goal setting Archives - Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Sharpening Your Axe

How does sharpening your axe relate to building an online business? Abraham Lincoln said “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe”. It’s a useful analogy to remember whenever you’re attempting any large task or undertaking. The “axe” in the case of building an online business is your mind, or better yet your intention.

With a strong intention, clear vision and an awareness of your most likely obstacles, it is much easier to drive towards your goals and aspirations. But if you harbour doubt, are insecure about your mission or vision, or you are unclear about your path, you’re already inhibiting your intention with the seeds of doubt.

Doubt will kill off your ambitions pretty quickly as will uncertainty and even fear of failure. There must be no doubt in your mind. If there is, you might ask for someone’s approval, which is the surest way to add more doubt and uncertainty. Most people aren’t interested in your aspiring beyond their own goals and ambitions, if they have any. So keep things to yourself, set yourself a clear objective and fuel your intention with belief. Here’s how to do it!

Sharpening Your Axe

A little while ago I found a video online of a guy talking about building an online business. It seemed so magical to build a business online which could give me a life of freedom and flexibility. Little did I know the journey up ahead. After a few early sales online I thought I was on my way. But I found my “inner” world would get in the way of success for me.

My old patterns of thinking meant that I quickly spent my earnings, rather than re-invest them into the business. I soon found myself back at square one, with little marketing budget and this further fuelled my feelings of inadequacy and uncertainty. In turn, these inner demons cycled me into procrastination, doubt and depression. In such a state, it’s pretty near impossible to build something, especially if you don’t have a roadmap with which to do it.

But this cycle was a typical pattern for me, and I was well familiar with it. What I subsequently learned was the opposite pattern was what I needed.

Sharpening Your Axe – What Successful People Do

The habit of being down on yourself, talking yourself out of things which will improve your life might sound familiar. This pattern fuels inaction, doubt and procrastination. Ultimately it leads to more of the same. What successful people do is the opposite to this.

They inspire themselves with positive self talk, take action and use positive feedback to further install the positive self image which they build on over time. This is the cycle of belief which either leads you downwards or upwards. At any given moment, you’re either going up or down with your self talk, feelings and emotions.

You can “hijack” this unconscious tendency if you make it conscious, and focus on the things which will encourage and support a new self image and new course of action. Successful people tend to have this pattern “installed”, whether consciously or unconsciously.

Identify The Negative “Triggers”

Negative triggers can lower your emotional state. These are events or mental “triggers” such as a disagreement, situation, or a bad experience. Even small things can trigger negative emotions from experiences which happened years ago.

It’s well worth getting therapy if you have some childhood trauma, for example, which can help you clear and overcome this. Over time you can become entangled with negative triggers which lead you into a negative emotional state unconsciously. If this becomes your default state, you are literally feeling low most of the time. It can be very difficult to get out of this if you start identifying the state with who you are! See also goal setting and identity shift.

If this is happening to you, you might be dealing with grief, or triggering feelings of loss or grief which you haven’t dealt with properly. If you have deep grief from experiences in your life, it is these you experience when you come up against issues within your business. So, even a small hiccup in building your business can send you down into a pit of depression.

Identifying these triggers can help you avoid them and create a less painful experience. If you don’t identify them, you’ll likely come up against them and project their cause as the current issue, rather than the old, painful trauma.

These can be the likely hurdles to building an online business. Identifying them will help you keep from running into them again and again!

Set An Intention And Write It Down

Intention setting is a great way to clear out the debris, focus on what you would like to achieve and set it out clearly in a way your subconscious mind can understand. A good, clear intention should be written out a number of times and adjusted to fit a specific criteria:

You really, really want it
You 100% believe you can achieve it

Once you have your focused intention, you can write it out and repeat it over and over to yourself. As you do so, certain feelings/emotions will likely surface. As they do, pay attention. This is your subconscious mind communicating how it feels about your goal.

These are likely the blockages which you might use to excuse yourself from the task ahead! They are feelings of inadequacy, or doubts and fears. Notice them and pay attention. Are they justified? Perhaps your goal is too lofty for you to believe? Or you’re talking yourself out of it because you don’t really care about the goal?

Pay attention to these feelings as they arise and re-write your goal to align with the two main criteria:

You really, really want it
You 100% believe you can achieve it

If you don’t really want your goal, you’ll soon abandon it. If you don’t believe you can achieve it, the same will happen. When you align the two you will find a goal/intention which aligns all parts of you. When this happens, it’s much easier to overcome any feelings of doubt and internal resistance to your intention.

Cybernetic Transposition

A MIT professor named Stuart Lichtman wrote a book on a subject called cybernetic transposition. This is the best book I’ve found on the topic of dream realisation/goal and intention setting. See Stuart Lichtman cybernetic transposition.

On a trial of 50,000 participants 81% achieved a seemingly impossible goal on their first attempt using this strategy. In short, you write your goal out multiple times over and over. This hardwires the goal/intention into the subconscious mind and it gets to work on it.

You also must listen to your intuition and re-write your goal so that it aligns with the principles:

You really, really want it
You 100% believe you can achieve it

If a goal brings up doubts, it needs re-writing so you fully believe it and really want it. If you don’t really want it, you’re not going to do the exercise and write it out hundreds of times!

Sharpening Your Axe

When you fill your mind with doubt, fear and scepticism, you create circumstances and situations of a like mind. But when you do the opposite, and focus on your intentions and goals, your subconscious mind delivers ideas and insights which can help bring about the results you want in life.

“Sharpening your axe” when it comes to building something like an online business refers to this principle. Without a clear intention, a roadmap for success, and a strong desire to realise the outcome you want, small, relatively insignificant problems are enough to derail your plans. Small problems become big problems. If you are harbouring negative ideas and inner demons and problems from long ago, they will surely surface when problems arise.

Sharpening your axe means uncovering your inner shadow and facing the inner pains which you may have pushed away and avoided. The grief from long ago will surface when faced with difficulties. By becoming aware of it, you loosen its grip on you. You become free from troubling emotions and can focus on your dreams and aspirations without fear, doubt or scepticism.

It is these negative emotions which are the biggest obstacle to overcome because they rear their head when something goes wrong which on the surface is superficial, but underneath causes a lot of emotional pain.

Goal Setting & Identity Shift

The last couple of my blog posts have been about the importance of goal setting but in this one I’m going to discuss goal setting and identity shift. One of the reasons you might find it so difficult to work on your affiliate business, or make change in any area of your life, is because of your identity. “Who” you see yourself as, has a great affect on what you can achieve, because it’s embedded in your very being.

For example, if you see yourself as someone who “struggles”, you might perpetuate that reality because it’s how you identify yourself: “I am one who struggles“. It is “me“. An identity gives us congruency and safety. When we make a conclusion about “who” we are in life, it’s a form of security which the ego can cling to. It is the self image. People get to know us as that person, and they continue to reenforce that false “self”.

When you try and change things you meet resistance, both from yourself and your circle of friends/family. But mostly it is from your “old” version of yourself trying to cling to its reality. You can’t be a “successful entrepreneur” and at the same time “one who struggles” , for example. You can’t be a “fit athlete”, if you see yourself as “fat and lazy”. One of those identities clashes with the other. So, in order to make progress in any area of life, an old part of yourself (an old identity) has to die!

Goal Setting & Identity Shift – Kill Your (Old) Self

But it won’t give up without a fight. Your old self has been around for a long time. You’ve had fun together! You have become comfortable as “that” person you created! That’s the reason that when you set about making change in your life, in any area, there’s a battle going on. Your old self is fighting for its survival! It’s a paradigm which you’ve entrenched in your mind for perhaps years of your life.

A new “self” will rock the boat. Friends will say things like “that’s not ‘you'”! When you come to “do the work”, you’ll kick and scream because that’s where the old self is fighting for its existence. It resists change because it wants to retain the status quo. It wants to stay alive!

But you want change and the best way to change things permanently is through self growth and an identity “shift”. That won’t happen without a fight, and without losing your old self in the process.

Goal Setting & Identity Shift – Why Goals Often Don’t Work

You might have had some problems with goal setting. You set a goal, and when you come to do the work, you get blocked. There’s resistance. Resistance is anything which comes up which you use to not do the work you need to do to accomplish your goal.

Your mind tells you a story about the action you should be taking and it might take a form such as this:

I’m not good enough
I just can’t find the motivation
What if I should be doing something else
I don’t really care about the goal anyway
I’m not cut out for this
I’d rather not do it
It won’t matter anyway

You avoid doing the work and the payoff is that you stay the same. Your identity remains in tact. But your situation doesn’t change either. A goal can help you do the work needed in order to change your identity. Once you have an identity shift, you become the person who does the work. But you must push through the pain otherwise you’ll only perpetuate what you already have. You’ll avoid the work, make excuses, and your reality won’t shift.

Summary

A goal sets the wheels in motion and gives you motivation to make change. However, once you have set a goal, you’ll come up against resistance. This will come in the form of your old self justifying why it doesn’t want to shift, why it doesn’t need to shift.

Observe this resistance for what it really is – your old self putting up a fight! In order to affect change you need an identity shift towards the person who does the work in order to get the outcome you really want – to achieve the goal.

the “old” you is the person who struggles, procrastinates and avoids the work you need to do to achieve your goal. The “new” you (version 2), is the person you must become in order to achieve your goal. The “battle” is between the old you and the new you who is trying to manifest itself through your goal.

Once you become aware of this battle, you can see the resistance for what it really is – the older version of you battling for its existence! This is explained much more succinctly in this video by Charlie Morgan and it’s well worth the hour and ten minutes of your day if you’re struggling with your goals.

The Importance Of Goal Setting

What’s the importance of goal setting? Well, if you don’t have a target, you’ll never hit anything! A goal should motivate you and drive your behaviour towards some future attainment which you desire. I’ve found goals have kept me going when I was unmotivated, even if they were only tiny goals. As time has gone on, I’ve become better at setting goals which are meaningful to me.

Earlier this year, I set myself the goal of achieving 1000 organic website hits by the end of this month (today). I even wrote a post on my strategy “how to get 1000 websites hits in one day without paying“.

Here’s my stats for this week:

Yesterday my website had 860 hits on it. That’s a slight short fall of the 1000 hits goal I set for myself. Still, today isn’t over and I’ll share my stats at the end of this post.

The Importance Of Goal Setting – Did I Fail?

I really don’t consider this a failure, even if I don’t make it to 1000 hits today. The thing is, when I set this goal, my daily hits were around 200 a day. The goal inspired me to aim for a higher figure, something I had never achieved before.

My mindset at the time too was slightly distracted and whimsical. I was feeling a little demoralised and uninspired. I was also wondering whether blogging would actually make much difference in terms of my sales. This mindset, (the uncertain kind), is the kind that leads back into procrastination and inaction.

The goal served to fire me up on all cylinders again. Rather than wonder about whether the action would “work” and spend needless hours on procrastinating on a new method of marketing, I simply focused on the goal.

The goal got me thinking about ways to achieve it. So my mind filled up with creative ways to accomplish it, rather than dawdling, and then doing nothing, which I often do!

The Importance Of Goal Setting – Breaking A Goal Down

I had never before hit 1000 website hits on my website organically, (and still haven’t – yet)! I have achieved this before, but through using paid advertising. By setting this goal, I stretched myself and have proved that goals do in fact work. However, I’ve “failed” many times in the past with goals. Partly that’s because I wasn’t very good at following through, or setting good goals. I would set a goal, and then forget about it. Many times I’ve found my goals on pieces of paper, even years later, laminated lines of text which were long forgotten!

In a recent house move, I found one from years ago about making £1000 a month from my online business! It was from 2010! The thing is, I didn’t keep track of my goal once I had written it. I forgot about it, and therefore it forgot about me too!

This time, I wrote my goal out and reminded myself of it every single day. That way, I couldn’t forget it. I also made sure I worked towards my goal every single day and that my daily routine was aligned with my goal. In terms of my blogging, I’ve kept up a blog post a day (at least) for the last several weeks! I also made sure I was posting my articles to my email list, and posted them on social media – every single day! The result is a compounding effect. Not every post gets huge interaction, but the compounding effect of doing these small daily actions means an upward tick of my traffic over time.

Why I Never Stuck With Goals

I have a scatter brain, I’ll admit it. So I would write down a goal, and then go and do something different, and totally forget about it. But a good goal is something that keeps you engaged. You want it so bad, you can’t stop thinking about it! It stretches your comfort zones and you believe in it, even if you don’t yet know how to achieve it.

A good goal needs to be a 10/10 for belief (meaning you totally believe it can be done) and a 10/10 for desirability too (you really, really want it). Unless these two parameters are met, you’ll likely forget about your goal, put it to one side, or dismiss it as unachievable. If your goal only scores a 5 out of 10, on either parameter, it’s not going to motivate you.

I used to write goals that I didn’t believe in. No wonder I discarded them. Or I would write goals I believed I could achieve, but didn’t really care about! A good goal is one you believe in, care about and really, really want.

The Importance Of Goal Setting – Summary

With an online business, it’s important to keep setting goals which drive you forwards and stretch you. With my affiliate business I’ve had periods where I’m running adverts, shooting videos, writing blogs or sending emails.

There’s so many things you can be doing, it can be easy to waste a lot of time, and still get nowhere. A goal ties it all together and keeps you motivated and taking consistent action. Without a goal, your mind can wonder about all the possible actions you could be taking, but end up taking no action, because you’re so confused.

I’ve not always been such a strong advocate for goal setting, because I haven’t always known exactly what I wanted! But if you can set a goal which is specific for you, which motivates you and inspires you into action, it’s never going to be the wrong goal!

The current hits today on this website are 235 but it’s still morning here in the UK! So I’ll update the web count once the day is passed to see if I hit the magic number of 1000! Please share this post because I need all the help I can get!

Update:

Here’s yesterday’s stats and it looks like I only managed to reach 746 hits on my website – a shortfall from my 1000 target of 254!

Still, I have learned a lot from this exercise and I don’t see this as a failure. Yesterday I pushed myself more, asked for shares, and some subscribers even said they would share my post for me!

The thing is, when I send an email out to my list, some people pick it up days later. So there’s a delay. The same is true from sharing some content on social media. Growth with blogging is incremental, and consistency is the name of the game!

Setting a goal of 1000 website hits (organically) has helped give me focus and commit. Without my goal, I wouldn’t have done as much. That’s the importance of goal setting. It gives you a target which helps to motivate you and inspire you! I’ll now set a contingency goal for the upcoming month! See my post what are contingency goals.

I set the goal of hitting 1000 website visitors (in a day) by the end of the month, but I only set this goal mid July! Take a look at how it impacted my traffic compared to other months:

What goal could YOU set which would make the biggest difference in your life for the better?

Stuart Lichtman Cybernetic Transposition

I first found the Stuart Lichtman cybernetic transposition technique after joining a group of affiliate marketing mentors. Stuart’s book was called How To Get Lots Of Money For Anything Fast! As a cynical Northerner (based in the UK) this seemed a little cheesy but it was a course requirement so I bought it.

I soon realised that this was the real deal! Stuart Lichtman had spent over 25 years developing a strategy to help people achieve the seemingly impossible. He had studied at MIT in engineering, psychology, and artificial intelligence, masters work in applied psychology, and doctoral work in organisation development and cross cultural business.

After developing what Stuart Lichtman called his cybernetic transposition technique, he tested in on a group of 50,000 people. 81% achieved a seeming impossible goal on their first attempt. A bold claim?

Stuart Lichtman Cybernetic Transposition

So how does the Stuart Lichtman cybernetic transposition technique work then? Through his book you will encounter a number of exercises which Stuart calls the three step process. Firstly, you will focus in on what you really, really want to achieve. One of the main problems with goal setting is that you seldom know exactly what you really want. As time moves on, other goals take a more important role. Or competing parts of your mind get in the way of your achieving it; or unconscious habits.

Or perhaps you didn’t really want your goal badly enough to overcome all the things you’ll have to do to achieve it? This is often why people fail with goal setting. Either they don’t want something badly enough, or they don’t believe they can achieve something. Therefore they set a goal which is more easily achievable, but less desirable. So they don’t follow through because the goal isn’t that important to them anyway.

Stuart Lichtman’s three step process allows you to investigate what you really want and it does this by getting you to repeat your goal over and over. As you sound out and write out your goal, you’ll “tweak” it so that it’s more aligned with your inner values. It also needs to be a goal which is a 10/10 on desirability and a 10/10 on believability. If you don’t believe you can achieve something, you won’t fully commit to the process. Similarly, if you don’t really want it, you won’t follow through either.

Stuart Lichtman Cybernetic Transposition

Cybernetic – the science of communications and automatic control systems in both machines and living things.

Transposition – transferring one thing to another

The Stuart Lichtman Cybernetic Transposition technique refers to transferring an old memory or achievement to one which is the desirable outcome. Old memories are hard wired into the brain and the unconscious mind. As you think of an old memory or something you have achieved, you can remind yourself of the sounds, sights, smells, emotions and feelings which accompanied all of those memories.

These are useful because they are the communications of the unconscious mind. Think about a dream you had. Dreams are usually in pictures, feelings, sounds and emotions. They aren’t in words! So using words as a means to communicate something important to the subconscious mind won’t be very powerful. You need to use feelings, smells, emotions and sounds to communicate an idea to the subconscious mind and for it to focus on that idea.

The Problem With Old Memories

Old memories aren’t always things you want to remember! So with the cybernetic transposition technique, Stuart Lichtman gets you to re-write your old memories so that they are more desirable.

Memories aren’t always 100% perfect and we often remember things how we want to rather than how they actually were. If you ask a number of people to describe a particular time or event, you’ll likely get a number of different and even conflicting responses.

So with the transposition technique you get to rewrite your history in a way which is much more desirable. Then, you use these already implanted images, emotions and sounds etc. into your new meta story.

What’s A Meta-Story

Your meta story then becomes your future goal or desirable outcome. By rewriting and rewriting over and over, you’ll get clearer on an outcome which is a 10/10 in desirability and a 10/10 in believability also. You’ll then use your old memory to implant the emotions which went along with your past achievement or event.

This, when repeated over and over, will tell your subconscious mind what to focus on. As your subconscious mind focuses on the outcome you want to achieve, it will come up with ways to do so which you may never have thought of.

For most people, me included, we are hardwired with negative repetitions from our childhoods. We tell ourselves old stories over and over which limit our lives. “I’m not good enough”, “Life’s a struggle”, “Money doesn’t grow on trees” and so on.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could interrupt these old, negative stories of limitations and replace them instead with stories which hardwired us for abundance. Well we can! Stuart Lichtman’s Cybernetic Transposition does exactly that. You just need to do the work.

Creating A “Red Flag” For The Unconscious Mind

Have you noticed that when you buy a particular brand of car, you start seeing them everywhere. But before, you never even noticed them. This is an example of your mind focusing in on a particular thing. The same can be done with your unconscious mind through repetition of a meta story.

A meta story, as mentioned, is a rewritten scenario from your past, which is edited to be more aligned with the outcome you want – your goal. By re-rehearsing your meta story again and again, you are effectively creating a very specific target for your mind to focus on. So even when you’re not thinking about it (consciously), your subconscious mind is.

Most people will write their goals out and few times and then forget about them. This doesn’t work because your unconscious behaviours override your desire for your perfect outcome (the goal). With a meta story, you clearly communicate the desired outcome to the subconscious mind in pictures, smells, feelings and emotions.

When you do this enough, and continue to do it, the goal becomes your overriding target which sits in the background slowly but surely attracting you to it. It’s far more powerful than what most of us do with our goals: planning, struggling, working and doing things only on the outside of the equation. While you also need to do these things to achieve a particularly difficult goal or achievement, using the meta story and doing the invisible work in your mind is paramount to a successful outcome that you really want.

Access Stuart Lichtman’s book here.