The 3 essential ingredients to achieve any goal in your life: Focus - Determination - Consistancy

People want to write books. They dream of becoming authors, and many of them dream of becoming bestsellers… maybe New York Times bestsellers… Some of the people, who dream of becoming Bestselling Authors, are dreamers and visionaries, people with great imagination. And there are the other ones who are focused on self-development, on Spirituality, or on success. Those people are self-development professionals, coaches, mentors, healers or therapists… They all dream of having a book of theirs finished, published and turned into a bestseller… Are you one of them? Have you ever dreamed of being an Amazon Bestseller Author? I guess you have, as most of us, the people who hung around blogging and “new age” ideas. But how do you do it? Is it achievable? Is it a reasonable goal, or a ridiculously impossible dream?

Of course it is doable. Becoming and Amazon bestseller author is really doable. I know from my experience as a Book coach, that the most difficult part is to “get this book done”. And the book to be done itself is not that difficult. I can tell you, and I can assure you that you can have an English book of 120 pages finished in less than a week, even if you are a not native English speaker. I have done it myself, so I am 100% sure that it is doable. So, if it is that easy, what is the problem? Why people find it so hard to just sit down and write? Sit down and start promoting? Sit down and start achieving their biggest goals?

The problem lies to Focus, determination and consistency.

People don’t know how to be focused, they have not real motif for determination, and they get bored with consistency. If you face this issue, this article is for you. It is dedicated to you with love, as a Christmas gift; Read it and use it on your new year’s goal setting process. Well, if you haven’t thought about becoming an author, and you haven’t got a clue on what an Amazon bestseller is, don’t mind, use those ideas to other goals of yours, and reap the benefits of your efforts during the entire year!

Determination: The first step.

First of all you need to be determined. Determination is a virtue, but we rarely have it for our big goals. We really embrace it in daily tasks, such as, wake up in the morning and get kids to school, cook for the family or brush our teeth, but when it comes to our big goals we seem to forget about it. So, we don’t have a determination problem in reality, we have an issue on clarity and understanding the bigger picture.

When you go brush your teeth every night, you know that this habit will help you keep your teeth healthy, and it will make you feel nice as well, because clean teeth feels great. So, you do it. If you don’t wake up to take kids to school, you know that this will cause trouble to your kids (I know, some of you are homeschooling, but still, you are determined to teach to your kids things that are taught in school). Here is the missing key: you are determined to do something, when you feel confident it can be done, when you feel the urge that it should be done and you know with crystal clarity the end results – as well as – what will happen if it is not done.

Think now of your big goals. Have you thought what will happen when you have finished your book and you promote it for becoming a bestseller? Have you realized what such goal will bring to your life? Do you know people who have already achieved something like that? Have you witnessed how their lives evolved? If not, if you are not clear on the results you are looking for, and if you do not have strong faith that you will indeed enjoy all those benefits, you will never be determined enough.

So, here is the first task you need to do. Write down:

• How will you feel when you reach your goal?
• What your friends and relatives will do or say (ask them if you don’t know)?
• How will your life change?
• What benefits will you reap?
• How will you celebrate?

Be clear on those questions, and your determination levels will increase dramatically!

Focus: the second step

Now that you are determined, you also need to get focused. Probably you are very determined to become an Author, to write this book at last, or to achieve any other kind of big goal, but you are not focused, and as a result, you turn around circles, you get exhausted from too much hard work, and sadly, you get no results at all. For example, let’s take the book writing goal. Not to be focused means, to be spending hours and hours on research, and also getting lost in the internet through social media, when all you should be doing was just writing. You might sit down to write, but have no outline to follow, so you write randomly, you get easily away from your subject, and then you understand that most of your writing could be addressed to 10 different books, but they are not connected and they cannot create just one strong focused and robust foundation. Maybe, you think you sit down to write, and you keep on multitasking, forgetting what you wanted to do from the first place, replying on phone calls, cooking, going to the grocery store many times per week, and the list goes on.

To achieve ANY goal, you need focus. Here are some tips I recommend:

• Work on the Pomodoro technique. Work focused on just one thing for 25 minutes. Then, have a break and decide whether you keep on working on the same task, or you do something else. I have downloaded a wonderful app on my phone, which also does the “tic tac” sound, and I am focused that this is my task for now, I do nothing else…
• Organize your entire week’s and month’s program and write it down. I use Google calendar for EVERYTHING in my life; when will I wake up, how much time I need for preparing breakfast, when will I come back from school, what time will I cook, which hours are dedicated to my blogging, which are dedicated to book writing, which are for promotion, for client work, for my daily shower, for my visit to hairdresser. I have put EVERYTHING on my Google calendar, and my mobile phone informs me every now and then on which task I should focus. Of course, I don’t follow it with extreme devotion, sometimes, I skip things and I do others that are more important at that time. But the calendar keeps me focused on all the things that must be done, and although in the beginning it seemed overwhelming, now I get to finish so much more and still I have extra time to do whatever I want.
• Do not try to achieve many goals at once. One thing at a time, this is what focus is all about. You may choose multiple goals if they influence different parts of your life. For example, if you want to finish your book, don’t also add 2 blog posts per day, it will never happen, you will be burned out and you will quit both goals. If you want to write your book and also lose 20 kilograms, then that is fine. Do diet while writing. It can work. See the point? To work on one goal at a time is achievable. To multi-goal-set on same parts of your life is almost impossible, it will totally drain you, and you will end up overloaded, sleeping on the couch, questioning your worth and your determination all together.

Here is some food for thought; do you remember the Aladdin tale, where the Jinni said to Aladdin that he can have only three wishes fulfilled? I have witnessed myself acting exactly like that when it comes to tasks and goal setting: I feel as if, if I don’t do all together, they will never be done. I feel as if, I forget to add this goal, and that goal at once, in one sentence of a wish towards my invisible Jinni, then it will never happen. When I realized that, I changed attitude, and started focusing on just one thing at a time. The results were so much better, and so much faster as well. We don’t have just one or two or three opportunities to achieve all of our goals, we have this day, and the next day as well. Let’s focus on one thing at a time, and soon we will see that we can enjoy all of our dreams effortlessly… because doing just one thing at a time and being focus only on that, causes no effort at all… but aggressive multitasking brings only frustration, confusion and resounding failure.

The last step to success: Consistency.

We all know the old Greek story about the Rabbit and the Turtle who challenged themselves to a speed race and the turtle won. The turtle was having small consistent steps all over the racing road, till the end, while the Rabbit was running too fast, but not consistently, and he even decided to go to sleep before the race was over. Be honest with yourself. Are you the turtle, or the rabbit? Overworking one day is not an excuse for us to not work at all the next one. Overworking does not help anyone because it exhausts us, it keeps us apart from reality and it makes us neglect other duties that are essential for our well-being.

When we are consistent, we reap incredible benefits:

• We get into a habit, and as a result, our body and mind learn how to do the consistent task effortlessly and without spending much energy.
• Other people (prospect clients, prospect JV partners, people who can introduce us to prospect clients) will see how consistent we are, and they will respect our work. They will feel safe to work with us or to recommend our work to others. Consistency is the proof of professionalism.
• Our friends and relatives will respect what we are doing and they will support us on our goals. Let me be a little personal here. My hubby was not supportive enough on my book coaching business. He could see that I was messing around with Facebook, while neglecting my housekeeping duties, and I wouldn’t bring almost no money for our family needs. I was not consistent, and he started being anxious about my randomly spent time. He was feeling I was using him, he would go to work, bring all the money, and I would just sit in front of FB and socialize… I had fights with him, and I was questioning myself what was wrong and why he was not supportive… but he was right. I was not consistent on my duties and on my tasks, and this made my home, my family and my business to almost fall apart. Then, I realized that my issue was consistency, I organized my life, my tasks, my duties, and I stayed focused just on one thing that was bringing more clients to my business. Guess what: within the first week of embracing consistency, I got two high end book coaching clients!!! Within just the first week!! And of course, I gained my hubby’s respect, he saw that I was determined and consistent (I was waking up when the alarm would ring – without snoozing, I would have properly prepared dinner every day, I would take care of the kids as a proper mom who is interested on her kids, I would have enough time to invest for him) and then he – the one who was trying to make me quit my book coaching business goals – he started doing extra effort to help me have extra time for my business. And now, he speaks about my business with pride! After all this, here is what I realized; if our close family seems not supportive to our goals, there is only one reason: they understand we are not consistent, and they do not respect what we are doing just because we don’t respect it either.
• Consistency turns us into experts on whatever we do. When I keep on writing one blog post every day, soon I find myself writing 4 pages articles effortlessly and within less than an hour… how great can this be?

So, to sum up, no goal is too big to be achieved, and also, no tiny task can be completed unless we embrace for their fulfillment; Determination, Focus and consistency. As our dear Mr. Jonny Walker (preferably red label) says: “Keep Walking”… if you do, it is impossible not to reach your destination.