546: The Formula to Achieve Your #1 Goal

[INTRODUCTION]

 

Hal Elrod: Hello, friends, welcome to the Achieve Your Goals podcast. This is your host, Hal Elrod. And today, we are going to talk about How to Achieve Your #1 Goal. If you are like me and most people, you probably have a lot of goals, right? More than one, or at least a lot of areas of your life that you want to make meaningful improvements in, and it can feel overwhelming, like where do you focus your energy? Oh, I need to read a book on parenting. But wait, I need to fix my marriage. But wait, I need to make more money. So many goals, so little time. So, we’re going to talk about how to achieve your number one most important goal today and we’re going to break it down into three very simple, very actionable steps that you can literally take today right away.

 

Before we dive in, I want to take just a minute or two to tell you about our sponsors that bring you today’s show. First is CURED Nutrition. Now, I bookend my days with two of CURED Nutrition’s most popular products, Rise and Night Caps. In the morning to help me optimize my mental clarity and focus, I take Rise immediately after I wake up. Rise is their expertly formulated brain-boosting nootropic blend that combines the power of lion’s mane and Cordyceps mushrooms, rhodiola, ginseng, and broad-spectrum CBD. And then every night before bed to help me fall asleep and stay asleep, I take CURED Nutrition’s product Night Caps. It is an all-natural way to support deep restorative sleep.

 

Now, we all know the impact of sleep on our health, but it’s not just about the hours spent in bed, it is about the quality of those hours. And that’s where Night Caps come in. These capsules are formulated with 30 milligrams of CBD, and 5 milligrams of CBN, a minor cannabinoid known for its strong sleep-supporting properties. Think of CBD as a calming and CBN as a sedating effect, and these work together to regulate your sleep without disrupting your body’s natural clock. If you want to improve your mental clarity and focus in the morning and your sleep at night, head over to CuredNutrition.com/Hal, that’s CuredNutrition.com/Hal, and use the code Hal, H-A-L, to get 20% off both Rise and Night Caps today, so you can sleep well and wake up at your best.

 

And last but not least, if you want to improve your health, lose weight, and have more energy, enhance your ability to focus as well and achieve any of your health-related goals, I highly recommend Organifi. I’ve used their products for eight years, longer than they’ve been a sponsor of this podcast. And I start my day with Organifi and I go throughout the day utilizing their Red Juice in the morning before I work out. It helps my pump so I can push harder in the gym in my workout.

 

I take their protein powder directly after my workout. It’s a plant-based organic protein powder. And those together help my workout, and I’m right now maybe the strongest I’ve ever been at 45, definitely the strongest that I’ve been in many years, and Organifi is a big part of that. So, if you want to improve your workouts, have more energy without caffeine, and increase your protein intake so your muscles build bigger, better, faster, head over to Organifi.com/Hal, that is spelled O-R-G-A-N-I-F-I, Organifi.com/Hal, and use the code Hal to get 20% off your entire order. Again, losing weight, boosting your muscles, improving your health, having more energy, Organifi has the full spectrum of fitness goals, health goals covered. All right, goal achievers, without further ado, let’s dive into How to Achieve Your #1 Goal, and hope you enjoy.

 

[INTERVIEW]

 

Hal Elrod: So, last week’s episode was about taking your personal development to the next level. And that was a conversation with Rene Rodriguez, author of Amplify Your Influence, fantastic human being. I highly recommend you go back and listen to Episode 545, again, taking your personal development to the next level.

 

This week, I’m preparing to give a speech at a conference for Cutco, which you may or may not know was the company I worked for, for six years from age 19 to 25. And it was there that I went from being what I would say is below average mediocre, however you wanted to find it at most things in my life, didn’t get good grades, didn’t excel at sports, wasn’t popular, you name it. And that was for the first two decades of my life. Of course, the first five years, I was a baby, but for my entire life up until that point, I did not have a really strong identity as somebody who was capable of achieving anything extraordinary. And having spent my entire life that it was at Cutco that I realized I was capable of more than I ever thought possible, and so are you, by the way, you’re capable of more than you ever thought possible.

 

Now, this isn’t going to be like some rah-rah, motivational, you can do anything to put your mind to a speech. That’s not what today’s episode is about. It is about some fundamentals that I was reminded because I was thinking back and preparing for this speech. And it’s fun, I’m excited. I’m going back to my old Cutco stomping ground, if you will. I’ll be talking to a roomful of folks, probably average age is 20 to 30, relatively young, some call it college students. And so, I was thinking back to that time and what my mindset was at that time and what enabled me to achieve not only my goals at Cutco.

 

At Cutco, I was very blessed, I had a really phenomenal mentor, Jesse Levine, that hired me. Well, personal development was his foundation. And he taught me a lot about mindset and goal setting. And if it wasn’t for him, I would not have gone on to break a bunch of Cutco records and stuff. I really owe most of my success to at least the foundation of was what he taught me and how he held me accountable, and so on and so forth.

 

And so, as I’m thinking back to that, I’m thinking about you and I was thinking of what, there were three different podcasts I was going to record today. There was one on what not to put in your body. So, I’ll do that one in the future here. How to be likable because I’m reading the book, How to Win Friends & Influence People with my daughter, and a couple of friends and his son, a friend and his son. And so, that’s an episode that I’ve got a few different ideas of titles that I want to, or topics that I want to talk about.

 

Another one is my journey with spirituality and religion. So, these are all, I was going back and forth between, I guess, four different topics today. And this is the one that I landed on, how to achieve your most important goals, and thinking back to not only how I started in Cutco with that, but then how did I take the mindset, the strategies that I learned in a very specific environment, selling Cutco kitchen knives? And then how do I apply that to my income beyond Cutco to starting a business, becoming an entrepreneur, increasing my income, achieving goals beyond what I thought were even possible for me? And so, that’s what I want to talk about today.

 

And we’re going to share three really simple, but really important– so don’t ever let simple go over your head. In fact, one of my favorite quotes from last week’s episode from Rene Rodriguez is that– oh, gosh, how did he say it? Now, I’m blanking on it. But it was something like our biggest breakthroughs or the greatest wisdom is found in cliches, the greatest wisdom or the greatest lessons, I forgot exactly how he said it, but the greatest lessons, the greatest wisdom are found in cliches. And what he said is the reason something becomes a cliché is because it is such a profound truth, such a powerful truth or strategy that people repeat it over and over and over again. And then other people become desensitized to it because they’ve heard it over and over and over again. But according to Rene, that’s the greatest wisdom is found in cliches. That was a really profound paradigm shift for me.

 

So, how to achieve your most important goals? And part of what sparked this is not only this Cutco talk that I’m working on right now. But in 2011, I had a really profound breakthrough. And I think this alone, I’ll share this with you right now, and I think this alone, this might be the breakthrough for you if you consider this, how it applies to your own life. And the breakthrough was at that time in my life, 2011, my daughter, I think she had just turned a year old, year and a half, somewhere in that range. My wife and I, we were renting an apartment. And finances were kind of tight. We were coming off the 2008 financial crisis, right? It was two or three, two and a half years later, and I was still rebuilding. My credit was still shot. I had foreclosed on the house in 2008. So, I’m in a rebuilding phase. And finances are still really tight.

 

And I remember during a Miracle Morning, it was probably a prayer or a meditation, some form of silence in the morning, when I had a breakthrough, just got some clarity. Then I realized I feel very fulfilled in every area of my life right now, or almost every area, that’s kind of the point. Meaning, my marriage was great at the time. As a dad, I was reading books on how to be a new dad. I was reading books on marriage. Spiritually, I was very, very connected to God and I was reading books on spirituality and books on enlightenment and really exploring different facets of that, which I’ll talk more about when I record that episode on my journey with spirituality and religion.

 

But basically, every area of my life, I feel like I was excelling. And my relationships with my mom and dad were great, and my sister. Like, my health and fitness was really on point. I was working out five days a week. So, I really felt every area of my life, I am excelling in, except my finances. And I thought, the interesting thing, and you might be able to relate to this, is I almost avoid focusing on my finances because there’s fear there, there’s stress there. And so, I looked at my stack of books, and none of them were about making money. The one area of my life that I wasn’t excelling in, that caused me stress was my finances at the time. Everything else was going pretty good. And I realize, I thought, what am I doing?

 

And it just occurred to me, and this is so obvious, and it’s so simple, yet, sometimes we miss the obvious. I need to focus. I need to invest time and energy and personal development into figuring out and focusing on how to make more money, how to increase my income. And I took all of the books that I’ve been reading, the parenting books and the marriage books and the spiritual books, and I took all of them and I put them away in my closet. And I went through my bookshelf and I had plenty of books on finances. And when I say finances, it was also like business-related books.

 

At that time, in 2011, my almost only source of income, only significant source of income was coaching. So, I was doing one-on-one coaching, right? And I started that in 2006. And so, this is now five years later. And I had lost over half my clients during the financial crash of 2008. Then I had doubled that client load and built it back. And so, I had a sustainable income, but I wasn’t getting ahead, right? I was making enough to pay the bills, but there was always that, like, (a) I’m not making enough money to save for a home down payment, which my wife and I, again, we’re in an apartment. I’m 32 years old at the time and had owned a home at 26 and then lost it, and so, I really wanted to get back to having a home. Now, I had a daughter, we were planning another child, had a family, and I wanted to have our own home. But I wasn’t ahead, I couldn’t get ahead financially.

 

And so, I decided, okay, I’m going to only read books on figuring out how to grow my business, get more clients, make more money, and also how to effectively manage my money. And so, I know one of the books, I think I had read earlier that I brought back off the shelf was Secrets of the Millionaire Mind by T. Harv Eker, classic, and another one, which really became the game changer for me was called Multiple Streams of Coaching Income. And the funny part is I had bought it, I don’t know, probably six months, a year earlier, it was sitting on my shelf. I was reading books on spirituality where I felt very strong and connected in that area, but it was easy to read that. There was no pressure, right? Think about that.

 

If reading books on spirituality, there was no pressure to implement it, it was easy, and even marriage, my marriage was already going well. So, if your marriage, and I’ve been there before where my wife and I, we’re at our wits’ end. And that’s a stressful time to read a book on marriage when you need it. It’s when we need the book the most, when we need to learn in an area the most, but that area might be a source of stress or fear, and so, we tend to avoid it in any way possible. And for me, finances were kind of that area at that time.

 

So, I pulled that book off the shelf, Multiple Streams of Coaching Income. I read it and I had a breakthrough and, at that time, I was coaching some Cutco managers and ended up creating an opportunity for Cutco managers that were new. And they were just starting out, weren’t making a lot of money yet, and building their business. And I offered five managers a coaching call with me. And instead of, normally, I charged at that time, I think, it was like $500 a month for two 45-minute coaching calls. And so, what I offered, it was for five managers to come on these two coaching calls and divide that $500 five ways. So, I charged them $97 a month for those five folks.

 

And we started it out, and they were raving. And I think that their first or second call, they said, “Oh my God, this is so helpful. This is great.” And it was actually not even my idea. One of them said, “Hey, we have more people that want to come on to the coaching call. Can anybody else join for $97?” And at that time, it was almost like, duh, I’m reading Multiple Streams of Coaching Income, she’s talking about the power of group coaching. Because now, you’re leveraging your time. Instead of having one person paying you X amount of dollars, you could have 5 or 10 or 20 or 30 people on that same call, taking the same amount of time from you, but now you’re scaling your income, you’re multiplying your impact with those people, helping more people than just the one in the one-on-one coaching setting, now in the group coaching, and then you’re scaling your income. So, I was like, “That’s a great idea. Let’s open this up.”

 

And so, I reached out to my five coaching clients that were on those calls and said, “Hey, if you all will refer,” and this was a strategy I learned in the book, “if you all will, have anybody in your life, any other managers that you think that would benefit from this content, if you refer them and they sign up, for every person that signs up, I will take $10 off of your monthly coaching fee. So, if you have 10 people sign up, then your coaching is free.” And I told them, “I’m not going to pay you, like this isn’t multilevel. You can’t recruit a bunch of people, and I’m going to start paying out,” but I said, “The best you can get is free,” right? “So, you’ve helped 10 people get coaching, and you’d get your coaching for free.”

 

And long story short, within two months, I had grown that five-person, $97 a month coaching, to 70 people. So, in that same thing, all I did is ask for referrals, contact those people, send them an email with the details of the program, jump on a quick call, and tell them about it and sign them up. And I just rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. And within two months, I went from $500 a month for those two coaching calls that I was delivering to $7,000 a month for those two coaching calls that I was delivering. And eventually, that program grew to 220 people, $22,000 a month, within I think six months, give or take, maybe a year, but for those same two calls that I was conducting for the coaching.

 

And so, I share that story with you because that result happened based on these three tips that I’m going to share with you today. Okay? So, these three tips, and you can apply these to any area of your life. In fact, here’s step one. We’re going to give three steps today. Okay, step one, choose one area of your life. Again, not rocket science, but whether it’s your health, your finances, for me, it was finances, right? Your marriage, parenting, whatever area of your life you want to improve or you maybe desperately need to improve right now, choose one area of your life.

 

And what that does, it does a few things. Number one, clarity is the first step in any transformation. Clarity is the first step. You’ve got to get clarity on what do I want to change, right? Why do I want to change it? Why is this important? Why is this a must for me? And get really clear on what that area is. And now, many of us have more than one area, but choosing one area, what you focus on, it’s like a laser, of course. And what you focus on, you are more likely, the more focused you are, the more effective you are at changing something. And you may have heard this before, but what you focus on expands. And what that means is it expands not only possibilities like, well, now, I’m focusing in improving this area, so now the possibilities of how it can improve are expanding because I’m focusing on improving it.

 

But also, in terms of your reticular activating system, which is the part of your brain that once you become aware of something, the examples always used when you buy a certain car, now you notice that car everywhere on the road when you used to not notice it. But because you have focused on that car, now you notice it everywhere. Well, if you were focusing on increasing your income, your reticular activating system is allowing you to now pick up clues and cues where you wouldn’t have otherwise notice them. So, that simple choosing that one area of your life you want to focus on, it’s the first crucial step, getting that clarity and having that discernment to decide, okay, yeah, I want to improve five areas of my life, but I’m going to pick one.

 

And another, and I don’t want to go too deep into the story, but just a high-level overview is in 2005, so what, six years before the previous story, I wanted to have the best year of my life. I wanted it to be like the year where I achieved level 10 success in every area of my life. And I decided if I focus on trying to achieve excellence in every area of my life, I’m probably just going to scratch the surface in every area of my life. So, I had to pick the one area of my life that was the most important and I chose having my best year ever in Cutco because it was my last year with the company. So, I set a goal to double my sales, to have my best year ever by far.

 

And then I also wanted to write my first book, which in and of itself, that was a huge undertaking. I also want to get in the best shape of my life. And I think it was like, at that time I was single, I was vain. I wanted to put on 20 pounds of muscle. I think that was the goal, right? I wanted to also meet the woman. I was tired of dating. I wanted to settle down, meet the woman of my dreams. I also wanted to launch my speaking career because that was my dream. By the end of the year, I wanted to get paid to give a speech. I’d never been paid. I’d given probably 50 speeches in Cutco for free. But I want to get paid and actually become a professional speaker. I forgot what else. I also had, I think, goals around spirituality and relationships and other areas of my life.

 

Well, bottom line is fast forward to the end of the year, I had doubled my sales for the year, doubled my income. I had finished writing my first book Taking Life Head On! I had given my first paid speech for $500 at countrywide home loans. I had met Ursula who became my wife years later. I rock climbed three days a week. I put on, I think, it was 17 pounds of muscle, like I achieved every single area of every goal that I had that year.

 

And the point here is this. It was because I chose one area to focus on. And it was my Cutco goal. And what happens when you choose one area to focus on, you don’t dilute your focus, you don’t dilute your energy, you don’t dilute your attention or your efforts across all these areas. And really, then enables you or doesn’t enable you to excel at anything, you just scratch the surface of your potential in all these areas. However, by focusing on the one area, it focused me. I had to develop consistency and discipline and discernment. And I had to develop great habits, I mean, that one area. And by focusing on that, and then for me, I’m not allowed to work on the other areas until I follow through with my commitments for the day. Like on a daily basis, I had to follow through with my commitments for that one area. I had to make my sales calls in the morning before I earned the right to focus on these other goals in my life. But at the end of the year, again, the proof is in the pudding. I achieved all of the goals, literally, every single one. And I believe it’s because I didn’t try to achieve every single one, as much as I got clarity on what was the one area of my life that I wanted to focus on.

 

So, a couple of examples from my own life, 2011, focused on increasing my income. And this leads to step number two. So, step one is choose one area of your life that you want to improve. Step two is schedule time to learn in that area. Remember Jim Rohn’s famous words that became foundational for my life and the Miracle Morning, it was your level of success will seldom exceed your level of personal development.

 

So, what’s important here is that you’re highly intentional and specific with what you’re learning. Remember what I did, once I chose my one area of life, which for me was I want to increase my income. The other areas are good right now, but I’m stressed out financially. So, I’m going to put all the books away that don’t relate to increasing my income. And I’m going to look through my bookshelf and I’m going to pull the books off the shelf only that are related to me increasing my income. And that became the main one, I mentioned was Multiple Streams of Coaching Income. Whatever business you’re in, if you’re in a business, finding a book on how to increase your income or grow your client base in that business is a great option. Whether it’s real estate or you’re a doctor, there are books on increasing income in virtually every profession.

 

So, schedule time to learn in that area. And again, I’m using my example of increasing income. For you, it might be saving your marriage. When I had cancer, another great example, when I had cancer, my one area was I have to beat cancer, nothing else matters. So, I focused all of my learning on beating cancer. I was not reading books on making more money. I wasn’t reading books on improving marriage. There was no room for that at that point. If I didn’t beat cancer, I would die, and nothing else mattered. And so, that became the one area, and I scheduled time to learn in that area.

 

I read the book Chris Beat Cancer. I read the book Radical Remission, I read the book– what are the other books? Life After Cancer. No, that came later. Oh, The Truth about Cancer. So, everything I learned was focused on that one area. And what happened? Of course, beating cancer. So, there’s so much power in you choosing one area of your life and then focusing your learning in that one area.

 

And then step three is schedule a time to implement what you learn. And that might sound like a given, but how often have we done that where we read a book and we trick ourselves into thinking that that is sufficient, that that’s good enough? I’m doing the reading, I’m learning, and then you learn something, you have an aha. And you tell yourself, wow, I made progress because I learned something. That’s true, it’s definitely better than not learning something. But if we don’t implement what we’re learning, if we don’t schedule time to implement what we’re learning, then what value does the learning provide us other than feeling better?

 

And feeling better is valuable, don’t get me wrong. But if you’re trying to improve an area of your life, not just feel better about an area of your life, now, if the area’s mental health, then that is the improvement, right? I feel better, I am happier. I am more at peace. I feel more in control of my mental and emotional state. Okay, in that case, yes, feel better.

 

But typically, even improving your mental health involves integrating habits into your life, implementing habits, such as, oh, I’m exercising now, I feel better. I’m working on things that bring me joy, I feel better. I’m making progress in my life. I feel better. I’m improving relationships, I feel better, right? So, more often than not, if not all the time, there are aspects that you need to implement.

 

And so, scheduling time to implement what you learn is step three. And the last thing I’ll say on that is ideally, it’s a daily recurring appointment with yourself. Whether it’s seven days a week, that’s not necessary. It could be five days a week. My favorite schedule has always been Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday. I love taking Wednesday’s off of whatever my daily grind is because it gives me a brain break, mental break, a physical break, right? It allows me to focus on something else and never feel like, just not that I’m burnt out. When I was in Cutco, my schedule was always– I made calls and did appointments on Mondays and Tuesdays, I took Wednesday’s off, and just took care of myself or ran errands or just got things done that weren’t related to my number one focus. And then I work Thursday, Friday. And so, you’re never working more than two days in a row, which is a very nice rhythm I found.

 

But again, ideally, make it a daily scheduled appointment with yourself to focus on implementing what it is that you’re learning. And that enables you to keep it top of mind for one. And this is opposed to like one day a week where okay, one day a week, I’m going to spend four hours a day on this one area, that’s one way to do it. There’s not a wrong or right. But to me, the benefit of making it a daily recurring appointment with yourself is that it enables you to keep it top of mind. So, you’re thinking about it every day, and then that helps your insights, your ideas, your breakthroughs to consistently evolve over time.

 

All right, so that’s it, y’all. Let’s keep this short and sweet. How to achieve your most important goals? Number one, choose one area of your life to focus on. Focus is power. And what you focus on expands both your possibilities as well as the insights that you gain based on your reticular activating system, having that one thing you’re focusing on. Number two, schedule time to learn in that area. And number three, schedule time to implement what it is that you are learning.

 

Goal achievers, I love you so much. I hope you are well. And implement this today, implement what you just learned, right? That is your first, start with step three, schedule time to implement what we just talked about. And those are three simple steps that they will absolutely transform your life and help you to achieve your most important goals. I love you so much, and I will talk to you next week.

[END]