clarity on your vision rather than developing a bunch of skills without knowing where you are going.

Mary Ellen: You have to know your competitors.

59:00 John: You have to think from the perspective of the prospects. You have to provide a place where they can share their passion with like-minded people. Ones who understand the passion and can share.

1. Read the goal-setting exercise in Think and Grow Rich
2. What is your main goal at this point? Should be something that can be accomplished within the next 6 months.
3. Break it down into steps. If it takes more than 6 steps. break it down further.
4. Concentrate on the first step. What do you have to do today to move the needle on accomplishing that step?
5. Continue each day, concentrating on only the action you need to take that day.

You might find mind mapping to be useful when breaking down your goals.  Click here for our info on how to get started.