Goal Setting That Actually Works ｜ FRIDAY FIELD NOTES
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
193.23701
Summary
As of the release of this podcast, which will be Friday the 8th, we are exactly one week away from the opening of our brotherhood, the Iron Council. In this episode, Ryan talks about the 5 components of goal setting that actually works.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
You're a man of action. You live life to the fullest, embrace your fears, and boldly chart
00:00:04.980
your own path. When life knocks you down, you get back up one more time, every time.
00:00:10.420
You are not easily deterred or defeated, rugged, resilient, strong. This is your life. This is who
00:00:17.200
you are. This is who you will become. At the end of the day, and after all is said and done,
00:00:22.780
you can call yourself a man. Gentlemen, what is going on today? My name is Ryan Michler.
00:00:27.680
I'm your host and the founder of the Order of Man podcast and movement. Welcome here today
00:00:32.000
and welcome back. As of the release of this podcast, which will be Friday the 8th, we're
00:00:37.960
exactly one week away from the opening of our brotherhood, the Iron Council. If you're not
00:00:44.040
familiar with what this is, it's like I said, a brotherhood of over 1,000 men all working
00:00:49.520
together to hold each other accountable, camaraderie, brotherhood, banter, friendship, but most of
00:00:56.400
all we're there to get results. That's actually what I want to talk with you about today on this
00:01:00.200
podcast. Before I get into that, I just want to mention again, one week out from the opening
00:01:04.540
of the Iron Council, everybody's thinking about what they want to do in 2024. We have got some
00:01:10.120
ideas, tools, and resources for you at orderofman.com slash ironcouncil. Just drop your name and your
00:01:16.220
email in the box when you go to orderofman.com slash ironcouncil. Then I will send you an email
00:01:21.880
personally the night before and the day of that we open the Iron Council up again, December 15th.
00:01:28.440
So I hope to see you there. All right, guys, let's talk about goal setting that actually works.
00:01:33.340
Everybody starts thinking about goal setting and goal planning as we're winding down the year,
00:01:38.440
which is so strange to think how quickly this year has gone and we roll into 2024. I want to talk
00:01:44.200
with you today about goal setting that actually works because so many of us have set goals,
00:01:49.400
set dreams, ambitions, desires, vision, planning. There's an infinite number of systems and tools
00:01:56.080
and resources available. I've used so many of them to varying degrees of success. I've spent a lot of
00:02:02.880
money. I've spent a lot of time. I've spent a lot of energy on things that not only don't work
00:02:08.140
scientifically, even we know they don't work. There are scientific methods and metrics that we can
00:02:15.360
actually look at to determine what works when it comes to goal setting. And over the past eight to
00:02:20.980
nine years, we've developed a system that will inevitably produce results. And the only reason
00:02:27.260
that it wouldn't produce results for you is you don't do it. That's it. If you don't do what I'm
00:02:33.080
going to share with you today, then you just won't produce results. And that's been true in my life.
00:02:37.560
I'm not even saying that arrogantly. That has been true in my life. When I don't produce the desired
00:02:41.980
result, it's because I'm not following the system that I've helped create and develop and use and
00:02:47.660
utilize with, of course, thousands of years of data and research. That's it. It's really that simple.
00:02:54.460
So let's just jump right into it. There's five components of goal setting that actually works.
00:03:01.860
Number one, it doesn't even have anything. Well, it does a little bit. It doesn't have much to do with
00:03:06.100
goals specifically. But the first thing you need to do is you need to have a vision for where you're
00:03:12.340
going. It's a bit like a map. If I want to get from here to that mountain outside of my window, and I
00:03:19.660
don't know how to get there, I'm going to need some sort of map, some sort of navigation, even just my
00:03:25.580
eyesight to see I got to go that way. But I have to have something to aim at. Because if I don't, all the
00:03:33.340
goal setting, all the goal planning, all the other stuff in the world that's available is meaningless.
00:03:38.640
It's insignificant if I don't know exactly where I'm going. And it's not wishy-washy. It's not like,
00:03:46.200
I kind of want to make it over there. It's very, very specific. And when it comes to a vision,
00:03:51.800
it needs to be emotionally charged. So a vision might be the kind of man that you envision yourself
00:03:58.240
being in one year by the end of 2024, or in five years, 10 years, 30 years, what kind of man are
00:04:05.340
you? And you need to document this. You need to write this down. And you need to revisit it often.
00:04:10.740
Are you a man who, well, let me say it this way. Here's some questions to consider. How do you show
00:04:16.680
up when things get hard? How does your wife look at you? How do your children look at you? How do your
00:04:21.920
employees look at you? If you were to die today, what would be your legacy? What would they say or eulogy?
00:04:28.240
How many people would show up? What would be the attitude and demeanor of those who did show up?
00:04:32.720
Would they feel obligated to be there because they have to? Or would they want to be there
00:04:37.900
because of the type of impact that you had in their life? And if that's the case,
00:04:41.640
what type of impact exactly did you have? What are the values that drive and motivate you?
00:04:48.880
What are the characteristics and behaviors and patterns and beliefs and activities and actions in
00:04:54.560
life do you portray? If your kids, I'm giving you prompts here, but if your kids were to describe
00:05:03.640
you, would you be proud of that kind of answer? The more emotionally charged you can be when it
00:05:11.080
comes to your vision. And this doesn't need to be long, by the way, but it should cover four key areas,
00:05:15.900
your physical health, your mental health, your emotional health, and your spiritual health.
00:05:21.240
Physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. And it should cover all four of those. It could be a
00:05:27.620
sentence. It could be four sentences for each of those areas. It could be a paragraph or a page.
00:05:33.380
I wouldn't go longer than a page because at that point, it just becomes convoluted and watered down.
00:05:39.400
And if it's two or three or five pages or a journal or a book, how often are you going to look at that
00:05:44.360
thing? Probably not very often. And it's not very specific. What you'll find is as you write your
00:05:49.360
vision down, there's some commonalities and some themes among the way that you show up physically,
00:05:54.860
for example, versus mentally and emotionally. And if there's some common themes, then that doesn't
00:05:59.740
need to be expanded into four different areas. It could be one common value or virtue that you'd
00:06:04.860
like to espouse that is important to you. Write down your vision. And this isn't necessarily
00:06:11.580
hyper-specific. We'll get to that. It does need to be hyper-specific,
00:06:17.220
but you do need to think about the type of man that you want to be.
00:06:21.560
I watch a lot of movies. I read a lot of books. Obviously, I talk to a lot of inspiring men.
00:06:26.120
They all have characteristics that I'm inspired by, that I'm motivated by. Whether they're fictional
00:06:31.580
in a book or a movie, for example, or whether they're actual human beings, I'm inspired by these
00:06:38.300
guys. And so I take what I'm inspired by and I infuse that into my vision so that I can be the
00:06:44.380
kind of man that I want to be. And I think one thing that I don't talk often about, that I don't
00:06:49.340
actually think is often talked about, is art as a form of motivation and inspiration. And I'm talking
00:06:55.020
about music. I'm talking about painting or photography. I'm talking about movies and television.
00:07:01.180
There's opportunity for you to infuse art into your vision. We don't talk about it a lot, but I just
00:07:09.180
watched Maverick, for example, last night. And that's art. Those are actors. They're portraying
00:07:17.920
a part. They aren't really those people, right? But they're portraying those parts. And the
00:07:23.380
characteristics espoused by those characters are characteristics that I want to have in my life.
00:07:28.280
And so I'm inspired by art. I have art all around my office. I've got artwork here. I've got a moose
00:07:33.880
over there. I've got pictures that I have yet to have hung up. I've got an incredible print of
00:07:40.480
dark angel Michael. This is art. It inspires me. This is art. This. This is art. Protect,
00:07:49.380
provide, preside. This is art or merchandise. There's art. There's things all around us that
00:07:53.600
are going to motivate you. You might be driving down the road and see a billboard and it motivates you.
00:07:56.760
You might watch a movie and it motivates you. You might listen to a song and it motivates you.
00:08:00.580
Whatever you can do to infuse something that inspires and motivates you. All right. I think
00:08:05.100
I beat a dead horse on that one. Vision is number one. Once we have a vision, now we can reverse
00:08:09.980
engineer the process into actual goal setting. And again, we're only going to talk. We're going to
00:08:15.860
talk about four key areas. We're going to talk about physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.
00:08:20.140
And when it comes to goal setting, there's a couple of different components. Number one,
00:08:23.540
we can't have it be too long. So I don't, I personally don't like, and again, this, this is
00:08:30.500
science suggests this is the case that if your goal is expanded over too broad of a, or too long
00:08:36.060
of a timeline, you're going to, you're not going to complete it. It's too long. And so you can't keep
00:08:42.220
your heart and mind and soul into it. But also if it's too short, then you don't have the time
00:08:47.860
required to accomplish something worthwhile. If I want, if I want to say, for example, if I want to
00:08:53.140
lose a one pound this week, I mean, look, I could lose a pound, but is that significant? Is that
00:08:59.320
meaningful? Is that really driving actionable change in my life? Probably not. It's too short
00:09:06.560
of a timeline. The perfect timeline that I found is 12 weeks. And that's why we have our 12 week battle
00:09:13.140
planner. It's enough time to accomplish meaningful change in your life, but it's short enough that it
00:09:20.940
will keep you engaged and motivated towards the goal that you're going to accomplish. And the next
00:09:25.680
step, the task that you're going to need to do on a daily basis in order to achieve those results.
00:09:31.520
So what I would like you to do, whether you use our tools and resources like this battle planner
00:09:36.060
or our battle ready program, which is a free program at order of man.com slash battle ready,
00:09:41.520
or you join the iron council, which is the, the, the creme de la creme, if you will, of,
00:09:47.260
of planning and goal setting and actually achieving those things, whatever you use is fine,
00:09:54.760
but I want you to have it in those four key areas. Physical. What do you want to do physically?
00:10:00.420
So for example, in the first quarter of 2024, I want to be at 13% body fat. Okay. We can measure that.
00:10:08.140
We can track that. We can figure out what we need to do in order to accomplish that because
00:10:13.620
millions of other people have done it. So how have they done it? Good. We're going to model those,
00:10:21.680
Or you might say, I want to pay off $20,000 of debt by the first quarter of 2024. Okay.
00:10:28.720
Okay. Let's reverse engineer that. What do we need to do? Well, we need to put down, you know,
00:10:33.340
pay off. If we break it down on a monthly basis, what would that be about roughly just under $7,000
00:10:38.620
a month, $6,666 or whatever it comes to, right? That that's what we needed to pay down per month,
00:10:45.860
which equates to a little over $200 a day. Hey, how do we do that?
00:10:51.020
How do we make sense of that? We can look at the numbers. It's, it's not hard
00:10:57.480
when it comes to something a little bit more challenging to, to quantify for your spirituality.
00:11:03.780
For example, there might be a course that you want to take online, or maybe you decide that
00:11:11.700
you want to read the Bible in the first quarter of 2024. Okay. Well let's look at how many pages
00:11:19.080
are in the Bible or how many chapters or how many verses based on how you want to measure it.
00:11:22.800
And we'll reverse engineer it. And here's what you need to read every single day.
00:11:26.800
There's no guesswork in that, by the way, like just jump online and say, read the Bible in 90 days.
00:11:31.340
And I'm sure there's a program out there that says you have to read, you know, three pages or
00:11:35.020
whatever it comes to. It's this, this doesn't need to be complex. And anybody who tells you it's
00:11:43.000
complicated, it's hard, or you look at their system and it's, it's, it's a nightmare and you
00:11:48.940
have to like track every little thing and all that they're lying to you. And we're lying to
00:11:54.780
ourselves often. Cause what I do see happening quite often is people will make things deliberately
00:12:00.460
more challenging than they need to. So they have an excuse. Well, it was hard. So I couldn't do it.
00:12:10.280
Well, now you don't have an excuse. It's not hard. It's actually very simple. You just need to
00:12:18.180
execute it. And if you're trying to make it more complicated than it needs to be, then
00:12:21.620
you might be doing that even subconsciously in order to absolve yourself of the actions and the
00:12:28.260
results that you will produce through the actions that you are finding is so difficult to complicate
00:12:33.180
or administer in your life. So number one vision, right? Number two is now we're going to have our
00:12:40.180
objectives in those four key areas. Now, number three, again, we're reverse engineering the process.
00:12:46.040
So now we're going to move into tactics. These are things that you're going to do on a daily basis.
00:12:50.420
So the example I used, one of the examples was read the Bible in the first quarter of 2024.
00:12:56.140
Perfect. What do we need to do on a daily basis? Well, we need to read five pages from the Bible.
00:13:01.540
That's it. So we take this vision that we have, which is very emotionally charged and driven.
00:13:07.420
We reverse engineer it into the objectives, read the Bible in the first quarter of 2024.
00:13:11.220
And now it's very black and white. All I have to do right now is read five pages. I don't need to
00:13:18.420
worry about anything else. This is the beauty of goal setting that actually works. I don't need to
00:13:24.420
worry about anything else. All I need to worry about is hitting five pages every single day.
00:13:31.220
Now I think intent matters. So if we're just scrambling through it before midnight, because we
00:13:35.520
forgot to do it and we got busy and everything else, I don't think that's going to be as meaningful
00:13:40.460
as waking up deliberately and intentionally 15 minutes earlier. So you can read five pages of
00:13:45.820
the Bible. The way we do things matters, but the objective is all the same. All I have to do is read
00:13:51.520
five pages. If I want to pay off that $20,000 of debt, you guys correct me on the math. I might be
00:13:59.820
wrong, but all I have to do is pay off just over $200 a day. For some of you, you might think that's
00:14:06.480
daunting. I don't care what the goal is. For some of you, you might think that's not daunting enough.
00:14:10.420
It doesn't matter to me what your goal is. If it's paying off $2,000 in a quarter, great. If it's
00:14:16.400
20,000, great. If it's 200,000, even better. I don't know what it is for you. All I'm saying is that
00:14:22.800
it should be something that you can quantify, that you can measure, and that you can actually work
00:14:28.420
towards. So if it's $200 a day, great. All you have to do is check a box. Did I pay off debt? Did
00:14:32.740
I send a check to my creditors for $200 today? Yes or no? It's like being pregnant. It's not maybe,
00:14:40.900
it's not kind of, it's not sort of. You either are pregnant or you're not pregnant. It's one or the
00:14:45.580
other. Male and female. You're either a male or a female. It's binary. You're not one or the other.
00:14:51.900
You're a man or a woman. That's it. Same thing with the tactics. You either did it or you didn't
00:14:59.200
do it. And I don't care about your excuses. I don't care about your justifications. I don't
00:15:03.640
care about your rationalizations. And I don't care because I'm not attached to your results,
00:15:07.800
but you are. And so you can bullshit yourself and you can tell yourself, well, I couldn't go to the
00:15:12.900
gym this morning because I had an early morning meeting. Well, why didn't you wake up an hour earlier?
00:15:16.740
Oh, well, you don't know what time I went to bed. I don't care what time you went to bed.
00:15:21.720
Did you say you were going to do it or not? Well, I said I was going to do it and you didn't do it.
00:15:26.940
So you failed today. It doesn't make you a failure, by the way. It just means you failed today in that
00:15:33.220
thing. Maybe it's not midnight yet, which means you can go to the gym after work. Well, Ryan, I can't
00:15:37.780
because I got this thing or whatever. Keep making excuses. Again, I'm not attached to your results.
00:15:44.120
Yes. You are. And I know this from experience, not only personal experience, but also experience
00:15:50.540
and talking with you guys. You're not satisfied with life. I'm not happy in my relationship because
00:15:55.080
fill in the blank. I'm not happy with my work because fill in the blank. I'm not happy with
00:15:58.140
my financial situation because fill in the blank. I'm not happy with my relationship with God because
00:16:01.940
fill in the blank. I hear these messages every single day. And I've said these things. Okay,
00:16:07.640
let's do something about it. Well, Ryan, I can't because I'm busy. Well, welcome to the club.
00:16:13.680
Ryan, I can't because I have other obligations. Welcome. We all have obligations. Change some
00:16:21.480
things around. Make things a priority. Make things important to you. I went to bed late
00:16:25.700
last night. I woke up this morning. My alarm was set for 550. I'm like, oh, this sucks. I
00:16:32.960
don't want to go to the gym. But you know what I did? I went to the gym because that's what
00:16:35.740
I said I would do. And I'm not 100% on that, by the way. I wish I could tell you I was.
00:16:41.640
That would be a lie. I'm not. But I went this morning and I could have rationalized it,
00:16:48.240
justified it. I went to bed. Sleep's more important. You can even make a valid case
00:16:53.560
that's accurate. But that's not my objective to get eight hours of sleep. My objective is to go to
00:16:58.000
the gym. Excuse me. My tactic is to go to the gym every single day, not to get seven to eight hours
00:17:05.720
of sleep. That might be another tactic down the road, but that's not what it is right now. That's 90
00:17:09.500
days. This 90 days is to train at least one hour of deliberate training, physical training
00:17:17.720
per day. So yeah, I didn't get the sleep I needed. So what? I'll get it later. All right, next. So
00:17:25.180
again, let me recap here. We've got vision. We've got our objectives. We've got our tactics. And then
00:17:30.260
the next thing I would suggest to you is you need checkpoints along the way. So you need to know what
00:17:33.560
you're doing actually works. So if you are trying to pay off debt, $20,000 of debt in 30 days,
00:17:41.640
you should be roughly $7,000 less in debt. And if you're not, then you're not doing it right.
00:17:46.760
You've got to have objectifiable metrics to measure this because you're going to, again,
00:17:52.160
you're going to try to fool yourself. You're going to try to deceive yourself. I promise you will.
00:17:56.100
We all do it. I do it. You're going to tell yourself you're better than you really are,
00:18:01.040
that you're doing better, that you're doing more. And you're not unless you actually look at the
00:18:04.880
data. I know this to be true with regards to dieting, eating correctly. I'll go in and I'll
00:18:09.960
put my food in and realize I thought I was eating good. And when I go in and put my food in, I realized
00:18:15.360
pretty quickly that no, I wasn't doing as good as I thought. So having these very clear defined
00:18:24.140
checkpoints along the way to let you know how you're doing is crucial.
00:18:27.960
It's that simple guys. And there's a few resources that you can use. You can go to
00:18:33.260
store.orderofman.com to pick up our battle planner. And there's a video that goes along
00:18:37.060
with that. You can join the iron council, which opens up on Friday of next week, the 15th at
00:18:42.920
orderofman.com slash iron council. You can join a free program called battle ready, which is
00:18:47.520
orderofman.com slash battle ready, or you could do it on your own. I care. I was going to say,
00:18:52.420
I don't, I do care how you do it. I want you to be able to produce the results that you want in
00:18:57.460
your life. But guys, it's that simple. Number one, vision. Number two, objectives in those areas,
00:19:02.840
mental, physical, emotional, spiritual. Number three, tactics that you complete on a daily basis
00:19:08.040
that you can literally check off on a piece of paper or a battle planner like this. And then the
00:19:13.360
last component of it is having checkpoints along the way, 30 day and 60 day to make sure you're on the
00:19:19.420
path. And if you're not, then you can change. Maybe you need to change your vision. I wouldn't
00:19:23.960
necessarily suggest that first. Maybe your objective is off. Maybe your tactics are off.
00:19:28.560
That's usually what it is. If you're not achieving your objectives, then your tactic,
00:19:32.540
what you're doing on a daily basis is not working. You need qualified people to help you understand what
00:19:37.400
that is. And then you need to execute. So vision, objectives, tactics, and then checkpoints along the
00:19:45.920
way. I said five. The last thing is an after action review. We'll cover that later. But that's
00:19:51.000
the fifth component is an after action review. Just going in and saying, okay, did this work? Did I
00:19:55.620
achieve my goals? Did I achieve my objectives? What did I do well? What didn't I do so well? What can I
00:20:00.380
do better in this next quarter? So vision, objectives, tactics, checkpoints, after action review.
00:20:07.880
I hope that serves you guys. There are resources available free, order of man.com slash battle
00:20:13.700
ready, a program that you can use on your own. You can get either an app or the battle planner at
00:20:18.820
a store.orderofman.com. And you can do that on your own. There's an accompanying video that will help
00:20:23.780
you go through that battle planner. Or again, the creme de la creme, the Cadillac version, if you will,
00:20:30.000
of what we're talking about here is the iron council, where you get an added level of accountability,
00:20:35.080
camaraderie, brotherhood, and achievement. And that's at order of man.com slash iron council.
00:20:41.380
I hope that serves you guys. Let me know if there's other things that you're doing in your
00:20:44.200
life that have helped you achieve your greatest objectives. And we'll keep getting after it. I
00:20:49.420
want 2024 to be a big year for me in all of the areas, spiritual, mental, physical, and emotional
00:20:54.180
areas that I talked about. And I want it to be a big year for you as well. And this is the way that we
00:20:58.680
do it. This is the way that you do it. There's no question about it. The debate has been settled.
00:21:05.360
Now it's just a matter of how exactly you implement it. And if you have questions or concerns or
00:21:10.160
whatever it may be, hit me up on Instagram at Ryan Mickler, email Ryan at order of man.com.
00:21:16.900
I will personally respond to both of those, the Instagram or the email. I'll personally respond
00:21:21.160
to you and we'll get you lined up. All right, guys, we'll be back next week until then go out
00:21:25.180
there, take action and become the man you are meant to be. Thank you for listening to the order of
00:21:30.520
man podcast. You're ready to take charge of your life and be more of the man you were meant to be.
00:21:35.900
We invite you to join the order at order of man.com.