Brian Tracy — 12 steps to goal setting
In his book Goals, Brian Tracy shares his 12 steps to goal setting (and achievement)
This video walks through the 12 steps and includes some of my own personal insights on those steps gleaned from other resources I've encountered over the years and my own conversation with Brian which you can learn more about here.
Links Mentioned:
- Episode 175 with James Clear — author of Atomic Habits: https://www.productiveinsights.com/podcast/james-clear-atomic-habits
- Episode 176 with Todd Herman Author of Alter Ego Effect: https://www.productiveinsights.com/podcast/todd-herman-alter-ego-effect
- Episode 219 (Brian Tracy's 12 steps to goal setting): https://www.productiveinsights.com/podcast/brian-tracy-goal-setting
- Episode 113 with Jessica Mah on Planning with OKRs: https://www.ProductiveInsights.com/113
- The Five Whys: https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTMC_5W.htm
- How to Set Goals for 2022: https://www.productiveinsights.com/blog/how-to-set-goals
Transcript:
If you're a small business owner, a coach, or a consultant, and you're looking to
achieve the goals that you've set for yourself this quarter or this year, this
might be the best video you've watched all day It's Ash Roy. And thanks for tuning
into the productive insights podcast or the productive insights YouTube channel. This
is episode 219. In this video, we are going to talk about Brian Tracy's 12 steps to
actually achieving your goals. As set out in his book, titled Goals, I've read the
book and I highly recommend it. I'll also be sharing some of my insights from my recent
conversation with him in episode 207. I don't know about you, but I have set out
several goals for myself and have not achieved them far more often than I would care to
admit. And if you struggled with the same problem these 12 steps might be
transformative for you. I especially like step number 11, and I'll explain why a
little bit later in this video. Now I'll be popping a link to Brian Tracy's book
goals below this video and in the show notes, which you can access at productiveinsights.com/219. And if you're watching this on YouTube, I have a special giveaway for one person valued at $497. And I'll be sharing exactly how you can get access to that giveaway at some point in this video. So make sure you stay tuned all the way till the end. Okay? So let's get into it. Brian Tracy's 12
steps to achieving your goals. And before embarking on these 12 steps, Tracy
recommends you do four things. The first thing he says is to develop a really strong
mindset that enables you to take responsibility for your life and for your actions.
We'll talk more about this later. The second thing he says is to get clear on your
values. It's very important that your values are aligned with your goals.
Otherwise, it's going to be a mismatch and you're going to be very de-motivated pretty quickly.
The third step he talks about is projecting your self-limiting beliefs. You have to
believe that you can achieve your goals. That is absolutely critical. If you don't
believe you're gonna achieve your goals, you're likely to get in your own way and
stop yourself, see are short of achieving them. And the final thing he says is to
visualize your future. Now that is very closely related to developing belief and
actually developing belief as a skill. And you can build this belief over time, and
I'll be talking more about exactly how you can build this belief in a section coming
up, but we talk about writing down your goals. Okay? So once you've done those four
things, you're then ready to embark on Brian Tracy's 12-step process. The first step
is to figure out what you really want in the following areas of your life, finances,
career, relationships, and health. Tracy recommends you get really clear in these
four areas to understand what you really want. What are your values in these areas so
that you can then come up with goals that are aligned with those values? Tracy also
says that you should set yourself goals that are challenging time-constrained and
clear and quantifiable. If you want to learn more about how to set smart goals, you
might want to check out my blog posts, which are linked to in the show notes, where I
give you an actual template for creating smart goals for yourself and walk you through
each of those steps. Okay? Step number two, you need to believe that you can achieve
- And I'm not talking about magically manifesting goals. Although some people
believe that it's possible. And maybe it is. I'm talking about setting yourself a few
goals that are actually achievable. I've often sent myself too many goals, and that
can be very de-motivating. You also want to set yourself goals that are realistic. So
for example, you don't want to set yourself a goal saying I'm going to double my
income from $200,000 a year to $400,000 a year. By the end of next week, that's just
unrealistic. However, you might say, I'm going to double my income by the end of this
year, and I'm going to break it down into monthly, weekly, and daily milestones. And
that's how I will get to that result. Now that's not to say you can't quadruple and
10 X your income in a year. It's possible, but it's unlikely. So you want to try and
set yourself goals that are challenging, but achievable if you exceed those goals.
Great, but just set yourself things that are realistic. Now, the next step is really
important, and that is about writing your goals down bright new goals down every
single day. I recently spoke to Brian myself about this. Writing your goals down
helps you to build your belief of the time. I believe that belief is kind of like
skill and you can build it by reinforcing that vision. And you can do that by writing
your goals down every day. I have a series of books over here that I'd be writing in
four months now, ever since Brian told me that I should write my goals down every
day, he suggested I do it for a month, but I've now been doing it for about almost a
year. And it has made a dramatic difference in my life. It's increased the sense of
urgency and the sense of agency. And it has developed more belief around these goals
that I'm pursuing for myself and for my business. Here's a snippet from that
conversation that happened. Brian, check it out. Can you talk to us a little bit
about your views on thinking on paper? You actually talk about this in your earlier
book. And I think it's very important for our listeners to understand
Brian Tracy:
Ash. I'm so glad you brought that up because what I'm going to explain to you is a
life-changer that something happens between the head and the hand. That is almost a
miracle. You can never get that. As you say, from typing, it comes from writing. And
so what I do in almost all of my seminars, is I have people take a page of paper and
write down 10 goals that they'd like to accomplish in the next 12 months, and then
select one goal. The goal that can have the greatest impact on all the others and
focus on that one goal. What I have discovered, which was like a miracle to me is
that when you write down a goal, you're actually writing it into your superconscious
mind.
Ash Roy:
Wow, Man, that's powerful as an idea.
Brain Tracy:
Yes. And what that means is down your superconscious mind takes that goal and begins
to work on the goal of 24 hours a day. Things will start to change. And I remember
when I was poor living on the floor of a friend's one-room apartment, and I was
reading a magazine article. And instead, if you want to be successful, you have to
have goals. So I took a scrap of paper and I wrote down 10 goals and I promptly lost
both the magazine and the list of goals. But in the next 30 days, my whole life
changed.
I would recommend writing your goals down each day. Would that make it even better?
So I started a course and I gave it for seven years and I trained more than a
thousand business owners. On my first day, I said, I want to introduce you to your
new best friend and your new best friend is a spiral notebook. So people would take
this and I would have them write out 10 goals that they wanted to accomplish sometime
in the next 12 months, I said, for the next 30 days, I want you to pick up your
workbook and every day, write down 10 goals the next day, turn the page. And without
looking at your previous page, write down 10 goals again and write down. And so
don't, in other words, you're not just copying from day to day, right? Reread from
memory. And this rewriting from memory, what will happen is the description of your
goals will change because you won't remember. And the order of priority of your goals
will change. And you'll keep doing this. And in 30 days, your life will have changed
forever. If you've got half a brain, just do it every day, it takes three to five
minutes for you to quickly write down your 10 goals, and you will start to achieve the
goals and replace them with other goals. At the end of the month, your whole life
will have taken this rapid change. And at the end of the year, you'll be a different
person.
Ash Roy:
Okay? So just to recap, the first step was figuring out what you really want in those
four areas. The second step was to believe that you can achieve the goals. The third
step was, to write your goals down every single day, and now we're on the fourth step.
So the fourth step is about taking stock, assessing where you are right now and what
got you here. So why is that important? Because assessing what got you here and
understanding where you are in the scheme of things helps you to understand the
patterns that got you here. Have you heard the phrase? What got you here? Won't get
you there. You might need to implement different strategies and adopt different
habits to go from six figures to seven figures as compared to the habits and
strategies that got you from five figures to six figures. So here are some questions
you can ask yourself, what is your income level at this point, maybe you're trying to
get fitter. So you ask yourself, what is your body fat percentage at this point? What
is your weight at this point? What are your body measurements at this point?
And then you say, well, how did I get here? Then you ask yourself, where am I going?
What income level do I want to get to? What body fat percentage do I want to get to? And
then you examine the behaviors that got you here and compare them to the behaviors
that are going to get you to that next goal. Let's say you want to increase your
profitability from 20% to 30% because let's face it. There's no point in making a
million dollars a year. If you're spending $2 million a year making it right, you're
worse off than having no money in the bank at all. So if you want to increase your
profitability, you need to look at certain behaviors that have led to your current
level of profitability. And what behaviors are going to change to take that
profitability up. In other words, how are we going to reduce your costs while keeping
your revenue or your income levels constant so that you can increase the profit that
you make each year? Maybe you want to look at your behaviors around spending. Maybe
you want to cut back on some of the software that you've been subscribing to forever,
but having used it as a business owner, maybe you want to spend less money on gadgets.
Ash Roy:
Maybe you want to cut back on those pay-per-click advertising campaigns that aren't
giving you the ROI that you've been looking for. Okay. Step number five, discover
your “why” Simon Sinek talks about this a lot. Why do you want to achieve the goals you
listed in step three? Why are these goals important to you? You might want to
consider using the five why's approach and our link to that in the show notes. So you
can learn a bit more about it, but essentially it's a process of asking the question
why several times, so you go deeper and deeper and deeper into your why and
understand the underlying drivers that are pushing you to achieve this goal.
Ash Roy:
Understanding your why at a deep level will help you navigate the inevitable
obstacles that life is going to throw your way as you pursue your goals. Now here's a
bonus tip for you. Set yourself up for success by creating a positive mental and
physical work environment. If you want to learn more about how to set yourself up in
an environment that is conducive to building great habits, check out my conversation
with James Clear. I'll link to that in the show notes. It's episode 175, and it can
access at productiveinsights.com/175. Okay. Step number six set yourself
deadlines for each goal. Have you ever heard the phrase, a goal without a deadline is
just a dream? Well, it's true. You need to get clear on where you're going and when
you're going to achieve that goal. Now you may change your deadlines from time to
time. But if you don't set yourself a deadline, there's going to be no sense of
urgency to achieve it. You won't be able to rally your resources and your team's
resources around that deadline. The other benefit of setting deadlines is it forces
you to be a bit more realistic around how many goals you can pursue at any given time
deadlines matter, use them. Okay? So we are at the halfway mark. Let's do another
quick recap. The first six steps we've covered so far are step one, figure out what
you really want. Step two, believe you can achieve your goals. Step three, write your
goals down every day. Step four, assess your starting point. What got you here won't
necessarily get you there. Step five, discover your "why" using the five why's approach
except for six set deadlines for every goal. Okay. Let's keep going. Step seven. Identify
the challenges you're likely to face along the way and then work out how you're going
to get around them. What sort of challenges are you likely to face and how will you
navigate your way around them? This step helps you to fortify your brain against the
inevitable challenges and failures. You are going to encounter on your way to
success. Brian, Tracy offers a great reframe of the word failure. He says, you only
fail when you stop trying, which I agree with wholeheartedly but wait, does that
mean you just keep trying and trying and trying when you know that it's not working?
No, absolutely not. And we'll talk about that more in step 11, you do need to know
when to quit and you need to be intelligent about it. But most people just quit
way too early and often people quit just before. They're about to succeed. Make sure
that's not you. When Edison was asked how he felt about failing a thousand times on
his way to inventing the light bulb. He said I didn't fail a thousand times. I just
found a thousand ways that didn't work. He reframed failure as a necessary part of
the way to success. It's important that you prime your brain, not to see failure as
an end or as something that detracts from your energy, but rather as something that
fuels you to keep moving forward provided you are not on a fool's errand. Looking at
adversity from this lens enables you to overcome several challenges and allows you to
adopt a very positive and can-do mindset. So here's a challenge for you. Next time
you face adversity, ask yourself, how would Edison have viewed the situation? What
would he have said to himself? How would he have viewed this challenge? And how would
he have reframed this so-called failure? Step eight, keep learning. Tracy talks about
committing to lifelong learning. And I remember after I finished my MBA, they
actually talked about lifelong learning. And I remember thinking, wow, that is a
brilliant concept. I do believe that it pays to be a lifelong learner. It creates a
certain sense of openness, a stance of humility that always enables you to grow and
evolve, which in my opinion is necessary for survival. And to thrive. Here are the
four tips that Tracy recommends. If you want to become a lifelong learner, he
recommends identifying the key result areas in your field and ask yourself, what do
you need to do to be great at it? Maybe you're a graphic designer and you want to get
better at your job. You might want to ask yourself, what is the best graphic design
software in this field and how can I learn to be an expert at it so that I can do my
job better. It then recommends that you reach out to your bosses, your coworkers, and
a few people you trust and ask them to rate you on a scale of one to 10 in your key
result areas. Now a word of caution, don't go to just anyone and ask them to rate you
because there are lots of naysayers out there and they can just drag you down big
judicious about who you choose, ask people who will give you constructive feedback.
Ash Roy:
Having chosen those people be receptive to the feedback and think of how you can
incorporate that into your skillset. The next thing you want to do is identify your
weaknesses. Now there's a lot of talk about focusing on your strengths and for the
most part, I agree with that, but it's also important to understand where your weak
points are because let's face it. The chain is only as strong as its weakest link,
right? And finally, Tracy says to be good at lifelong learning, you want to leverage
what you're good at once you've worked on shoring up your weaknesses and Tracy
recommends you get to the point where you give yourself a seven out of 10 on your
weak areas. You then need to build on your natural strengths. Okay? Step number nine,
surround yourself with the right people. Jim Rowan was known to have said, you're the
average of the five people you hang around with. And I think he was right who you
choose to hang around with determines the philosophies, values attitudes you let into
the life. And these things really matter. Choose your friends wisely. Once you've
identified the skills you need to achieve your goals, figure out who embodies the
values and those attitudes that will help you to achieve those skills and spend more
time with them. One thing's for sure you can't go wrong by hanging around with people
who have great integrity and a strong work ethic. Find these people and then build
relationships with them and nurture those relationships. How do you build these
relationships? The best way to start is by getting adopt a generous stance. If you
want to learn more about generosity and developing these meaningful relationships,
you might want to check out my conversation with Seth Godin. In episode 200, you can
find out more at productiveinsights.com/200. Okay? So we're up to step 10, a final
pit stop. Let's do a quick check-in. So do you remember the nine steps? Step one,
figure out what you really want. Step two. Believe you can achieve it. Step three,
write your goals down. Step number four, assess your situation. What got you here?
Won't get you there. Step five. Discover your "why". Remember using the five whys to go
deeper and discover your why? So you can overcome obstacles that will inevitably come
your way. Step six set deadlines for each goal, deadlines matter. Step seven,
identify the challenges you're likely to face along the way. So you can prime your
brain and you can set yourself a strategy to get around those inevitable challenges.
Step eight, keep learning lifelong learning. Step nine, surround yourself with the
right people. And that brings us to step 10. I'm running out of fingers, Create a
plan and execute it. How often do we create plans, but then do nothing with them? We
don't execute. This is where setting yourself deadlines and goals that can be tracked
to deadlines are critical. At this point, you're clear on what you want. You've
identified the skills you need to achieve the things that you want to achieve. It
figured out the inevitable challenges you're going to encounter, and you've figured
out your "why", which is going to help you see yourself through those challenges. The
next step is to turn all your short and medium-term goals into a plan that will take
you all the way through to your long-term goal. Now, I had an interesting
conversation with Jessica ma in episode 113. And what came out in that conversation
was the act of planning in and of itself is a valuable exercise. Your plan may not
actually materialize it often doesn't, but the act of planning brings a certain level
of insight. That is invaluable. So I can't stress enough, that to create a plan and then
execute it. Tracy recommends the following three steps to creating your plan and
executing it. He suggests you create a project planning sheet, which has your
tasks arranged by priority and the deadlines he suggests you consult with other
people involved so that you're taking into account all the resources that will be
brought to bear on your goal. Achievement. You suggest consulting with other people
involved in shaping these goals so that you can identify whether these goals are
realistic and achievable. And then he says, at that point, you decide whether to move
forward or not assuming that you and your team members agree that the goal is
achievable. Basically recommends they're doing this as better than just chasing
something that is a lost cause. Now you may recall earlier on in this episode, I
talked about knowing when to quit and not chasing a fool's errand. Well, this is it.
This is where you have a reality check and you check not just in with yourself, but
with the other stakeholders involved as to whether the goal is achievable and whether
it's feasible. And then if you still feel that it's strategic and feasible, you move
forward. Okay? Step 11. This is what I said was going to be the most important step.
Ash Roy:
Monitor your progress and stay the course. Peter Drucker famously said you can't
manage what you can't measure. This is true for most things, especially for goals
basically recommends you set yourself daily, weekly, monthly, and annual benchmarks
for your goals, and then measure your progress against them. This is really important
because it'll tell you when you're on track and when you're getting off track, it
will also tell you if your goals initially seemed realistic, but are now no longer
realistic because of changed circumstances or maybe skills that you overestimated
when you set those goals. Just a quick note here, numerical metrics are important
but don't underestimate the value of qualitative feedback. Being able to just get
revenue numbers, for example, is a great thing. But if you're annoying people in the
process of growing your sales, then you're probably doing yourself brand damage. And
that qualitative feedback on how you're going about achieving your goals is as
important. And in some cases more important than the quantitative feedback of what
revenue numbers you've hit or what profit targets you've achieved. And the final step
is don't stop. Keep going. Persistence is the name of the game here. In most cases,
once you have a clear plan that will take you from where you are to where you want to
- This final step is about moving forward with persistence, regardless of the
obstacles you encountered provided, of course, you're always monitoring the feedback
Ash Roy:
and making sure that things are still on track and that your goals are so feasible.
You're a failure and rejection affects almost every one of us. And there are many
ways to address these fears. One is to adopt the principles in the book, the alter
ego effect, which I discussed with Todd Herman in episode 176, I'll share a link to
that in the show notes, you can access it at productiveinsights.com/176, to make
sure you don't stop. And that you keep going crazy recommends that you do the
following, increase your knowledge. We talked about lifelong learning, get enough
rest. Adequate sleep is probably one of the best productivity hacks out there. And
probably one of the least used ones from what I could tell, confront your fears, try
and do something a little bit scary every day. Something that gets you out of your
comfort zone. And finally, just begin. I remember having a conversation with Seth
Godin a few years ago, and he suggested in this blog post that you should keep
blogging every day. And I raised all these objections and I said, oh, but I can't
write 2000 words a day and I can't do this. And I can't do that in here. All the
reasons I can't blog every day. And he just responded with two words and said,
just begin. And that day I wrote this blog post just begin. And I wrote every day for
that month and it transformed my blog. I couldn't recommend this last bit. Highly
enough. Just begin. Now, if you follow these 12 steps, you will almost certainly
achieve every goal you set for yourself provided that goal is realistic and
achievable. Will it be easy? Heck no. Will it be worthwhile? Heck yes, you got this.
I wish you all the best. And if you found this video useful, please do subscribe. Now
I did promise you a special offer worth $497. Here's what I want you to do. I want
you to go into the comments and within the first 48 hours of this video being
published, I want you to write down your top 10 goals for this year. I'm going to go
through all the comments and I'm going to pick the winning comment, make sure that
your goals are smart goals. So in other words, you set yourself specific, measurable,
achievable, relevant, and time-bound goals. I'll go through all the comments left
within the first 48 hours and I'll pick a winner and you will receive a free one-hour
consultation with me valued at $497. I look forward to seeing your comments. Thanks.
And don't forget to subscribe and share this with somebody else who might benefit.
