Why You Don't Reach Your Goals

How are you? Well, come on in here. Good to have you today. I guess on the surface, we're talking about goal gaps. Have you ever had the intention to do something?

You set a goal and then you didn't do it. You're not alone. There's a reason for it. And we're talking about that today. I think you're going to find it good.

I think you're going to find it good. What is that? It is the Daily Boost from MotivationToMove.com. My name is Scott Smith. Everything, by the way, is at MotivationToMove.com, my perfect week planner, the most awesome planner that you've never looked at and the one that you probably won't use even if you get it because it's too simple.

It's there. My podcast, my coaching programs, information about me, the whole thing. MotivationToMove.com. Go there if you want to know more, okay? Good to have you here today.

So, I just got off a coaching call with my inner circle. I spent about two and a half hours a week with them. Always a great call. I do a lot of coaching calls as well.

We had a great conversation this morning, and I'm going to go over that with you today because I have a particular obsession. We're going to talk about goals, but I want to talk about the thing that causes most of the problems.

So most people who do the work that I do, most people who coach and consult people, most of what they do is they work on very old models. They work on what kind of he said, she said kind of stuff, stuff that may have been thought about 50 years ago and works, yes.

But if you've ever done any kind of personal growth, gone to a seminar, taken a tactic I've taught you and wondered why it didn't work, that's my obsession. It's like, well, why doesn't it work? Why can't it get 100% success on things? And I spend a lot of time doing that.

So when I research, I don't go back and look at, well, what did Tony Robbins say? I don't do that stuff. I don't go back to, you know, what did the latest guru say? I don't go back on the pseudoscience of self-help.

I go back on the science of personal growth and figure that out. And I dig in. AI helps us do that. We can do very deep studies on that. So I'm obsessed with that.

But I want to go through that today with you a little bit and get you to understand why there are goal gaps and why sometimes things fall apart. But let me set the frame here first.

Years ago, I started saying, stand up, take a step, repeat. Now, I made that up. That was a motivational thing. I just recognized over time that if I stood up and took a step in the direction I wanted to go and just repeated, I was likely going to get what I wanted.

Now, yes, we had to focus. We had to make sure we're going the right direction, all that stuff, right? We could dive down that hole for a very long way.

But I made it up. But it turns out the science actually supports that. And the science didn't always support that, but it does these days. I've gone back and dug that up.

I was researching immensely in the past couple of months with my Operation Reinvention. I just wanted to know this. I wanted to know why people want to change.

Why they get to a point that they either do or they don't and why they fail so often. And is there a way that we can kind of have a system that would catch that? Can we build tiers in? Tier meaning simply a response level that said, well, if you're at this level, you can do this.

Forget timing. Just forget. Where's your mindset? Could we do that? That's what I was working on. I'm going to share that with you today. So let me, we set the framing there, the stand up, take a step and repeat.

Before I get to goals, let me do this as well. This is change. So most people you listen to are going to be talking about change, something called pre-contemplation and contemplation and then actually making some change. And people teach this model all the time.

It works well. Most people will assign some kind of timeframe to it. You're in pre-contemplation of your change for 30 days, maybe 60 days max. Well, science tells us that it doesn't necessarily go in that order.

It's like Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It does not necessarily go in that order. And also, the timeline has nothing to do with change at all. So say you want to change.

Say you want to change something about your life. To use a very generic term, whatever it happens to be. You want a better marriage. You want more money.

Whatever it is. I don't know what it is. But say you want to change. Well, the ultimate thing that happens is you have an identity. And your identity is who you are now based on those changes.

And you have something that you want to be. You have a new identity you want to go to. Why do we have this struggle back and forth? Well, the truth is most people don't have this forward leaning momentum where they're looking to the future.

In other words, you can't see clearly what you want. I will say most of my time working with clients is to help them build this clear vision of what they're going to. I call it keeping the vision. And that's most of my time.

I need to extract from them what this vision of the future will be. They don't believe me right away. We have to kind of live it for a while. In most cases, it takes about a month.

I'm just saying it does three to four weeks to get there. And so that's the key. First thing is the reason you can't get there is because you're living in this thing that you want to get away from right now, but still it's who you are. If there's anything that you want to change in your life, whatever you're living currently has gotten to where you are today.

And it's hard to get that stuff up, right? So the only reason you'll ever give it up is because you begin to lean forward a little bit and you start to get a vision of the future. So this is where all the coaching and the talking comes into play. And ultimately what happens is this until you get to the point where

that you recognize whatever's behind you is like one little tight little package called the old me. Yep, that's who I am. It's not a bunch of little things. It's just one thing now.

You coalesce all the things you've ever done into one thing. Go, that's who I don't want to be anymore. And you have a vision of what the future is until you get to that point you can't move forward.

So when you do get forward, you hit what we call the Rubicon. The Rubicon is a point of decision. If you know the Rubicon, the Rubicon Trail out of the Sierra Nevadas, it's a very tough trail. They have a Jeep named the Rubicon.

And the Rubicon Jeep is equipped to cross the Rubicon effectively. If you buy a regular Jeep, you probably have to modify it to cross the Rubicon. The trail is that tough, right?

So we call this a Rubicon of decision, and that means that you have decided that That the old person, you know who you used to be and you know what you want to do. You can see the vision now and you have enough information within you to go, oh, wow, I want to do that.

Now you make the decision. And you cross the Rubicon. And you don't look back. You have a very large chance of succeeding if you get to that point. And your whole goal, if you're not there right now, your whole goal is to get there.

I spend probably 80% of my time working with people to get to that point because I know if I can get them there, then we kick in with high performance. We kick in with all the stuff you want to do.

Most people go too soon. Most people say, oh, I heard a seminar. Now I'm going to go make $10 million this year and you'll fall apart in three weeks. Identity hasn't changed.

So we get to the Rubicon. We start to move forward. We're standing up. We're taking a step and we're repeating and you still fail, right? Let me tell you something.

If you make the decision to do it, here's the goal gaps I'm talking about. Goal intentions account for about 28% of the variance in actual behavior. What that means is you get about a 28% chance of doing this if you have an intention.

So everybody leans on intention these days. Have a good intention. A good intention is not enough. It's a specific intention you've committed to, you've decided to go after.

But still, you're only 28%. If you take it up stronger than that, say you really, really haven't studied it like crazy, and you're so into it, you're so committed, you're so ready to go, you're going to follow through on everything, get what you want. You still get only 53% success rate. That's a flip of a coin.

Now, what's happening here? Well, obviously, we want a strong intention to get, we really want to know where we're heading, and that means a good plan, solidly understanding what we're going to build. That'll get us to 53%.

The variance after that comes in just life. You fall outside the lines of these systems. Everybody does. It's like going to Disney World. If you're a normal person who comes into Disney, the Disney system works just fine.

But what happens if you can't fit your stroller through the thing? Well, Disney has another system to help you get your stroller around the thing so you can get into the park, right?

So what I do and what a lot of coaches do, I guess, is we know, I know that there's a 53% chance if I get you committed, you're going to succeed. And so, but I also know that leaves 47% of a chance that if we don't take care of the stuff that happens along the way, you won't succeed. You'll fall off.

So the goal gap is that it's understanding that our intention is not enough to get us there. And even if it does get us there, we have other things we have to worry about, but that's okay because stand up, take a step, repeat factors that into it. It's the adjustment process along the way. So you understand now it's the identity shift from the old person to the new person, getting enough confidence to decide to cross the Rubicon to begin the stand up, take a step and repeat and to go over your goals.

That's where this foundation gets laid. So where does it go from there? A little more science for you. Okay. Okay. If you have this idea, I've realized I need to change.

I can tell you this, it reliably leads to nowhere. If somebody comes on a call with me and it's the first time I've ever talked to them and they say, I've realized I need to change. The very first thing I know is this ain't going nowhere.

And so I start to test and validate. I start to push back a little bit to say, okay, well, have we gone beyond that a little bit? Have we gotten to the point that the identity is beginning to shift? Are they on the edge of decision?

Where are they in this process? If they're very early on, I tell them, go back and listen to the Daily Boost more. If they're further down the line, I'm like, okay, great a second. Great.

Let's look at this now. They're actually moving through this process. They're further down the road. We can actually get them there. Then we have something we can work on.

But surely the realization that I need to change is just the very beginning. I want to really let that sit for a second. In anything in your life you realize you need to change, that's just step one.

And take it for what it is. Don't listen to what everybody says. I wish I could tell you. We could change it. You know, hey, give me two and a half weeks, I'll get you there.

I can some of the times. Sometimes it takes four months. But honestly, sometimes it takes about 30 seconds. Life is fun, isn't it? So what's going on here?

What does we call this? Let me give you a tip right now that works really, really well if you want to do something. This is called implementation intention. Again, actual science.

You can look it up if you want to. It's there. It's very deep in the psychological journals, right? It's there. And something called the if-then planning.

You see it a lot in computers. If this happens, then that, right? You see it a lot all the time. But it's such an effective way. And typically, most people I bring up the if-then planning thing will immediately agree with me on this.

So a great example for you. Instead of saying, I'll exercise more, if you specify if it's 6 p.m. on a weekday that I put my shoes on and I take a walk, you are nearly 100% likely to do that. Now, why does it happen?

You've heard us talk about triggers before. Triggers are a big thing. Triggers are what gets you either to do something or not do something. Triggers for me get me in trouble.

So it happens to me. It's like, what triggered me to eat a bag of M&Ms? I don't know what it is, but it happens, right? A trigger, if we can move that trigger out from the emotional state and move it to another place, it's going to be easier.

So where would we move it? We make it an environmental trigger. So the environmental trigger, it's the clock now. When it's six o'clock and it happens to be a weekday, so we're on the clock and the calendar, six o'clock on a weekday, I put my shoes on, I take a walk, I go to the gym, I do whatever I said I was going to do.

If you do that, everything changes. And you're probably doing a lot of that in your world right now. Well, it's 725. I need to leave by 730 to get to the office on time to be at my job on time so I don't get in trouble.

You're probably already using external environmental triggers. I say use them more. So if I were to take all this and put it in a model and take it away from the old pre-contemplation, contemplation of change model that has been worked for so many years or people have been used so long, which I find is cool, but it's kind of like on the surface. People don't get that stuff.

Here's what it comes down to. You ready for this? And this sets me up in something that I have often talked about, and that is the motivation model. There's a big trend right now.

People say motivation doesn't work. Don't do it. There's a lot of money behind it right now. People have staked the claim. They've written books on it.

And that's typically what happens. So listen, whenever somebody writes a book and they say, it doesn't work, I say, yeah, how many books have you sold? Oh, 2 million of them? Yeah, you just found something.

You have a little clickbait that got it to work. I look at that. When everybody says it doesn't work, it does. I know something. Motivation does work.

And here's my proof. The COM B model, okay? I'll just give you the COM part of this, okay? COM C, capability. Current research says this. If you have the physical and psychological ability, including the knowledge and skills, you have a better chance of succeeding.

So back that up a little bit. It makes common sense to just about everybody, but how many times have you set a goal that you didn't have the physical skill or the psychological ability, you didn't have the knowledge or the skills to do it?

But it's perfectly fine. Listen, a lot of stuff we set goals for, we don't know how to do. I'm okay with that. But if you really want to succeed at full change in your life, you must acquire the physical, psychological skills, knowledge, and abilities.

Number two is opportunity. An environment that makes the behavior possible. This is huge. So everything we've talked about, if you don't have the capability, it's just not going to happen.

So what do we do with that? We build it up from the beginning. We start early on to begin to build the capability. Go to school, study, whatever you have to do.

Then we have to seek the opportunity. What is that? Maybe it is going to school. Maybe it's changing where you live. Maybe it's changing your friends.

Whatever you have to change from what holds you back to what will create the opportunity, you have to do because that makes the behavior possible. That's the O, opportunity, and COMB model.

And finally, the M stands for what you might think it stands for. It stands for motivation. I've always said this before in the past. I've always said motivation is usually very fleeting in the front.

Sometimes it's, in fact, what happens in the front side is usually this. It's you get inspired to do something. That's where it all kind of starts. And I don't start anything if I'm not inspired.

So that's kind of where it begins. And then when it begins, you get this idea and this goal, and suddenly you recognize, wait a second, this is what I want to do. Do you have the capability? Do you have the opportunity?

Not usually. So that's when motivation comes in to kind of drive you through getting the capability and the opportunity. And furthermore, if you think about this, if you go forward on, you start working on your goals, as things get difficult, as you have to work through learning more to get what you want, creating better opportunities, you still need the motivation to get you there.

So, but it begins with capability and opportunity, but the motivation is to glue the whole stuff together. That's all the time I got for today, but I'm going to, I want to lay that out to you. I could have spent three hours talking and I just did kind of anyway.

I was talking on the phone before my call, then I'm talking to the call, then I'm talking to you. It's about three hours of conversation on this stuff. I hope this gave you a kind of a foundation. I know it's very superficial, but it may, may, may explain why maybe you feel like you're getting tripped up sometimes.

My programs, Operation Readvention, things like that, we go into this stuff. We fix it at the core. I'll see you tomorrow.