I spoke to Jim Wendler a couple of weeks ago and we were talking about goal setting and best practices.
Jim mentioned that when he was playing football, everyone wants to “win the game”. Jim’s approach was to tell them — “Just win the play. Win the play and the game will take care of itself”
Great advice.
Any task can be broken down into smaller more manageable steps. Business, training, weight loss etc.
A 4 year business plan can be broken down into one year goals. And then a goal for each quarter.
Then – we can further break that down into monthly targets. Then weekly. And then daily, perhaps even hourly.
But it just comes down to this….. Take care of the next client or customer. Do that and everything falls into place.
If you want to lose 50lbs — just take care of the next meal. The next workout. The next set. The next rep. Do that and the 50lb weight loss takes care of itself.
The whole premise is similar to the “process goals” that I talked about on Facebook — just set a number of workouts to be completed in the month and focus on the process of just getting the workouts in – not necessarily the outcome that you’d be looking for. If you take care of the attention to the process, you’ll take care of the outcome by default.
The conversation with Jim reminded me of a lesson my Taekwon-Do instructor taught me (excerpted from The Total Body Breakthrough)
I can remember having to face a scary opponent in a championship match once. This guy was on the covers of all the martial arts magazines and this was my first time competing in this weight class. He was bigger, stronger and more experienced than I was.
In short, I was terrified. My instructor, Mr. Campbell, recognized this and asked me –
“I know you’re scared. On a scale of one to ten, how scared are you?”
I answered with no hesitation “ TEN!”
He smiled and said – “Ok. How scared would you be if this match was only one round in length?”
I answered” Not as scared. Maybe a seven out of ten”
He said “Well keep that in mind. You only have to fight the first round. But what if the first round was only one minute long? Would you still feel the same way?”
Me: “No. That would maybe be a five out of ten”
Mr. Campbell nodding: “Ok. What if it was just a single exchange in the middle of the ring? One time. Then it’s over. How do you feel about that?”
Me: “ Ha! No problem. Maybe one out of ten. I’m too fast for him if it’s a single exchange!”
Mr C: “Ok – let’s just attack once and then we’ll take it from there”
At this point I’m buzzing with excitement, stepped into the ring and attacked my opponent. And just repeated that single activity over and over. No fear at all.
And I won the fight.
Success is just a series of small behaviors repeated over and over. Set the behaviors in place and the outcomes will arrive in due course.
As we enter into the last few days of 2011- take a look back at the goals you set earlier this year.
Are we on track?
What do we want to accomplish from now before the end of the year?
Break it down into smaller steps.
And just win the next play.
–
AC
