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Setting Goals… But Which Type Of Goal?

by Olivier Becherel | Nov 30, 2016 | Achieving Goals, Performance Management |

Everybody will tell you to set goals to be successful. Well, I agree with that however what they are not telling you is that there are different types of goal you can set, and that makes a big difference…

Did you know that there are 3 types of goals?

Maybe you do and in that case, I guess you know exactly which one to set and focus on.

However, if you don’t let’s have a quick look at those…

1) Outcome Goals

These are measurable results, e.g. In 90 days, I want to have lost 20 pounds.
Athletes, Type A personalities, entrepreneurs, and men are especially gifted in thinking this way.
If you focus only on the outcome, it creates high levels of stress and anxiety, as you don’t have control over these.

2) Performance Goals

What are you going to improve in order to get to the outcome goal?
Break your outcome goal into performance goals over two week periods that you can measure throughout the process, e.g. In the next two weeks, I am going to the gym one time.
These are high impact, measurable activities that will impact your outcome goal, e.g. I will improve the number of people who see my listing from 10 to 20 by <date>.

3) Process Goals

Follow the formula: 4W=C+M
Who is going to do What, When, and Where? This will equal Clarity and Momentum.
You have 100% control over process goals.

So there you go, 3 types of goals you can play with. Setting a goal is the first step, achieving a goal is completely different story. Confidence is often required to achieve your goal. The enemy to confidence and momentum is confusion and uncertainty. Confidence can be built, and isn’t simply something that is instilled upon you at birth. Confidence is a learned behaviour and it is the byproduct of incremental, constant, and consistent improvement.

In Nutshell: Setting the right type of goal is crucial. To help you with your goals, here is a powerful question “What is the highest impact skill that, if I improved right now, would give the highest impact on my performance?” That is what you should be developing…. Finally, remember the worst thing you can do is to start setting goals without ever looking back.

Dr Olivier J. Becherel

Co-founder of Mastery to Success - The Human Potential Academy

Dr Olivier J. Becherel is a Human Potential Activator who integrates Neuroscience & Human Potential to optimise performance and wellbeing. His mission is to help senior executives in the Health & Life Sciences industry realise their goals, stay cool under pressure, and break free from the invisible traps that can slow down and/or stall their performance, career and success.

To learn more, visit MasteryToSuccess.com.au

The Worst Thing To Do When You Are Emotional…

by Olivier Becherel | Nov 22, 2016 | Managing Emotions, Staying cool under pressure |

One thing most people have been told to do from a young age is to suck it up and move. In other words, don’t show your emotions, keep them to yourself by suppressing them.

However, while most people think that suppressing your emotions is a sign of strength – that you can handle them effectively. They are not aware that suppressing your emotions is actually the worst thing to do!

Suppressing your emotions is not the same as being emotionally resilient. Suppressing your emotions is just acting as if they were not there – you ignore them, you bury them somewhere deep in the recess of your mind, and just continue to act “as if” nothing really happened. While sometimes you may have the impression that it’s working temporarily, in reality, emotions don’t just simply disappear. They are still there at the back of your mind, active and consuming your most previous resources of time, space and energy. Slowly but surely, they will drain you until they are resolved, no doubt about that!

Not only that, but when someone suppresses their emotions, it sends a threat signal to those around him/her, making others feel uncomfortable, wary and it creates an internal feeling of tension and dis-ease.

We are “built” to experience a range of emotions.

Some emotions feel pleasureful and we generally strive to experience more of those… Others feel painful and we do everything we can to avoid those – by suppressing them when they arise.

Would you agree that when you went to school you’ve learned many topics, some of them, you probably never used after leaving school? But you learned them anyway because it was part of the curriculum.

But I’m most certain that you never learned how to “effectively manage” your emotions at school. You’ve never learned emotional intelligence & resilience.

Your ability to accurately perceive your emotions, understand the meaning the behind them, manage them and use them to facilitate thinking is NOT something you’ve ever learned.

That seems odd really given that every human being – without exception – experiences a range of emotions everyday, multiple times a day…

The only thing someone told you is when things are painful, suck it up and don’t show anything in public because “that’s not appropriate”…

Unfortunately, that’s not the best solution. Emotions exist for a reason, they indicate an integration of brain/body, mind, and social information sources. They serve as a great snapshots of our current state or frame of mind. They help us become conscious of how we are creating meaning in our lives from moment to moment.

They convey important information and if we start changing our perception of emotions by seeing them as an integration process between (1) our mental maps that include memories, interpretations, physiological reactions and behavioural tendencies, (2) the importance of connecting with others in our social field, then it becomes evident to recognise the value of the information an emotion provides. And once we do, we suddenly become more curious about them.

Emotions are an important feedback mechanism, a guiding “friend”.

So, next time you experience a strong emotion, whether good or bad, pleasureful or painful, don’t just bury it in the black box at the back of your mind.

Instead, feel it, observe it, and ask yourself:

What kind of information this emotion is giving to me?
What is the message for me embedded in that emotion?
How can I use this information to facilitate new thinking?
How can I use use that information to move forward in life?

In Nutshell: The worse thing to do when you are emotional is suppress your emotions. Emotions are loaded with information, and suppressing them rob you of important guiding messages. Next time you experience a strong emotion, whether good or bad, don’t just bury it in the black box at the back of your mind, instead, feel it, observe it, and be curious about it. Find out what message is there for you that will help you grow and move forward in life?

Dr Olivier J. Becherel

Co-founder of Mastery to Success - The Human Potential Academy

Dr Olivier J. Becherel is a Human Potential Activator who integrates Neuroscience & Human Potential to optimise performance and wellbeing. His mission is to help senior executives in the Health & Life Sciences industry realise their goals, stay cool under pressure, and break free from the invisible traps that can slow down and/or stall their performance, career and success.

To learn more, visit MasteryToSuccess.com.au

The New World of Work – Part II

by Olivier Becherel | Nov 15, 2016 | Overcoming challenges, Performance Management, Staying cool under pressure |

From the “New World of Work”, three features stand out:

It is being accelerated by technology
It is more connected
It is even less predictable

In my previous post, I explored the radical change brought by “accelerated by technology”. Today, I’m discussing “more connected” and “even less predictable”.

Digital technology – i.e. the internet – has not only dissolved the barrier of time & space, it has also promoted hyper-connection between people. In other words, it has created a global small-world network.

Collaborations are now easier than ever, more dynamic and fluid and your everyday actions require you to communicate and share ideas with a sense of urgency.

Your inbox has now become a convenient organising system for other people’s agendas, and the need for speed in responsiveness is the new normal – 24/7, 7 days a week.

As a result, one of your many challenges is to stay focused on the task at hand, avoid digital distractions and manage increasingly complex and diverse relationships.

Building swift trust and relationships on the fly poses new interpersonal challenges, and managing cultural differences, diversity and inclusion represent a major hurdle for corporations, executives and employees.

Hyper-connection has not only gave birth to cognitive overload, it has also created collaborative overload – the point at which someone is so overwhelmed with collaborative responsibilities that she effectively becomes a bottleneck, unintentionally slowing down or inhibiting the flow of work within an organisation.

Performance suffers as people are buried under an avalanche of requests for input or advice, access to resources, or attendance at a meeting.

So, what can you do to thrive in the more connected, less predictable New World of Work?

Hyper-connection requires the development of new sets of skills, such has emotional intelligence and resilience. It’s about developing a wider range of communications skills, flexibility of behaviour and learning how to slow things down.

It’s finding ways to improve team efficiency by developing curiosity and caring about other members of your team.
Having confidence in your “know how”
Sharing your goals to to build clarity and unity.

Paradoxically, effective collaboration is highly structured…

The capacity to rapidly adopt new perspectives, consider different point of views, understand cultural diversity while promoting inclusion at the same time is crucial for success. Assuming your responsibility to maintain cohesion within the group and finding new ways to manage your time, energy and focus is underlying your competitive advantage.

To thrive in a more connected world requires focus on people rather than purely on systems, investment in people’s development and ultimately changing the way you interact.

Your network can provide you with new resources, knowledge, learning and instant feedback mechanisms to guide you in solving complex problems. Past solutions are less and less relevant…

Personal innovation – i.e. personal development – is a now a necessity to build your personal brand in order to maintain your competitive advantage. It’s about becoming antifragile – a property of systems that increase in capability, resilience, or robustness as a result of stressors, shocks, volatility, noise, mistakes, faults, attacks, or failures – as Nassim Nicholas Taleb would put it.

The New World of Work is highly responsive and unpredictable, however the good news is that you can learn and develop the necessary skills to adapt and thrive. All it takes is for you to pause for a moment, take a deep breath and make the first step to reach out…

In Nutshell: The New World of Work is more connected and even less predictable. It requires the adoption of a new mindset to develop agility, resilience and execution as learning. By taking responsibility for your personal innovation and developing emotional intelligence and resilience skills, you will maintain your competitive advantage and be well armed for the future…

Dr Olivier J. Becherel

Co-founder of Mastery to Success - The Human Potential Academy

Dr Olivier J. Becherel is a Human Potential Activator who integrates Neuroscience & Human Potential to optimise performance and wellbeing. His mission is to help senior executives in the Health & Life Sciences industry realise their goals, stay cool under pressure, and break free from the invisible traps that can slow down and/or stall their performance, career and success.

To learn more, visit MasteryToSuccess.com.au

The New World of Work – Part I

by Olivier Becherel | Nov 8, 2016 | Performance Management |

Innovation and disruptive technology have lead to significant changes in the world of work. In this “New World of Work”, two aspects have been affected the most: (1) the nature of work (WHAT we do) and (2) the way work is executed (HOW we do it).

Reflecting back on the evolution of society and the modern economy, we can identify three emerging features of the New World of Work:

It is being accelerated by technology
It is more connected
It is even less predictable

Here, I’m going to explore the first radical change “accelerated by technology”. The other “more connected” and “even less predictable” will be the subject of future posts.

As we have left the Industrial Age to enter into the Information Age, we’ve seen an exponential increase in the generation, manipulation, storage, and consumption of information.

As a result, a dramatic increase in complexity has also developed. This deluge of information represents a challenge for most people regardless of age. It’s becoming more and more daunting to keep pace with the amount of information and increasingly more difficult to single out the important information – “signal”, from the ever present and increasing background “noise”.

Not only that, the dissolution of the space-time barrier that used to exist prior to the internet has further exacerbated the issue. It’s not about having access to information anymore that is the bottleneck – because in most of it is freely available at your fingertips, but the challenge lies in finding, manipulating, making sense of and using the important/relevant/accurate/trustworthy information among these quantum fluctuations. In other words, finding the needle in an exponentially growing haystack.

The need for speed also requires a shift in mindset. Not only you have to deal with the rate of change and the high levels of uncertainty that it generates, you also have to develop agility, resilience and execution as learning to survive and thrive.

So how do you develop those “New World of Work” qualities?

Agility comes from your ability to learn fast and adapt rather than relying on your extensive experience or academic knowledge. It’s about acting in ways that will produce rapid feedback so you can learn fast from those feedbacks to adjust your course of action. It’s about developing new levels of clarity and optimising your performance. It’s about the necessity to reinvent yourself day in day day out to continue to survive and eventually thrive in this constantly changing landscape.

Resilience comes from the ability to handle high-presssure stressful complex situations and developing your ability to regulate your emotional state to sharpen your decision-making capacities. It’s about developing your own unique ways to deal with overwhelm, stress, anxiety, workload and pressure in order to efficiently and effectively manage your levels of energy, clarity, focus and ability to execute.

Execution as learning requires the ability to emotionally detach from outcomes, gain perspective and let go of that “perfectionist mentality”. It’s about focusing on developing your capacities to learn fast no matter what… It’s about flexibility of behaviour – the law of requisite variety.

Finally “accelerated by technology” has led to the tendency for people over-rely on technology at the expense of common sense and critical thinking – automation complacency.

To not only survive but to thrive in the New World of Work, a radical change in mindset is required. That’s why it’s no surprise that personal innovation, personal development and executive coaching have become important parts of professional development and “must” in our modern economy to reach new level of success and fulfillment.

So, if you’re finding it hard to cope with the New World of Work, that you’re on the verge of collapse, or having the impression that you’re stuck in an impasse, it may be time to ask yourself:

Am I taking full responsibility for my personal innovation?
What can I doing right now to reinvent myself and adapt to the New World of Work?
What can I do to be/become a fast learner?
What can I do or must do that I’m not currently doing?
What is the one thing I can do such that by doing it, it will make everything else easier or unnecessary?

The New World of Work is ruthless, however the good news you don’t have to do it all on your own. There is plenty of help around. All it takes is for you to pause for a moment, take a deep breath… and make the first step to reach out…

In Nutshell: The New World of Work is accelerated by technology, more connected and even less predictable. It requires the adoption of a new mindset to develop agility, resilience and execution as learning. It requires you to take responsibility for your personal innovation and your own personal/professional development.

Dr Olivier J. Becherel

Co-founder of Mastery to Success - The Human Potential Academy

Dr Olivier J. Becherel is a Human Potential Activator who integrates Neuroscience & Human Potential to optimise performance and wellbeing. His mission is to help senior executives in the Health & Life Sciences industry realise their goals, stay cool under pressure, and break free from the invisible traps that can slow down and/or stall their performance, career and success.

To learn more, visit MasteryToSuccess.com.au

It’s Not Always About Learning A New Strategy…

by Olivier Becherel | Nov 1, 2016 | Achieving Goals, Overcoming challenges |

When you don’t get what you want or don’t achieve your desired goals, the first thing that comes to mind is “I need a new strategy because mine is not working.” Of course a new strategy can help, but often this is not the first thing to address…

Before you think of changing your strategy, it’s important to understand why your current strategy is not working. In most situations, there are 3 reasons why you’re not achieving what you desire most.

Reason #1 – Incongruency between your goal and your core identity – who you truly are. More specifically, you’ve set a goal that is not aligned with your highest values (which are your life priorities, the things that are most important and meaningful to YOU). In other words, your goals is not realistic. Although you may really want to achieve that goal, it is not realistic currently in your present situation given your current highest values. Note that doesn’t mean you can never achieve this goal… It just means that there is some work to do align your goal with your values, and only learning a new strategy won’t do it.

Reason #2 – Some roadblocks are preventing you from taking action. Often this corresponds to emotional baggage, unconscious patterns, limiting beliefs, fears, shame or guilt. In this case, changing your strategy is not going to make much difference unless you confront your “own stuff” and resolve these emotional roadblocks.

Reason #3 – You lack clarity of the details for the execution. When you think about your goal it may seem/feel too big, too hard, to complex or you perceive that it’ll take too much effort and energy… Therefore you end up procrastinating and telling yourself “Not today, I’m too busy, I’ll start tomorrow…” but sadly tomorrow never comes, it only gets pushed back, further and further…

Next time you set a goal and you find yourself not making much progress, don’t jump to conclusion that you need to change your strategy and learn a new one.

From experience, coaching clients from around the world, strategy is often the last issue to address. Congruency between your goal and your core identity comes first followed by resolving emotional baggage. Once these are sorted out, it’s then time to design your most authentic strategy.

If you’re currently struggling to get things done or achieving your goals and are beating yourself up for it, it might make sense to get in touch with us…

In Nutshell: When people don’t achieve what they want, they often blame their strategy. While it’s indeed sometimes the case; for most people it’s really about (1) incongruency between their goals and their core identity and (2) unresolved past emotional baggage. These are the most common issues that stand in the way of someone reaching their goals.

Dr Olivier J. Becherel

Co-founder of Mastery to Success - The Human Potential Academy

Dr Olivier J. Becherel is a Human Potential Activator who integrates Neuroscience & Human Potential to optimise performance and wellbeing. His mission is to help senior executives in the Health & Life Sciences industry realise their goals, stay cool under pressure, and break free from the invisible traps that can slow down and/or stall their performance, career and success.

To learn more, visit MasteryToSuccess.com.au

The 3 Laws Of Implementation

by Olivier Becherel | Oct 25, 2016 | Achieving Goals, Decision-making |

Productivity, a buzz word these days, is often associated with more, faster, cheaper… Productivity requires to have a clear goal or intention, but unlike the “Law of Attraction”, simply having a goal, visualising it, and intending is not enough to make things happen.

There is need for implementation – the deliberate act of making a decision and taking action upon that decision.

While people find it easier (not always though…) to make a decision, what follows that decision – implementation – can often be a rate limiting step in achieving a goal.

A simple way to become better at implementing both in private life and in business is consider the following three questions.

Question #1: Most people usually ask themselves “What do I want to do?” While that is a good question in itself to start with… a better one is “What do I want to have happen here?”

By asking yourself “What do I want to do?”, you open up the door to different possibilities, which in some instances can lead to too many choices, uncertainty and indecision, and as a consequence a lack of implementation/action.

On the other hand, asking yourself “What do you want to have happen here?” reduces the number of choices by primarily focusing on the end result – the ultimate goal, the desired outcome.

By reducing the number of possibilities from the start, you automatically increase your focus, clarity and direction.

Question #2: Next, people often ask themselves, “What do I need to do?” Often this question is answered by a jotting down a list of things to do… However, what if instead of looking for additional things to do, you were to employ the via negativa (the negative path) and instead ask yourself “What if I don’t do this?” What would be the impact if you stopped doing thing #2, thing #3, thing #4, etc… Would you get closer to thing #1 – the most important one?

By employing the via negativa, you eliminate the possibilities and narrow down your choices on the most important action to do. In a way, you prioritise your action by eliminating the “nice” but unnecessary… and avoiding multi-tasking. Multi-tasking has been debunked. It has been shown to be ineffective. Best is to focus on one thing at a time, do it, complete it and then move on the to next one…

Question #3: That one is really sneaky because it can used in two ways…

And the question is “What can I do right now?”

Depending on where you put the emphasis (bold), you can read it “What can I do right now?” which gives you focus and direction on the type of action to perform, or you could ask yourself “What can I do right now?” in this very instant to get momentum and move forward.

I encourage you to use both formulations of question #3 as they will provide you with different, yet complementary, answers for implementation.

That’s it, here you have three powerful question to help you clarify, focus, and prioritise your action for implementing. No more excuses…

In Nutshell: Here are your 3 laws of implementation. Simply answer these 3 questions and see what happens next…

What do I want to have happen here?
What if I don’t do this? And this? And this?
What can I do right now?” and “What can I do right now?”

Dr Olivier J. Becherel

Co-founder of Mastery to Success - The Human Potential Academy

Dr Olivier J. Becherel is a Human Potential Activator who integrates Neuroscience & Human Potential to optimise performance and wellbeing. His mission is to help senior executives in the Health & Life Sciences industry realise their goals, stay cool under pressure, and break free from the invisible traps that can slow down and/or stall their performance, career and success.

To learn more, visit MasteryToSuccess.com.au

10 Roadblocks Holding You Back From More Success

by Olivier Becherel | Oct 19, 2016 | Overcoming challenges, Performance Management, Staying cool under pressure |

Spending the majority of their daily hours running the company and managing employees, executives are often ‘time poor’ to develop themselves and learn the necessary tools to optimise their performance and stay cool under pressure.

A Harvard Medical School Study found that close to 96% of senior leaders feel somewhat burned out. A staggering 30% describe it as extreme and around 18% of leaders and executives are actively disengaged.

In addition, research has also shown that many executives don’t have “good self-awareness” for figuring out when they’re reaching the edge, because they are so focused on what’s happening on the outside – in their company – that they tend to be disconnected from themselves.

Paradoxically, while the importance of self and social awareness increases as one reaches the senior executive level, the capacity for self and social awareness decreases.

The more self and social awareness becomes an important skill to master for a leader to operate optimally, the less likely he/she find the time to develop that capacity.

Lost focus, irritability, resentment, dread, lost productivity are some of the all too familiar visible signs of underlying ‘invisible’ mental roadblocks.

Having conducted extensive research on human behaviour, peak performance and leadership, and coached individuals from around the world, I’ve identified the most disruptive mental roadblocks that trap executives and prevent them from playing a bigger game.

If you currently have the impression that things are slipping through your hands, that you’ve reached an impasse or that you feel like you’ve just “hit the wall”, you may have encountered one of these roadblocks…

ROADBLOCK #1 – Feeling disconnected from your work.

ROADBLOCK #2 – Inability to manage change in a healthy way.

ROADBLOCK #3 – Consumed by work to the point that other areas of your life are being neglected

ROADBLOCK #4 – Constant overwhelm which impairs decision making and clarity of thinking.

ROADBLOCK #5 – Feeling like an impostor because you have to ‘Play The Game’ at work

ROADBLOCK #6 – Inability to self-regulate and thus experiencing the emotional roller coaster

ROADBLOCK #7 – Difficulty or inability to manage internal conflicts within your team

ROADBLOCK #8 – Lack of confidence which leads to procrastinating on the ‘Tough Stuff’

ROADBLOCK #9 – Feeling bad and/or guilty because you don’t know how to tap in to your full potential.

ROADBLOCK #10 – Not having a sounding board to share your struggle within the company.

Being a senior executive carries tremendous responsibility. You’re expected to lead by example, setting almost superhuman standards – despite the fact that you face the same daily challenges as everyone else. Although being a very real issue, this is rarely acknowledged at the senior management level….

Ignoring those and pretending that “all is under control” is not the solution. If you find yourself dealing with one or more of those roadblocks, know that it’s OK to reach out and seek some help!

“Be strong enough to stand alone, smart enough to know when you nedd help, and brave enough to ask for it…”

Because ultimately, if you don’t take care of yourself, how will you be able to take care of your employees and the company…

In Nutshell: What traps executives from achieving success and playing a bigger are mostly mental and emotional roadblocks.

The worst you can do is to deny them, suppress them, or ignore them.
The best you can do is address them and seek help when needed.

You can do anything, but not everything…

Dr Olivier J. Becherel

Co-founder of Mastery to Success - The Human Potential Academy

Dr Olivier J. Becherel is a Human Potential Activator who integrates Neuroscience & Human Potential to optimise performance and wellbeing. His mission is to help senior executives in the Health & Life Sciences industry realise their goals, stay cool under pressure, and break free from the invisible traps that can slow down and/or stall their performance, career and success.

To learn more, visit MasteryToSuccess.com.au

A quirk of our mind: What you see is not always…

by Olivier Becherel | Oct 11, 2016 | Decision-making |

Our brain is a wonderful tool that has been tweaked and refined by natural selection and one of the most exquisite quality we possess is a natural ability to detect patterns in nature and in information.

This remarkable property allows us to learn very effectively new things and remember them.

The first time you saw a chair, you had to learn everything about it, it’s colour, it’s shape, it’s texture, it’s size, etc… You had to do this a few times to create a generic representation which now allows you to identify a chair, no matter it’s colour, shape, size or texture…

From a pattern – the pattern of a chair – you built a generic representation of what a chair is, and this allows you to not have to re-learn what is a chair every time you encounter one…

Another aspect of our unique ability to detect patterns can also lead to biases in perception.

What I mean is that we may also, from time to time, identify a pattern that may not really be there… Take for example the image above.

What do you See?

If you are like most people you might say…

I see a triangle with a black border that is interrupted by a white triangle that connects three black disks.
I see a white triangle connecting three black disks on top of a triangle with a black border

I believe this will probably be the most common answers…. unless you see something different, something more creative… in that case, it’s even more interesting…

But if you carefully examine the image, is there really a white triangle?

Actually, there isn’t, it’s just white space, there is no white triangle, but our brain is fooled by the pattern which suggests that there is a white triangle… So what’s the lesson from this “illusion”.

When we don’t have all the information, we tend to fill in the blanks to create meaning.

And that often leads to misinterpretations, misunderstanding and quirks in communication…

So next time you see something, just take a minute and look carefully whether you are really seeing something, or just making it up… Identifying the difference can change the whole situation and the outcome that you are looking for…

When you see people doing something, the reason “why” you think they are doing it may not necessarily be the real reason… In doubt, why not ask them and avoid unnecessary confusion, extrapolation, delusion and/or troubles….

In Nutshell: What we see may not necessarily exist… When we don’t have all the information our brain play tricks with us and we fill in the blanks to create meaning… Take your time to observe things and people, and you may realise that what you see is not really there… That will change the consequences and outcomes of the situation… And when in doubt, simply ask for clarification if possible.

Dr Olivier J. Becherel

Co-founder of Mastery to Success - The Human Potential Academy

Dr Olivier J. Becherel is a Human Potential Activator who integrates Neuroscience & Human Potential to optimise performance and wellbeing. His mission is to help senior executives in the Health & Life Sciences industry realise their goals, stay cool under pressure, and break free from the invisible traps that can slow down and/or stall their performance, career and success.

To learn more, visit MasteryToSuccess.com.au

Getting things done

by Olivier Becherel | Sep 13, 2016 | Achieving Goals |

I’m sure you would be familiar with the phase “Eat that Frog”… Basically “Suck it up” and get it done… While it’s a great book title, it’s important to have a deeper look at what prevents people from achieving what they set their mind to…

In other words, HOW to get things done. If you study productivity theory, goal settings and many other management tools, it’s possible to be really overwhelmed and at times even confused… The more I learn and help people optimise their performance and wellbeing, the more I realise that you cannot solve a complex problem (getting things done) by making it even more complex or complicated…

Albert Einstein said “You cannot solve a problem at the same level of thinking you created it.”

Most problems resembles a paradox or a dilemma – you want to do one thing, but there is something else in the way, or something else is more “important” or “urgent”… or even quite frankly very often – you have to do something, but you don’t really feel like doing it…

Another aspect of not getting things done is that sometimes there is so much stuff around you and/or inside of you that you don’t really know where to start and therefore, nothing happens…

Today, I’m not going to touch on the “paradox / dilemma” of getting things done (that will be the topic of another post), but I’m going to explore briefly the “too much stuff” side of the issue.

Less is more

The underlying cause of why people don’t get things done when they have too much stuff is because they don’t see connections between the things themselves and they don’t see any pattern or order. In other words, they have no strategy in time and space, and have no idea how much energy doing the tasks or activities to reach their goal/outcome is going to require.

Therefore, with that much uncertainty, their brain go on the “stress mode” and resistance appears…

Our brain is an exquisite tool to find pattern among apparent chaos – that’s why we invented Science after all… and the consequence of that is that we have become very adaptable to survive.

To move from “I WANT BUT I don’t know How” to “I KNOW and I CAN” requires you to organise things/ideas in time and space to create a sequence which will inform you on the amount of energy, time and space it’s going to require to complete that task/activity.

And the simplest way to do that is to take a pen and a piece of paper and draw a sequence from START to FINISH and start placing on that sequence the different key elements that need to be in place and competed to achieve your outcome.

So here are the steps:

#1 – Identify the necessary components to achieve your outcome.

#2 – Organise them by order of priority

#3 – Draw a time line and start placing the various components on it in a the most “logical and/or intuitive way” for your outcome to happen… Make sure you have a finish date!!!! Otherwise it will be “Some day….” or “Never day….”

#4 – Now that you have your sequence in time and space, make sure the first thing to start with doesn’t require too much energy or time, so you can get started immediately.

#5 – Follow the sequence and tick things off as you complete them and reward yourself when you achieve your outcome.

As you are progressing on your timeline and getting things ticked off, you’ll notice more energy and momentum…

In Nutshell: Getting things done requires:

CLARITY to the path
CERTAINTY of the action to take (WHAT/ HOW / WHEN)
CONFIDENCE that you have the resources (time, space, energy) to do it!

And pen and paper remain the simplest tools for this…

Dr Olivier J. Becherel

Co-founder of Mastery to Success - The Human Potential Academy

Dr Olivier J. Becherel is a Human Potential Activator who integrates Neuroscience & Human Potential to optimise performance and wellbeing. His mission is to help senior executives in the Health & Life Sciences industry realise their goals, stay cool under pressure, and break free from the invisible traps that can slow down and/or stall their performance, career and success.

To learn more, visit MasteryToSuccess.com.au

5 Questions To Achieve Your Goals

by Olivier Becherel | Sep 6, 2016 | Achieving Goals |

When it comes to achieving goals, most people focus on the definition or formulation of the goal. I’m sure you’ve heard about the S.M.A.R.T goals which stand for:

S = Specific (What specifically do your want?)
M = Measurable (How will you know when you’ve reached it?) = Evidence procedure
A = Attainable (Is it in your power to accomplish it?)
R = Realistic (Can you realistically achieve it?)
T = Timely (When do you want to accomplish it?)

Another way I learned to formulate a goal is to use the C.R.E.A.T.E frame:

C = Clear and concise (Maximum 2 sentences)
R = Realistic (as above)
E = Ecological (This is about considering the consequences of achieving your goal for: yourself, your family, your community and the world/planet)
A = As now (State your goal in the present tense “I am… or I have…”)
T = Towards what you want and Timed (Make sure it is aligned with your Core Values and you Set a Date on when you want to accomplish it)
E = End Step/Evidence procedure (Have a clear picture of how the end step looks like so you’ll know when you reach it).

As you can see the two frame to set goals are fairly similar, with some differences that are important to consider… But what I really want to share with you today is what comes next, because setting a goal without taking action, is not going to help you achieve it… A lot of people stop at the goal formulation (THE OUTCOME), follows is about THE PROCESS.

“What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.” – Zig Ziglar

In addition to formulating your goal carefully, the following 5 Questions is what will make the difference whether you achieve your goal or not… and to give you a hint, It’s not just about the Question you ask, it’s more about the sequence in which you ask the question….

Why? (purpose, cause) – What is your reason, your purpose?
What? (service, product, idea, vehicle) – What is it specifically you would love to do?

Here is the most common mistake people make. They ask themselves How? And get bogged down here… The quality question to ask next is not How but…

When? (put a date to start) – What is your time frame or sequence? Without a date, it’s always tomorrow or someday…and in most cases it’s neverday…
Who? (who do I need to connect with? Who is my target/audience?) – Who do you need to contact/connect with to move forward?
How? (Chunk things in bite size to avoid overwhelm) – What are the steps (the sequence in time and space) to follow?

In Nutshell: Setting goals is much more than formulating your goals correctly. Of course it’s very important to be really clear and realistic on your Goal (OUTCOME), but it’s even more crucial to be Clear on the PROCESS. Most of the time people, have the why and the what , and then they ask the wrong question. They ask HOW?

The key is to follow the order of these questions. “When?” and “Who?” before the “How?”, because “when” and “who” define the sequence in time and space which then allows the strategy (HOW) to be put in place.

Dr Olivier J. Becherel

Co-founder of Mastery to Success - The Human Potential Academy

Dr Olivier J. Becherel is a Human Potential Activator who integrates Neuroscience & Human Potential to optimise performance and wellbeing. His mission is to help senior executives in the Health & Life Sciences industry realise their goals, stay cool under pressure, and break free from the invisible traps that can slow down and/or stall their performance, career and success.

To learn more, visit MasteryToSuccess.com.au