Being an Achiever | Steve Pavlina

You become an achiever by achieving your goals. If you achieve your goals, you’re an achiever. If you don’t achieve your goals, you’re not an achiever.

This is a simple, binary way to think about achievement. To achieve means to reach, attain, or accomplish. What you choose to reach, attain, or accomplish is up to you.

The difference between an achiever and a non-achiever is largely a matter of attention. Non-achievers give their goals little attention, if they bother to set goals at all. Achievers give their goals sufficient attention so as to reach, attain, or accomplish those goals.

Non-achievers reach, attain, and accomplish something other than their goals. Quite often they will reach, attain, and accomplish someone else’s goals, without consciously making those goals their own.

To be an achiever, you must give your goals sufficient attention to reach, attain, or accomplish them. This means you must withdraw much of your attention from activities that are not directly leading to the accomplishment of your goals.

In a given week, where is your attention going? If you aren’t habitually obsessing over your goals, then what are you obsessing over instead?

What do you normally put ahead of your goals?

Do you manage to watch some TV or movies?

Do you keep up with email, social media, and text messages?

Do you attend to the social obligations that your family, friends, and co-workers expect from you?

What exactly are you reaching, attaining, or accomplishing in a typical week? Are you 
making progress on your goals by giving them many hours of attention, or are you putting your attention elsewhere?

Achievers accept that in order to achieve their goals, they must withdraw attention from non-goal activities. Achievers also accept that these competing interests may resist being put on the back burner. The cable company may try to talk you out of canceling. Starbucks may send you a reminder email if you don’t show up for too long. Your mother may nag you about something trivial. Achievers learn to decline these invitations for their attention by default. They keep putting their attention back upon their goals.

You must especially be on guard for new invitations and opportunities that come up while you’re working on your goals. These hidden distractions can easily sidetrack you. If an opportunity aligns solidly with your goals, wonderful… take full advantage of it. But if it seems off-course with respect to your current goals, then stick to your path, and say no to the diversion. Generally speaking, it’s wise to be less opportunistic, so you can be more of a conscious creator. You’ll often make faster progress by creating your own opportunities instead of haphazardly chasing the random opportunities that others bring you.

The Scarcity of Attention

Attention is a limited resource. The ability to consciously direct your attention with good energy and focus is even scarcer than the time you have available each day.

In any given week, there may be many interests competing for your attention: friends, family, co-workers, random strangers, corporations, organizations, government agencies, media, and more. And these days they have many different ways to reach you.

Internally you have some competition as well: your physiological needs, your emotional needs, your cravings, your habitual behaviors, etc. You need to eat, sleep, eliminate waste, bathe, and so on. These activities require some attention too.

Somewhere among those competing interests is another voice seeking your attention. This is your goal-oriented nature, your greater intelligence, your desire to live a life rich in meaning and purpose. This part of you craves achievement, and it won’t be satisfied by anything less. It wants you to set your own goals and to reach, attain, and accomplish them.

How much of your attention are you giving to your achievement-oriented self?

If you starve this part of yourself for attention, it will punish you with low motivation, low self-worth, and a general scarcity of resources. But if you give it the attention it craves, you’ll be rewarded with high energy, drive, passion, abundance, and a sense of purpose and contribution.

Directing Your Attention

Fortunately you have the power to consciously direct your attention. You can let your attention float around aimlessly. You can focus your attention on something other than your goals, such as the goals other people have for you. Or you can focus your attention on your own goals.

To really move your life forward requires a major commitment of attention. If you want to improve your finances, you must put your attention on creating value for people, sharing that value, and intelligently monetizing that value. If you want to positively transform your relationships, then give that part of your life some intense and prolonged attention.

Unfortunately we have the tendency to remove attention from those areas of our lives that aren’t doing so well. In the short term, it’s wise to shift focus when we feel overwhelmed because temporary diversions can help relieve stress. But for deeper transformation to occur, we need to put lots of attention squarely on those areas that scream for improvement.
Setting goals requires focused attention. Planning out the action steps to achieve our goals requires even more attention. Executing those action steps takes more attention still. Achievers make such activities a priority in their lives. Non-achievers don’t.

As you get older, keep raising your standards for what deserves your attention. Keep deleting and declining unnecessary fluff and obligations that might otherwise distract you from your magnificent goals. This will free up more attention to focus on your goals.

Have you noticed that when you put your full attention on a goal and obsess about it, you can really move it forward quickly, and you do eventually achieve it? But when you let your attention become diluted by too many competing interests, then progress on your goal slows to a crawl, and you eventually lose your connection to the goal altogether. Goals require significant and prolonged nurturing until they’re achieved; otherwise they die.

Say No to Almost Everything

The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything. – Warren Buffet

What does it mean to say no to almost everything?

For me this means being able to work full-time on my goals, without letting anything get in the way. It means keeping my schedule free of distracting entanglements. It means that even when I work on goals that seem to be put on my plate by someone else, I must either make those goals my own (and say yes to them), or I must reject them and not give them any attention. If I cannot make a goal my own in some way, it doesn’t deserve my attention.

Even a goal like doing your taxes, you can make your own. You can commit to keeping your finances up to date and in good order. You can choose to pay the tax contribution for whatever reasons appeal to you. But if you can’t make a goal your own, and you try to work on it anyway, then you’re fighting yourself, and your progress will be stunted and inconsistent, which is an enormous waste of precious attention.

Don’t dwell in the land of half-commitments. Put your full attention on your own goals, including goals you’ve made your own. If you have a job, then either make the commitment to do your very best at that job, or vacate the position and let someone else do it better.

Put Your Goals First

Many achievers have jobs. Many achievers have families. Many achievers have competing commitments of various kinds. But achievers don’t use their job, kids, and other commitments as excuses for not giving sufficient attention to their goals. For everyone who uses these to excuse their inability to set and achieve goals, there’s a real achiever who started from a more challenging position and used those same elements to help motivate them to achieve their goals. Where non-achievers see excuses, achievers find drive.

A good way to put your goals first is to set high-quality, holistic goals to begin with. Don’t squander your attention on shallow pursuits like making money for its own sake. Set goals that will help you grow, build your skills, create value for others, and do some good in the world. Ask yourself: Does the goal seem meaningful and intelligent when you imagine yourself 20 years past its achievement?

Deliberately put your attention on your goals. When you catch yourself standing in line, dwell upon your goals. Visualize yourself taking the action steps. Make this your default behavior instead of pulling out your phone to attend to something trivial.

Carefully plan out the action steps to achieve your goals. If you received my latest newsletter, you’ll find an extensive how-to article about planning the achievement of your goals.

Clear time to work on your goals, and make this time sacred and inviolable. If you can only clear a small slice out of each week to work on your goals, then consider setting a goal to reach the point where you have the freedom to devote as many hours to your goals as your energy allows. What specific goals would you need to set and achieve to make that a reality? 
Imagine being able to devote most of your time every week to working on your most important goals, without anything getting in the way. Many people live this way, and they love it. Why not you?

The Goal of Freedom

One of my past goals was to remove financial scarcity as a potential source of distraction, so I could spend most of my time each week working on my goals, whether they were income-generating or not. I want to center my life around personal growth pursuits and share what I learn as a legacy for others. I devoted a significant amount of attention to that goal over a period of years until it was achieved, and after that I could continue to maintain such a lifestyle with relative ease. I know that some people think it’s unusual to have the freedom to immerse oneself in setting and achieving goals that may have nothing to do with making money or having a job, like traveling around Europe for a month or going vegan or exploring open relationships, but this kind of freedom is important enough to me that I made achieving this goal my top priority for years, sticking with it until it was achieved. It was challenging but definitely worthwhile.

I know many people who’ve achieved similar goals. Generally speaking, they tend to be the happiest people I know. Instead of taking orders from someone else as their daily routine, they put their attention on their goals, desires, and interests. They make it a priority to maintain this freedom. They don’t use a job, kids, or the lack of money as excuses — just the opposite in fact. From these people I commonly hear stories of setbacks recalled with laughter and good cheer, not with fear or regret… like the time a couple of friends had to sleep in a park because they had no money for a place to stay. What non-achievers fear as roadblocks are merely stepping stones (and entertaining future stories!) for achievers.

If lifestyle freedom is important to you, then make that your primary aim. Put the attainment of this goal first in your life. Working to achieve this goal must become more important to you than keeping up with social media, pleasing your parents, watching your favorite TV shows, and other distractions. If anything else is truly getting in the way, then either drop it from your life, or find a way to turn it into an advantage that increases your drive and motivation.

It’s easy for me to tell the difference between people who are committed to achieving lifestyle freedom vs. those who aren’t committed. The ones who are committed are obsessed with the goal; they think of little else. I can’t get them to shut up about it! They’re constantly trying to figure out how to make it a reality. They work hard at it. They stumble and keep right on going. Usually the goal takes longer than they’d like. They often want it to take less than a year. It usually takes 2-5 years to reach the point of financial sustainability. The achievers make it obvious that they’ll get there no matter how long it takes. For them the goal is mandatory, not optional.

The non-achievers talk about the goal as a distant fantasy. It’s a wish, a dream, a possibility… something that would be nice to have if and when the planets align properly. Their action plan consists mainly of reading books about the Law of Attraction and listening to Abraham-Hicks recordings. They treat the goal as a casual desire but not a serious commitment. They disrespect the tremendous force of will that’s required to achieve it. They virtually never get there.

If the goal of lifestyle freedom matters to you, then drop, cut, and burn whatever distracts you from it. Put your attention squarely on that goal, and obsess about it until you achieve it. If you need more time, cancel cable TV, close your social media accounts, and keep your phone powered off during daylight hours. Take breaks as you need them, but keep putting your attention back on this goal. If you do that, it’s a safe bet that you’ll achieve it.
You’ll set yourself on the path to achieving lifestyle freedom when you stop putting other distractions ahead of that commitment.

Source 

What to Do When You’re Falling Behind | Steve Pavlina

When I was a kid, it took me longer than I would have liked to learn how to ride a bike. I kept using a bike with training wheels and I didn’t practice much, so of course I didn’t learn how to balance.

One day I observed that my sister (younger by 2.5 years) was getting close to figuring out how to ride a bike. She wasn’t quite there yet, but she was clearly much closer to balancing than I was. I couldn’t let her beat me to it!

So I grabbed my bike, pushed it out to the street, and decided that I was going to learn how to ride it then and there. I hopped on — sans training wheels — and swerved all over the place like an out-of-control maniac. I tried to stay near the grass when I could muster some degree of control, so when I fell, I’d hopefully crash onto the lawn instead of the street or sidewalk.

After many short-lived attempts, I finally learned how to balance. Then I was off and riding. I rode my bike a lot that summer and have had the skill ever since.

Up until that point, I’d been making a big deal out of the whole process. It seemed scary and daunting. I was afraid of falling. But once I confronted the fear and mustered the courage to risk getting hurt, I quickly emerged on the other side with a whole new skill. From the moment of decision to the time I emerged with the basic skill was probably less than an hour.

What finally motivated me to face the fear and take action? It was the feeling that I was falling behind. My peers were leaving me in the dust. They could ride and I couldn’t. If my younger sister got there first, I’d no doubt be unfavorably compared to her, and I really didn’t want to deal with that.

That build-up of pressure worked to my advantage. I was capable of facing the fear and developing the skill, but I’d been delaying. I was letting fear get the better of me. That pressure gave me a much needed kick in my complacency.

Many years later, I found myself in a similar situation. When I started college, I didn’t take school seriously and goofed off a lot. I basically triple-majored in shoplifting, alcohol, and poker… and was eventually expelled. By the time I had a second go at it, my old high school friends were all starting their senior year, while I was starting over as a freshman. I was three years behind my peers, and I really felt the weight of that.

Once again, the feeling of falling behind became a powerful motivating force for me. Instead of taking four years to graduate, I made a huge commitment to master time management and tried to earn my degree a lot faster. I took about 3x the normal course load, and I earned not one but two Bachelor of Science degrees (in mathematics and computer science) — in only three semesters. Additionally, I received a special award for the top computer science student (as selected by the faculty) when I graduated.

I had no idea I was capable of that, just as I had no idea I could learn to ride a bike so quickly. The feeling of falling behind served as a powerful motivator. Instead of trying to squelch those disappointing feelings, like I’d been doing up to that point, I allowed myself to feel the weight of that pressure. I used those seemingly negative feelings to motivate action and overcome resistance.

The Positive Side of Social Pressure

There are many ways to deal with social pressure, especially when you feel you aren’t measuring up to some external standard. You can question or reject the standard, which is often the best option for standards you disagree with. Or you can agree with the standard and use the pressure to elevate your performance.

I’ve seen other people leverage this same kind of pressure to their good advantage. People who’ve been languishing in their careers unleash dormant ambition. Shy or socially awkward people push themselves to master social skills. People who’ve been mired in scarcity unlock financial abundance.

Very often, these people succeed, sometimes remarkably so. They turn the feeling of falling behind into a powerful source of motivation. They redefine their old relationship to their peer group. Instead of being the late bloomer, the laggard, or the underachiever, they become the fast learner, the leader, the performer.

Accelerating Your Growth

Using social pressure to beat yourself down is pointless. Using it to motivate fresh progress is powerful.

When you perceive that you’re falling behind, how can you leverage this feeling to speed up your growth?

First, let yourself feel the heaviness of the pressure. Stop trying to repress it, minimize it, or distract yourself from it. Feel the pain. Feel the disappointment. If this makes you feel like a complete loser, let those feelings flow freely for a while. Own those feelings. They’re temporary.

Once you’ve had a chance to let those feelings circulate and you no longer feel like you’re repressing those emotions, then pause and forgive yourself. So you fell behind. It happens. It’s okay. Acknowledge your humanness. Say, “I forgive myself fully and completely.”

I recommend dwelling on the forgiveness step until you really feel that you’ve forgiven yourself. Try journaling about your decision to forgive yourself. Write or type, “I forgive myself fully and completely,” over and over again. Keep your attention on forgiveness and self-compassion until you feel some emotional release, especially some tears. If you truly forgive yourself, you’re likely to feel some relief and lightness afterwards.

Forgive yourself, but don’t let yourself off the hook completely. It’s okay that you slacked off in the past. It’s not okay to keep slacking off. Resolve to be done with that dissatisfying past behavior. No more falling behind.

Realize that you can get caught up. You can go faster. You can redeem yourself.
Accept that it won’t be easy. It doesn’t need to be easy. The challenge will be good for you. It will help you grow. It will wake you up. It will help you raise your standards.

Now turn your attention to creating a positive vision of fresh action going forward. Redefine your short-term vision of success as a vision based on action, not on immediate results. One reason we fall behind is that we make a big deal out of failure. However, many results (such as learning to ride a bike) practically require you to fail — sometimes a lot — before you can succeed. So don’t put so much pressure on yourself to achieve a specific result just yet. Instead, feel the pressure to take simple actions. Turn this pressure into movement.

When I committed to learning to ride a bike, instead of focusing so much on the end goal, I pushed that desire to the back of my mind. I focused on facing the fearful action I was dreading. For me it was trying to ride and falling and getting hurt. So I made the commitment to go ahead and try my best, to fall as much as I might have to fall, to endure the scrapes and bruises, and to quickly get back on the bike and try again. I accepted that there might be some pain and blood, and if so, I’d hurt and bleed and keep going. By accepting the possible outcome I feared, I reduced my resistance to action. I decided I’d rather be a bruised and bloodied boy who could ride a bike instead of a pristine boy who couldn’t.

What’s the equivalent bloodied version of yourself that you’re avoiding and thereby causing yourself to fall further and further behind? Is it a vision of yourself having to work or study for long hours? Is it a vision of yourself being repeatedly rejected? Is it a vision of yourself making mistakes and losing money? You can endure all of those things. And you can keep right on going after they occur. They’re all petty fears to begin with. You’re strong enough to handle them.

In college my commitment was to sign up for as many classes as I could schedule on my calendar. I decided I’d do my best to attend those classes, do the assignments, take the exams, and learn the material efficiently.

Doing Your Best

Define success as doing your best. Face the fear. Make the valiant effort. Don’t worry so much about the end result.

One reason you may feel like you’re falling behind is that you haven’t been doing your best. It isn’t the perception that other people seem to be passing you that’s such a bother. What really gets under your skin is believing that you could have prevented it. The consequences of not doing your best can be very unsettling when they finally catch up to you.

Ask yourself the question, “What would my best look like?”

This is a powerful question to ask, but so often we don’t ask it because our answers will shed light on those situations where we clearly aren’t doing our best. And that’s where the feeling of falling behind starts creeping in.

Let it creep in. Immerse yourself in those feelings. Feel the unpleasant heaviness and disappointment of falling behind.

Then define your best in the form of simple and direct action. What is the best effort you can make? What can you do? What’s the action to take?

You can try and fail. You can try and get rejected. You can try and learn.

If you keep making your best effort again and again, you’ll power through old fears and sniveling worries faster than you thought possible. And soon the results you desire will become visible… and then fully realized.

Where do you feel like you’re falling behind? In which areas of your life are you underperforming? Let yourself feel the weight of those disappointments. Forgive yourself. 
Identify what your best effort could look like. Then go take action. Make the attempt. Fall. Get bruised. Get up and try again. Persist until you create your desired results.

It’s just like riding a bike.

Source

Motivation - Change Your Life

Powerful motivational video (starts at 30 seconds)
"Progress = happiness." "Take full responsibility for your life."   "We can accept conditions as they exist, or we can take the responsibility to change them." "It's possible that you can live your dream!" "It's not over until I win!"

Music: Inception - Time and Logic - Inception

Speakers: Tony Robbins, Les Brown, Eric Thomas

Source 

How to Raise Your Standards | Tony Robbins motivation

Tony Robbins: How to raise your standards.

Tony Robbins is an entrepreneur, best-selling author, philanthropist & the nation’s #1 Life & Business Strategist. A recognized authority on the psychology of leadership, negotiations & organizational turnaround, he has served as an advisor to leaders around the world for more than 38 years. Author of five internationally bestselling books, including the recent New York Times #1 best-seller.

Find out more about Tony Robbins here: https://goo.gl/k48Fa6.

https://youtu.be/xPiw21RuTd8

So what did you think?  Pretty amazing, huh?