Rob Moshe

goal post

1. (sports) Either of the pair of vertical supports limiting the goal in various ballgames, such as soccer, rugby and American football.

Imagine being invited to play a game of soccer. It is your first time playing, you have never seen a soccer field, and you don’t know the rules. You come on to a big field and the only noticeable marking is a big white rectangle on the grass.

You are separated into two teams and you are told kick the ball around and try to score a goal on the other team.

What would your primary question be?

Where Is The Goal?

So often we step on to the field of life and we never define the goal.

What are your Goal Posts?

The more clearly you can define your goals the more likely your chance of scoring.

Here are six questions to reflect on when clearly defining your goal.

1. What is your desired outcome? – Focus on positive outcome, what you want to be, have or do.

2. What will accomplishing the goal do for you? – What will the benefits be, how will you feel when you accomplish?

3. What is its end point? – This is critical. Set your time frame for the completion of your goal.

4. What are the steps required? – Break it down into a manageable process.

5. What is your first action?  – From question #4 choose your first step and decide when you will do it.

6. What is your reward? – Set a reward that will really help motivate you.

After you have gone through this process feel free to share your goal here. When you share your goal with others it also helps hold you accountable.

We resolve. We forget. We resolve. We forget.

For as long as people have been celebrating new years, they have been following this same pattern. They make large goals for the year ahead, and then as the exhaustion and hangover dissipate on the morning of January 2nd, the frenetic pace of life returns and, the resolutions of the week before are long forgotten.

If your journey is to the east and you travel south, you will never arrive at your destination.

We talk about goals of eating better, exercise, deep relationships, and overall discipline, and then we start are year with excessive eating and inebriation, meaningless kisses, and excessive sleeping and time wasting. Then as a result of our less than stellar choices, we reinforce the negative and make the possibility of achieving our goals all the more challenging.

As you live your moments, so you live your days, week, months, years and LIFE.

Making massive changes in you year and life can be overwhelming, intimidating and debilitating. To change a moment is manageable almost easy. Taking control of those moments will lead to massive life change.

Setting the stage for tomorrows performance.

You have some goals for this year. What is the goal that you want to work on? What is the process, the steps involved to reach that goal. When the stage crew sets the stage for a performance they put one piece, work on one detail at a time. Each piece/detail is not the set, the set is a result and combination of all the pieces.
A goal is not some thing we do, it is something we achieve, and we achieve it through taking the proper steps (one at a time) and the combination of those steps will result in the achievement of your goals.

A new way to enter 2010

Don’t repeat the same process that you have been doing all these years and expect different results.  For tonight just enjoy yourself (responsibly).

Tomorrow can be the beginning of your finest year. To achieve that you must begin with thinking.  Nothing heavy mind you. Partying all night and deep thought don’t really go hand in hand.

For starters just take some time on January 1st to ask your self some thoughtful questions.

What was great about me in 2009?

What strengths did I see in my self?

How did these great moments enhance my life?

What could I do different in 2010 to make my life even better? (answer in the positive)

How would it improve my life?

You’ll know that all these questions focus on the positive.  Positive Focus. Positive State of Mind. Positive Outcomes.

Sun Set. Sun Rise

A year will end and a new year will arrive, you have no controll over this. How you step into the year is in the sphere of your control.
Step forward, step with purpose, step with strength. Be Great.

Enjoy Your Success In 2010

Rob

I’ve been speaking with peers on different ideas for projects we’d like to begin. For the most part we are all in the same phase of our projects, the procrastination phase.

The hardest part in any task is starting. The difficulty lays it trying to change our set patterns; we are attempting to add something new.

This can be scary, as not many people like to step out of their comfortable routines.

I suggest finding the smallest, easiest task to complete and just do it. After you complete the first task, pick the next task up. Continue this process, and soon you’ll find your project nearing completion and you’ll be doing things that in the beginning you were too afraid to touch.

Accomplishing your goals can be like rolling a snowball down a hill. In the beginning it’s only a tiny snowball, not much to look at, but as you roll it down it begins to grow. Soon it has become so large that it moves on its own momentum. It carries itself.

However, if you don’t take the first step you’ll never get anywhere.

Recent studies have shown that it is far easier to create new habits then it is to try and break old ones. In fact the act of trying to break an old habit causes you to focus on it, which leads to a re-enforcement of the habit. Better to focus on something totally different.

Take action now!

This article discusses not only the power, but the absolute necessity of employing your gift of imagination to achieve success.

Baseball Example

Our community baseball team made it to the finals this year as the top team, and the finals are best of three.

In the first game we got crushed. The first inning was almost comical, but the majority of our team didn’t find it very funny. In fact with that one inning we went from the posturing of a top team to that of a defeated back-lot bunch.

Entering our second game, we tried to get our momentum back, but you could see in the faces of our team members that we did not believe we could prevail.

Needless to say, though we played a stronger game the second time, we lost that game too and the championship. I could say that they defeated us, but the truth is that we defeated ourselves.

Why am I telling you about my baseball game?

For me, I treat much of my life as a learning lab. I get curious how I act and how others act in any given situation. Because I didn’t take the game personally (I like to have fun), I was able to step outside myself and see how I was reacting.

I have discovered if I visualized how I would look and think if I was a top player, I could actually perform closer to that level. I tried it in this particular game and hit a nice double.

But what I found more interesting (and the focus of this post) was how others perceived themselves.

During the game I suggested to one of our top hitters — who wasn’t hitting very well — to visualize what he would look like performing at his best. I did this with the hope that it would get him into the ZONE. He replied that he was NOT a visualizer, that he had had a trainer try that with him before, and that he just didn’t have the capability to visualize.

What was interesting was that a few minutes later he was talking about something from the past and you could see how his whole persona changed. He was smiling, his eyes had a sparkle, and he was standing taller. He didn’t even realize that he was visualizing.

Unfortunately when he got up to bat he was not seeing himself at his best. He struck out and the game was over.

Intention and Visualization

Before you can take an action, it must first start as an intention in your mind. Even when you do something unconsciously your mind is still actively initiating this process.

What is interesting to note is that our minds work in images not in text. If I say the word “Airplane” your mind does not start typing A, i, r, p, l, a, n, e. Instead you suddenly think of an airplane that is familiar to you. That’s why, if you read any book on memory techniques the focus is almost always on visualization.

With that understanding you can begin to move past the statement, I am not good at visualizing things. The very fact that you’re reading this post right now, demonstrates that you have the capability to visualize. If you couldn’t visualize, then all that you would see is incoherent rows of letters.

Realizing that all your actions are preceded by your mind seeing the required process, what do you need to do in order to improve your likelihood of success? Exactly. Create the right visualization..

You may be thinking, “What if what I’m visualizing can’t be done?”

Let me relate the story of Roger Bannister.

History and science indicated that it was impossible for a human body to run a mile in under four minutes. Roger Bannister understood that he could not physically push his body past its limitations, but he believed that his mind could surpass them. Bannister spent much time visualizing himself break past the four-minute barrier. Eventually the image became so embedded in his mind that when the time came to race, his mind took his body into the reality that it perceived.

Spend time reflecting on the many inventions of the past 50 years. 200 years ago these were just fantasies in peoples minds. All that we imagine has become or is on its way to becoming reality.

So, you may want to invent a new type of energy to power our cities, to greatly improve your business, or to weaken a bad habit.

How can you implement visualization to help you do this?

Reflecting Forward

One of the processes I use to help my clients is an exercise I call reflecting forward.

I ask the client to follow these six steps:

1. Be clear on your intention – What is it that you want to accomplish? What will its accomplishment do for you?

2. Decide how long would you would like this to take – Be realistic. How long do you think it should take you to work towards your objective?

3. Close your eyes and visualize yourself at that point in the future, having achieved your desired goal – You might vividly see this in your mind’s eye or it might be just an awareness. Visualization does not require seeing in detail.

4. Interview your future self – Ask your future self the steps that he took to achieve the desired goal. What where the hurdles? What were the lessons learned? What would he do if he could do it over again?

5. Return to the present and create an action plan – You have the insight of visualization; now create a concrete plan around it.

6. Take immediate action – To breath life into your endeavor, make sure you take action within the following 24 hours. Otherwise it will end up becoming a mere dream.

Conclusion

Remember that in order to create success, you have to be able to visualize it. You need to trust that you have the talents and abilities to accomplish your desired goal.

To paraphrase Dr. David Schwartz in his book, The Magic Of Thinking Big:

If you can perceive and believe, you can achieve.