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“Successful people do what unsuccessful people are not willing to do.”
A good life is nothing but a combination of intentionally well lived days in a row for longer periods of time. If we take care of our days, we don’t need to worry about our future and it will make our past beautiful. A well planned and well lived day will build on the strong foundation for a better tomorrow – and when you look back at such days in a row- you will feel great about your past too.
Robin Sharma once rightly said: “Small daily improvements over time lead to stunning results.”
Since, we are on this journey to perform at our highest level, so the first requirement is to become intentional to plan our days and imbibe the self-discipline to overcome our inner resistances. You need to keep your cravings for instant gratification at bay and focus on the activities that will make your closer to your goals. This section explains few strategies that will help you take charge of your everyday actions. Let’s look at these strategies now:
1. Apply W.I.N. Formula to Control Your Moment to Moment Decisions:
What is this W.I.N. Formula?
This is the strategy that highly successful use to take their moment to moment decisions, that enables them to craft their best days – and thus achieve results.
W.I.N. stands for What’s Important Now. This acronym was used by Bob Bowman, coach to the legend Michael Phelps, an American swimmer and one of the most prized Olympic athletes in the History.
In his book, No Limits-The Will To Succeed Michael Phelps explains the secrets behind all his legendary performances and winning of Olympic medals, including his coach’s Bob Bowman strategies. There is a mention in the book, where coach Bob Bowman explains what separates Michael from all other swimmers. Bowman states that if other swimmers don’t feel good, they don’t swim good. But this was not the case with Michael. He performs regardless of what he feels, as he has trained his mind with his practice for a long period.
Michael shows that high performers don’t let their feelings come in the way of their actions. If something is to be done as a priority, then they perform at their best, despite whatever they feel about that activity. Their feelings are not important, rather the action towards the goal is important.
Anyone can conclude that if you have strong self-control and can control your emotions effectively, then no one can stop you from taking action towards your goals. It wouldn’t be incorrect to say that on most occasions it is rather our inner critic mind that interrupts in our performance, and not the outside circumstances.
Michal’s criterion for making a decision at any given moment is simple “What’s Important Now” and not “How do I feel now”. Ultimately, it is this W.I.N. formula that triggers him to take massive action towards his goals, and with strong self-discipline on his feelings, he is able to master his game.
Just feel yourself the conviction, in the words of Michael Phelps, when he says:
“It’s true. When it comes down to it, when the time comes to focus and be mentally prepared, I can do whatever it takes to get there, in any situation.”
There is no ambiguity, no second thought in his mind – it’s just a solid decision. Life becomes quite easy when you master such kind of self-discipline in your life.
On the similar lines of W.I.N. Formula, Eric Greitens, a former Navy SEAL officer, writes in his book Resilience: Hard-Won Wisdom for Living a Better Life, explains that your actions should be based on what you want to become, i.e. your future identity. It’s never a right approach to take action on the basis of what you feel.
Simply put, your actions should be driven by the identity that you want to achieve and not by what you feel about the activity at any given point of time. The factor of feeling comes at the last in this formula. It goes like this:
Identity > Action > Feelings
Whenever you have a dilemma about taking action, ask yourself, ‘Who I want to become?’ And the answer to that question will guide you to take the right action –and that action will lead you closer to what you want to become. With that sense of clarity about your direction, the level of energy you will put to your work will be entirely different (in a positive way), as compared to actions taken based on what you feel. You will perform with greater determination and a sense of urgency towards your goal with this approach.
And the best part is that once you can take massive actions, you will move forward- you will either see results or get some lessons, and that way will make you feel better.
In the above equation, you would realize that instead of making your feelings the dominant factor to take actions, you have simply put it at the end of the equation. There, the whole sequence is reversed for your benefit. Now, your feelings are just an outcome of the quality of actions taken by you.
Don’t go by your feelings to decide your next action step – they will simply leave you in the lurch. If you are in a good mood one day, you work your butt off; but next day, if you don’t feel better, you just spoil your day. There are already so many uncontrollable outside factors that you need to overcome on your journey towards your goal, and additionally your negative feelings to it are going to make your life much harder.
Taking the case of Michael Phelps – he knew what he wanted to become – the best in the world in his game. Thus, the W.I.N. principle guided him to take the right action for him to attain that identity of a world-class swimmer. The actions taken on the right underlying factors lead to performance at a heightened level, which delivers the best results. So finally – goal achieved and you FEEL superb now. And that’s the way to go.
What kind of action leads to high performance?
Okay, let’s take it one step further.
So far, based on the identity that you have chosen for yourself, you apply the W.I.N. formula to take the immediate action that’s most important for you. Since, we are talking about achieving the state of high performance; it is quite relevant here to talk about the level and quality of actions to be taken more specifically. Grant Cardone in his book The 10X Rule: The Only Difference Between Success and Failure squarely addresses this point in below words:
“One question I’ve received over the years is, ‘Exactly how much action is necessary to create success?’ Not surprisingly, everyone is looking for the secret shortcut—and equally unsurprising is the following fact: There are no shortcuts. The more action you take, the better your chances are of getting a break. Disciplined, consistent, and persistent actions are more of a determining factor in the creation of success than any other combination of things. Understanding how to calculate and then take the right amount of action is more important than your concept, idea, invention, or business plan”
Grant further states that most people fail because they are operating at the wrong degree of action. He goes on to categorize the actions based the degree of involvement as below. For taking any action, one can have these four choices:
1. Do nothing.
2. Retreat.
3. Take normal levels of action.
4. Take massive action.
You have to take massive action to attain the state of high performance and just look at the reason why Grant emphasis the power of massive action, when he says:
‘Overcommit, be all in, and take massive levels of action followed up by massive amounts of more actions. You will create new problems and deliver at levels that will amaze even you.”
Be clear in your mind that any lukewarm actions do not work- they will give you only lukewarm results. If you keep on doubting yourself and take action in that state, you can create the required high momentum in your actions. In fact, you are trying to deceive yourself here. Your mind will try to convince you that you are taking action, but at the same time, you will find yourself doubting and slowing down your actions. This approach doesn’t work.
Therefore, massive action in the direction of your destiny is the only way to go.
Now let’s talk about the next strategy to incorporate high performance in your days:
2. Set Product Goal & Process goals.
“Set Product Goals and Emphasize Process Goals: To achieve greatness, you must set end goals and place significant emphasis on what it takes to accomplish them.”
~ Jason Selk
We all know about goal setting. We know that we should be setting SMART goals, i.e. they should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. But the key thing about these goals is they are always appearing us to be obtained in future. Sometimes that very reason becomes a hindrance to achieve those goals. We keep on thinking that we always have time to achieve that goal. That’s why most people set almost the same goals every year.
The solution lies in setting two categories of goals:
Jason Selk, one of the world’s leading peak performance coaches uses this terminology of product goal and process goals in one of his book. Let’s understand this better and how this lead to achieving your goal of high performance.
Product goals are the goals that are result oriented and are potentially attainable with a period of next 12 months. For example, if you have a goal of running a half-marathon in next six month or a full marathon in twelve months, that will be your product goal. Product goals are specific in terms of results and the timelines to attain those goals.
Process goals are goals that are action oriented – they focus on what actions are needed to be taken on a daily basis to achieve your product goals. This is important to set the process goal for every product goal. Because it is very easy to set up a goal that is far away six months or one year, but when we see the goal still a few months away, we tend to drift assuming that we have enough time to achieve those. We think that we will be able to catch up sooner on those goals when we reach closer to the deadline. But it doesn’t work that way usually – because if we start drifting that becomes a vicious circle. Skipping one day leads to skipping another day and soon you would realize that you have not worked for days, weeks, or even months giving one excuse or the other. Here process goals come to your rescue.
Jason recommends that we should have two or three process goals for each of the product goals. Sometimes a process goal may happen less frequently than every day, but it still needs to occur on a regular basis to drive the achievement of the product goal. Take your previous example of running a half marathon in six months from now, as your product goal, what should be your process goal? Here you need to have two to three process goals, and those could be as below:
The process goals are the immediate triggers that put you in action on a daily basis to make your closer to the distant product goal. Setting up product goals and process goals together not only gives a sense of direction but also ensures that you are on the track and achieving regular progress.
To put it differently, while the product goals show you the ultimate flag at the summit of the mountain, the process goals asks you to work on the goal every day and also have a sense of motivation if you covered the required distance in a particular day. Process goals also help you to avoid getting de-motivated because of the goals appearing so far in future, because you know that daily progress will ultimately lead to your product goals.
As is rightly said, “Well begun is half done”.
You need to start taking action based on the right parameters and keep on building momentum to achieve the level of high performance.
The summary of what we discussed in this section is below as a step plan to help you start taking action now:
“The 10X Rule requires that you take action in massive quantities and immediately. Anyone who puts off doing what he or she can do right now will never gain the momentum and confidence that result from doing so.”
