How to Achieve Big Goals: Life Assessment & Goal Designing

Ready to achieve your goals in life? Struggling to stay on track to make those goals a reality? In today’s episode, we cover:

Resources Mentioned In The Episode:

Fit Life Challenge

DLP Capital

Elite Journal

Episode timestamps:

[01:45] Impact of assessment on how to spend time

[02:50] The two things you must know when using a map

[04:07] Happiness levels declining & how to overcome that

[05:26] How to have accountability with goals 76% more likely to achieve 

[08:07] Live meditation practice to fuel energy & visualize ideal future

[14:37] The eight Fs of living fully in all aspects of life 

[17:02] Importance of having a round ‘wheel of life’ 

[18:43] Applying goal designing in your life

[22:43] The Elite Journal as a framework to big goals 

[29:20] The next book, Building an Elite Career

Transcript

* This transcript was mostly generated by AI, so please excuse any mistakes, and enjoy!

Patrick: Hello and welcome to Live Fit Ignite Change, where together, as a community, we inspire each other to live a fit life, ignite the change we wish to see, and thrive in all areas of life. 

In today’s episode, we cover how to assess where you are versus where you want to be, how to set big goals, and how to achieve them. And includes a proven practice to fuel your body with energy to see your ideal future, plus the framework to achieve those goals so you truly can and will ignite the change that you wish to see at home and around the world.

[00:00:47] Changing our world does not happen at once. It does not happen alone. It takes a committed group to be the change we wish to see. So together, we rise above negative influences to lead by example, making a positive impact at home and around the world. You can learn more, join us and get at shownotes@livefitignitechange.com or for short, livefic.com.

 [00:01:15] Patrick: This comes from a live training I led on life assessment and goal designing at DLP Capital. This training is all about living fully in all aspects of your life. There’s some great discussion from the group throughout, so I hope you enjoy. Here it is.

[00:01:30] All right. There we go. Welcome. EES essentials training. I know we got a couple more people coming in here, so I guess until they come back in, I want to be able to just start this off and like Don was just saying, this is life assessment and goal designing. Pretty impactful training. For those online or anybody here in the room that’s done this, I would just love or wait for folks to come back.

What has this exercise has on you guys, those that have done it, I’d love to hear just a little bit about what the whole process has meant to you. Any takers concerns?

Attendee: Yeah, so I’ve actually filled out my personal compass.

 [00:02:11]  Attendee: I filled out this flight assessment, and I feel like since I’ve done that, I’m much more zoned in on my priorities, where I want to spend my time. So it definitely has an impact on how I use my time off.

Patrick: I like that zoned in on goals and where you’re going. So it is a great exercise. And I’d ask you guys too, who has ever used on their cell phone a mapping feature to go from one place to another?

 [00:02:42] Hands raised. Everybody in this room’s, hand is raised. Pretty simple. There are two things you need to start that out right. What do you need to know?

 [00:02:50] Attendee: Starting point.

Patrick: Starting point and?

Attendee: Finishing point. 

Patrick: Really simple questions, right? But we do this all the time to go on little errands. But you think about your life like 25 years down the line. Do you know where you’re going? And do you actually know where the starting point is? So that’s what this training today is all about. And I know you’ve been sitting, you’ve had two hours. So we’re going to get up, we’re going to get interactive and we’re going to make this be an exercise that you can actually do right now in the next 30 minutes.

[00:03:24] And what Don always likes to say, what this training is all about is a life training, life changing exercise that is all about one thing, and that is living fully in all aspects of life. So, as we get rolling, I love the quote from Andrew Carnegie what this is all about. If you want to be happy, set a goal as a command  to your thoughts, liberate your energy and inspire your hopes. So, first off, we’re going to cover why it’s important that we show you how to do it, and then we’re actually going to get into letting you try how to do it, right? So why it’s important most people don’t assess their life, they don’t assess their goals, and they don’t reach their full potential.

[00:04:07] Most are not happy and they’re not living a life with intentionality, with purpose. You’ve seen the studies like they are on the screen here. Americans are the unhappiest they’ve ever been. And around the world, negative feelings are on the rise. And it’s just not a happy place.

[00:04:25] The happiest people could be. Now, if we do get into it in the life assessment, rhetorical question, but wouldn’t you want to be happy, right, and truly thrive in all areas of life? So if there could be an area of life that might not be as good as you want. And what’s really interesting about this exercise is, could there be something that you don’t even know that isn’t at that level yet, and you can go through it and discover it. So that’s what the life assessment is. It evaluates where you are today, really, in just a few minutes. And it does exactly what Andrew Parking said in that quote. Liberates your energies and inspires your hopes. Does that sound good?

Attendee: Sounds great.

[00:05:06] All right, then we get to part two. This is goal design and why goal design is important. Again, rhetorical question. But wouldn’t it be great if you could reach all of your goals and really reach them? Right?

[00:05:16] So it’s amazing that study from the University of Scranton said 92% of those who set New Year’s resolutions never achieve them. And I love the study out of the Dominican University, too. Goals are 42% more likely to be achieved when they’re written down. But what’s really cool, 72 or 76% more likely when written down with action and accountability. Does that sound familiar?

Like something to do with DLP, with rocks and milestones and accountability with our leaders? So, the other one came from Brian Tracy. And the whole idea of do you want to be part of the 1%? Well, that research showed that only 3% of Americans actually have written goals and only 1% have written goals that we review regularly. So, again, all part of the process of what this is about.

 [00:06:02] I’d love to open it up to you for interactive discussion. Again, have you found this to be true and where have you found success? Or maybe have you found success in writing down your goals, reviewing them regularly and having accountability? What has helped they’re in the room or are those on online?

Attendee: I’ve had success with introducing the idea and identity to my two daughters, and they have actually started the process of writing goals down, reviewing them with the family, and then achieving and when they achieve their goals, I haven’t seen bigger smiles on their face because of that sense of accomplishment.

 [00:06:43] Patrick: I love that. Steven thank you both using the tools that we have, but with your family as well. And to your point, the biggest smiles, huge interface when they achieve their goals, I love the tools, too. We have a personal kind of family side business where we’re creating healthy products that came out of the fit, like challenge my son’s involved. And to your point of getting families involved, my 15-year-old has actually been running weekly meetings, which are how we keep each other accountable on weekly meetings.

[00:07:10] Show what you need to do that week. So really good example. Thanks for sharing. Anybody else on those?

Attendee: One of my personal rocks is fitness related, so one of my next milestones is not snacking after 8:30 at night.

[00:07:26] Like, I get the kids to bed, and then my tendency is, like, let’s watch a show, eat a snack. And I told my wife that milestone, and she’s been helping keep me accountable because she’ll hear, like, a crinkling of a package in the pantry, and she’s like, hey, it’s past 8:30. So just, again, setting the goals, writing it down and having accountability. 

Patrick: That’s awesome. Carlo. Yeah, such a great point.

[00:07:48] What it’s all about? So that is exactly why we do this and what this exercise and everything we’re doing today and all the tools that are provided here is what this is all about. And now it’s time to show you how we use them. Cool? All right.

[00:08:07] This part might seem a little strange at first, but it’s really one of the best things that you can do to kind of visualize your ideal future, where you’re going? And so you guys have been sitting all day. This is our third meeting in a row, so let’s go ahead and stand up. I’m going to stop sharing my screen here so you guys can online can actually see how this works. I’m going to describe how it works, and then we’re going to get into doing it.

 [00:08:39] It’s a process of visualization that comes originally from Tony Robbins. Came up with a lot of that. He pulled it from some Indian breathing techniques. And not to say that I’ve improved on Tony Robbins, but maybe I have. We’re all highly busy professionals, we want to combine things.

[00:08:58] So we’re combining the visualization with the gratitude with something else tony called Lymphasizing, which is the idea of getting your body in motion to be able to clear out your lymph system just so you feel better. So again, like I mentioned, it might seem a little strange at first, but hey, we’re all here together, so we’re together. We’re all doing it when it’s weird, right? So I’ll describe how it works. You’re going to beat your arms up, almost like you’re going to reach up to the sky and as if you were going to breathe in and pull in your energy.

[00:09:26] So as you breathe in, the arms come up. And then as you breathe out, the arms come down. It’s real quick. It’s like this. And then the Lymphocytes part is going to be just like a little jumping jack.

[00:09:38] I mean, very simple. So if you put those together, as weird as it may look, go arms up and then you come down and that’s it. Going to do that 30 times just to get up, move, get your body work going. I know some of you online Kirsten, you love this kind of breathwork stuff, right? So you’re going to be ready to roll and then we’ll get into a little bit of gratitude and visualization after that.

[00:10:06] All right? So here we go. We’re all going to do it together. Arms up. Ready?

 [00:10:10] Go. All right to chime in here. At this part, the group did 30 quick breaths in and this is a great practice to fuel your body with energy, so you can certainly still do that right now. Also a heads up during the training, the next part was visualizing the future. And it’s more impactful when you close your eyes for this part, of course, don’t do that if you’re driving, but you may want to pull over to complete this. That part only takes about three minutes. Also, handouts are mentioned and you can find all the materials in the show notes at LivefitIgnitechange.com Goals. Okay, back to the training.

 [00:10:45] Awesome. You all feeling good. Smiles, the energy, the posture, it’s better all around. So you guys can go ahead and take seat. And for this part, now that you are feeling good, you’ve got that energy. What I’d love you to do, I’d advise you to do here, this is the visualization about the future.

[00:11:01] We’re going to start it with a little bit of gratitude. So if you’re open to it can place your hand on your heart. And I’d like you to close your eyes. You don’t have to if you’re not comfortable with it, but you want to close your eyes, place your hand on your heart, and then if you do, you’re going to breathe in and just take a simple deep breath, maybe two count of four. So breathe in, two, three, four, out, two, three, four.

 [00:11:33] And as you do, you’re now thinking about the things that you are grateful for even with your hands on your heart. And you can almost like breathe in, like you’re breathing in through your heart. And you’re thankful for all the things that you have in your life, even that your heart beats without you asking it to. All your friends, all your family, all the things that you’re grateful for, think about those for a moment.

 [00:12:03] And now with this gratitude, once you go back to a place in your mind when you were incredibly grateful, go back to one particular moment that made you so happy, thing that you could be the most grateful for. Go back into that moment right now, live in that moment and feel those feelings that you felt at that time. Smile comes over your face. As you know, you’re celebrating that moment with those you care about most.

 [00:12:41] Now that you’re living with that great joy, share that joy with others that you love. Send it out to your family, your friends, coworkers, whoever you want to share it with.

 [00:12:58] Now that you’re filled with that great spirit of love and joy, giving and gratitude, we’re going to go to a really special place together. It’s a special place because gears out into the future, you can pick a time, 10, 20, 25 years, whatever it may be. And it’s special because in this place, it’s where all your goals have come true. You are living the life you’ve always imagined. You think about all the things in your world, your faith, your family, your friends, your finances, your fulfillment and freedom, your fun.

 [00:13:43] They’re exactly how you want them to be. And at dinner that night, you’re celebrating it with those you care about most.

 [00:13:52] Let them out for a moment. Now you’re celebrating that evening and when you’re ready, you can come back today, slowly open your eyes. Thank you. How do you feel now you’ve seen your future in each of the AFS which you see up on the screen. I love this quote from Think and grow rich, whatever the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve.

[00:14:31] And so now you’ve seen it. You’ve seen that future. So let’s go make it happen. All right? All right.

[00:14:41] So if you’re ready, here’s the interactive part. We are going to step one, life assessment. The first step in setting your personal goal is to assess where you are in all aspects of your life and then take time to dream about where you would like to go. What do you want to achieve? And so that gets us to the eight S assessment.

 [00:15:05] The eight S, as we just mentioned in the visualization, is on faith, family, fitness, finance, fulfillment, freedom, friends and fun. And the life assessment is an exercise that is in your alignment workbooks. So those of you that have your laptops in front of you, go ahead and pull out your alignment workbooks. If you don’t have it, in your alignment workbook. For some reason, we have a link here that goes to a template of this.

 [00:15:30] We’re going to drop into the chat and if you’re in a conference room, we’ve got handouts where you can actually start going through this. Does anybody want to hand out? Everybody’s got those out? I’m going to go through and just talk through some of the basics of what this is. So you first off, start with the life assessment.

 [00:15:56] nd like I said, this is your opportunity to assess everything in your life. There are no right or wrong answers here. Be completely honest. Each one is on a scale from one to five. So you can see it starts out with family and the first question is I spend at least 10 hours of focus time with my family each week.

 [00:16:12]

It would be on scale of one to five, one being the least true and five being the most true. Do that. Go ahead and put into five. If you don’t put in one, two, three or four somewhere in between on how well you’re doing, again, no wrong answers. Nobody has to see this.

 [00:16:28] It’s just up to you and what you want to rate. So I’m going to talk through it pretty quickly, but I will show the screenshot that’s on the screen. This is from an alignment workbook and you’ve got the tab for the life assessment, which leads to the goal setting, which leads to the Living Fully dashboard, which leads to the personal consult and that’s we’re about to go through on all of them. So you can fill out the life assessment wherever you want. The cool part about doing electronically, it scores them for you.

 [00:16:53] So I’ll get to that in a second. If you want to do it on a piece of paper, you’re welcome to. You just have to do some math yourself. All right, so as we go through these again, what I’ll show now is the certain questions. So again, family, friends, fun, fitness, and then freedom, faith, financials, and fulfillment.

 [00:17:16] And so what this is, is we call it the Life Matrix or almost the Wheel of Life. When you do end up finishing this and you sum it up where it comes together, bread asks, is there a sheet with the tab that you showed? Yeah, that is in your alignment workbook. So if you do have an alignment workbook, you can go ahead and pull that up. If not, you can at least just use the template that we have.

 [00:17:42] So, yeah, search for your alignment workbook on Google Drive and if not, I can send out a link afterwards and get you set up on that. So that if you are using electronic version like Brother was talking about, it does summarize all of these for you. And so this is a great tool to be this is why I said earlier, using the map, like, do you know where you are and do you know where you’re going? This helps you say, do you know where you are? Because there are so many things in life you really don’t know where you are.

 [00:18:10] I even took it the first time I took it and the multiple times I’ve taken it’s like, oh, yeah, I’m really not doing that, or I’m not doing that. And it’s a great way to step up and make it work. So if you do see something that is low, like, for example, on this one, on the screen, it looks like freedom and career and fun are a little bit low. So those would be the ones that you’d want to concentrate on first. When you get to step two, goal designing, you can make goals in all of these areas, but make sure you have particular focus on those areas that you were low in.

 [00:18:43] All right, next up, goal designing. And this is step two. Again, I know you haven’t had time to finish your assessment, but we will leave time for a workshop at the end. But I want to go ahead and describe how all these work together. So for this one, goal designing, once you’ve assessed where you are and you can really start to consider where you want to go in your lifetime.

 [00:19:08] So, determine your top goals in each area and then your overall priorities. And then the goal designing section follows what I just talked about, the life assessment. So again, if you’re following along in your alignment workbook, this is the next tab over. If you are setting goals, another quote I love from Michelangelo. The whole idea of, like, we want to set big goals, right, don’t sell ourselves short as close.

 [00:19:30] The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short, but in setting our aim too low and achieving our mark. So when you are setting goals, think bigger, raise the bar personally and professionally. You want to do things different in your own personal life and in your work life. Where can you make the biggest impact in both? Because when you do, a lot of times people say, oh, I got to do all this today or this week or even this month.

 [00:19:58] But we often, as the quote says, we overestimate what we can do in a day, in a week, but we underestimate what we can do in three years, five years, in a lifetime. And that’s why all this is laid out to say, what is that future vision? Where do I want to go in a ten to 25 years? And then start backing into and then, what do I need to do in three years to be on track to that in one year? And then it goes down to your quarterly rocks and then your bi weekly milestones, and then your daily habits.

 [00:20:24] It all relates, of course, when you are setting these goals, they should be smart which we often talk about specific measurable attainable, relevant and time based. Then when it gets into your goal designing, if you all are following along in the workbook, you see where you can put in a lot of these different goals. Now, it gives some examples here. So family, both could be spend time, more time with family, be home for dinner every night, do a nightly reading, a ritual with your children, a guy who say winds and prayers with my boys every night before they go to bed. I mean, it could be something like that that you want to start doing to set these goals so you can actually stay accountable toward them and you can go through and just brainstorm.

 [00:21:05] And at this point, you’re not worried about your living fully dashboard, which you get to. The idea here is coming up with about five to eight different goals that you want to work on in these areas. And again, it goes through all the eight categories like we’ve talked about. And then when it gets to the end of this, you can add up your top ten to 15 goals because you’re going to have a lot from the different eight categories. You can go back and circle the biggest ones, the ones that you really want to focus on, and those become what we call the living fully dashboard.

 [00:21:39] The living fully dashboard give us on the personal compass. We refer to it a lot. And then for those of you that are new to it, might seem like a lot of stuff here, but the idea is some people refer to this as their top ten for the year. So we said earlier, like our new year’s resolution, what if you did that ten goals? That’s the idea of coming up with each of these.

 [00:21:58] And so that’s what your living fully dashboard is. The idea is that what you can do, you can sort of see it on the screen here. Each of your top ten you can give certain weights to. So for example, if all ten of them are 10%, well, that’s great. Otherwise you can dive into it a little bit more and maybe some are worth 5%, some are worth 20%.

 [00:22:18] The idea is you want to just make it something that works for you so that’s real quickly. A life assessment, goal designing, and the living fully dashboard. Making sense? Yes. Cool.

 [00:22:32] Any questions? Been online? See some chats and I missing chat comments.

 [00:22:42] Cool. All right, so once you’ve done all that, the idea then turns to goal achievement, takes discipline, and building habits. Again, another great quote, this one from John Maxwell’s. Management is an oxygen. Time is beyond our control and the clock keeps ticking regardless of how we lead our lives.

 [00:23:03] It’s priority management is the answer to maximizing the signs we have that’s when we get into prioritizing our time and using the tools available. We talked about so many tools from our rocks and milestones, the accountability and the idea of the Elite Journal. That’s why we call this the framework to your goal realization, just as a goal visualization. And how do you realize it is by taking those actions each and every day. So if you follow through in the Elite Journal, it starts out by talking about what is your ideal future picture.

 [00:23:39] You can write it down and see that in the next ten to 25 years, then the three year goals, then the top ten for the year. You can create a vision board. You can kind of spell all this out, make it in a graphical type of way, and then from there we go to the weekly and daily pages. So if you’re following along, it’s all the exact page number in front of me. But anyway, each one of these each week you’ll see, and I’ll describe how to use this as you go through it.

 [00:24:07] The weekly pages like we just did in the visualization gratitude, you can start with the wins and then think of your top lessons learned and what your top goals were. And the really great part of this over on the bottom right of the screen is a daily and weekly scoreboard. These are the things that you want to do, that you want to put the habits into your life to start tracking so they will become reality. So for example, you went on their morning routine. You want to do that seven days a week, mark down the days you do it journaling, you want to do that, mark down the days you do.

 [00:24:41] It a good example for salespeople if you have a number of prospecting calls to make, how many calls you gonna make in a week, and then each day you can write down how many you do it your workout and I do four workouts a week. Which day did you do it? Did you get up to the total? So that’s a great way to keep track and just make all this stuff happen. The next is the daily pages.

 [00:25:00] Again, they start with gratitude and then it goes into what your top goals are. So we talked about earlier, how do you get things done, how do you prioritize things? It’s the whole idea of, well, you write your top goals, come up with what the priorities are today to work on those goals, and then you can work on what are you stuck on, what your daily schedule is, any task, top lessons learned, anything that will help you propel you along the way. So again, I’ve been talking a little too much to open it back up. For those who have been using tools like this, whatever tool you’ve been using that intentionally help you focus on the top priorities, how has that changed your life personally or professionally?

 [00:25:40] Love to hear from you. 

Attendee: I’ll go Patrick. So something about this goal setting I don’t feel like a lot of people like to do it, including myself. However, I know when I do it, I know what’s possible. And just like you said with the map thing in the beginning, if I don’t know where Colin wants to go, how in the world am I going to support him, for instance?

 [00:25:59] But if I know where he wants to go, I can say, hey, I actually know how to help you get there using these tools. But if I don’t know where he’s going, then I have no idea how to help guide him. And so this is a super power tool, as I call him, especially when we work in integrated teams like we do at DLP. So, yeah, this is how I’ve gotten to where I’ve gotten in my life and I’m just so grateful that we use this type of type of tool. Love it.

 [00:26:26] Patrick: Brad, thank you so much for sharing. I love that power tool, but that’s exactly right. And I love that you bring up helping others get there, too, because I think that is what so much of this is about. The alignment meetings that we talk about so much, the idea of being able to work with your leader. Your reports are really just those on your team that you work with every day.

 [00:26:44] How can I help you get there? How can I help you reach your goals? It is all about where you came from, where you are to where you’re going. Thank you. Yes.

 [00:26:54] Attendee: A really cool thing, too, which we can incorporate in the future. Jeff Hoffman, who started Priceline.com, very successful billionaire, he spoke at one of our last conferences. And on all these people’s desk, on everyone that works to their desk, they have a picture of something that they really want, whether it’s a house, whether it’s like a meal, whether it’s whatever it is. And so when you walk around their office, everyone knows what people want because there’s like a picture of those things on their cube or their office. And so it’s like, oh, Charles wants this ad, andrew wants this.

 [00:27:28] How can I help them get that? It could be a clock. Maybe they want more time.

 [00:27:37] For vision board. Awesome. Great stuff.

 [00:27:44] All right, well, cool. What’s up, Andrew? Are you about to go?

Attendee: I was just going to say I want over the water bungalow in Fiji. That’s what I want.

[00:27:57] Angel: I had not thought about putting a picture up, so thank you. Bear that idea. Someone to do that.

 [00:28:05] We’ve got quite a few new members. The entire accelerators team is in here. And I’ll ask, why do this?

 [00:28:15] I’m doing this for just a better future for my family and setting them up for success down the line. I think also, sometimes there can be some curveballs in life that you are not ready to receive or maybe you have fully planned up to a certain point in your life and you didn’t. Think past that. So this can realign you and say you can say to yourself, OK, now I’ve been derailed a little bit and I need to get back on track. What does that look like?

 [00:28:45] Exactly. I love the comments and the chat and everything else. So great stuff. And so this is typically the time when we would have a workshop. We started it out.

 [00:28:56] You started filling out the assessment. You saw how to do all of these things. And so as we walk through this, the life assessment is the first part. Then do the goal designing and then your Living Fully dashboard. You can do this in your alignment workbooks in the Elite Journal.

 [00:29:13] Patrick: And then once you do get that Living Fully Dashboard ready, that is what goes to the Personal Compass, which is covered in next week’s session. Any other questions? Any other thing we needed to cover?

 [00:29:26] Attendee: I have one question, Patrick. With a new book coming out about the career, is there going to be a new version of the journal or a layover? Good question. So the new book that Kirsten is referencing is called Building an Elite Career, where this first book was building an elite organization and now the second one is more for the team members in those high growth organizations building a Lead career. And it’s all about living in a life of focus, intentionality and how we use the tools.

 [00:29:59] But the journal is the same. It goes with the journal. The life assessment and goal design that we just did is the same. The personal compass. There’s a whole chapter on the personal compass.

 [00:30:08] So yes, all of these tools that we are using are going to be enhanced even further and just lay down in a clear format in that part. Great question, Kirsten. Thanks. All right. I hope you enjoyed that.

 [00:30:19] Be sure to complete these action steps to get on the path to your big goal achievement. Again, you can find all the materials and resources for this episode in the show notes at LiveFit ignitechange.com goals or for shortlivedfic.com goals. If you resonated with us and would like to live fit and ignite change in your life, you can get started for free at LiveFit Ignitechange.com Start where you can join our community of high performers and get access to our Kickstart resources for free. You can choose if you’d like to start on the path to getting in the best shape of your life and or ignite the change you’d wish to see by casting a vision and taking the steps to get there. You can get plugged in at LiveFit Ignitechange.com Start or for shortlivefic.com.

 [00:31:12] My family and I, we’re igniting the change that we wish to see in the world by helping others live it. We were sick of all the processed, sugar loaded foods and drinks marketed to us, especially to our youth. So we’re developing a line of truly delicious, grain free sugarfree products that children and adults love as part of our Innerive Performance Nutrition brand. Learn more and join the inrive Insiders for free to be the first to hear about samples, launch parties and specials at inrive.com that’s inrive.com. Thank you so much for tuning in and please be sure to like, share, rate and review the show.

 [00:31:53] This is what’s needed to help reach more and serve more, but together, we truly can ignite the change that we wish to see. Thank you so much for your help and you make it out and I hope you make it an outstanding day and go forth to light, love and serve the world and live the life you’ve always imagined.