Battle Ready Read online

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  CHAPTER 6

  GOALS

  ‘A dream without a goal is merely an illusion.’

  – Ollie Ollerton

  One of the biggest questions people are asked when it comes to self-development is: ‘Do you have any goals?’ Well here’s the thing, we all do! Your subconscious is a goal-striving mechanism which will stop at nothing until it’s achieved your dominant thought topics. But be warned, if left unchecked your subconscious won’t always select positive goals. Think about the football player running through on goal scared he’s going to miss. His subconscious visualises and creates the negative outcome in the real world. It’s far better to have goals that you desire as opposed to always achieving the things you hate. Think about that.

  ROME WASN’T BUILT IN A DAY

  Those who make plans and act on them are more likely to achieve what they want out of life, compared with those who meander with life’s currents. When I returned from Australia I had one major goal and it was as clear in my mind as braille on fire: ‘To create a globally recognised brand, recognised for the positive growth and development of others.’

  Rome wasn’t built in a day, there were teething problems with Break-Point. To start with I went into partnership with some people and it turned sour, caused the company a loss and I had to go the legal route to get rid of them. But the situation wasn’t crushing, because my focus and end goal far overwhelmed it. It was a wrinkle not an earthquake. And looking back, at the time of starting up Break-Point I was still dealing with my demons, and they were getting in the way of progress. If you don’t clear your mind as well as your life to be Battle Ready, you’re going to be in survival mode dealing with emotional shit rather than focusing on your goal. In a state of stress we cannot be creative, and that spark of inner genius we all possess can never become a flame.

  For those of you reading this who’ve had things go wrong with your own plans, refocus on what you are there to do, not just on the problem at hand, and remember that failure is an important foot servant of success. The more you fail, the stronger your finished success will be, because all those future pitfalls have already been made and dealt with en route! Refresh and reposition your energy. If the situation overwhelms you, and feels greater than your purpose, it’s not the right purpose. When things get in the way, reinforce the positive affirmation of what you’re focused on, and those past negatives won’t slow you down. Your purpose must outweigh your circumstances otherwise you become a victim of your circumstances and will lose yourself in them, as well as losing sight of your path going forward. Remember, it doesn’t take long for the grass to grow over a pathway.

  Find the ignition you need to really propel yourself. Don’t choose just any goal, but a big goal that when imagined, lights up your insides like a firework. No goal is ever great unless at some point you doubted your ability to achieve it. Some of us are born with our life’s purpose staring straight back at us, like Pablo Picasso who could draw before he could talk, and at seven years of age sat in most classes drawing a live pigeon he brought to school with him in his pocket. But while Picasso knew exactly what he wanted to do with his life from the word go, most of us are not like that and have to live through various experiences before we find what really nourishes our soul.

  PROCESS

  A dream without a plan is merely an illusion, because unless you have a plan to execute, your desire will always be just a thought. Yes, it’s important to have imagination to start with, but at some stage you have to get your hands dirty and move into the action phase, and for this you need to apply a process, a system, a plan.

  First of all, ask yourself, ‘What do I want to achieve?’ For example, it might be something like: ‘I want to run a 20-mile race.’ Instead of going straight out of the door, running 20 miles and doing yourself an injury, you create a plan by which you slowly increase your level of endurance, mile by mile. You start to create a process, for example: ‘on Monday morning, I’m going to put my trainers on and walk out the door. I’m going to run a mile.’ It needs some time specific detail, and it needs to be achievable.

  Every great idea has a honeymoon period, and just thinking of it gives you a sense of euphoria. That said, unless the idea has a plan to realise it and you begin to move into the doing phase, it quickly withers on the vine. It’s super important to disengage the mind and emotion, because your emotion will fall back into a repeat cycle of yesterday and tell you that you won’t stick at your desired goal, what’s the point of trying? The mind will create clever little games like telling you to go check your email, check your phone, or that there is something that really needs your attention; anything to make you procrastinate, to the point that you no longer have time to make a mark on the day and start the journey, the first footstep that takes you closer to where you want to be.

  In order to actualise, you need to do something physically!

  In the absence of clearly defined goals, we allow pointless trivia to consume our lives. Einstein once said: ‘If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.’ It’s a question of energy and atoms, which is what we’re all made of. Change the energy and the atoms will move themselves, but you need a clear plan of where you’re heading.

  YOU NEED A GOAL WITH A DATE

  Once you have a goal with a date it will draw you towards its magnetic flux. You’ll make decisions and take actions, each of which will be a building block, a step towards your realising your goal. And the more you plant the idea, the harder your subconscious will work, marshalling every fibre within you to get you there. It’s not about being forever focused on the end goal, it’s more that once you know where you’re going, trust that it will happen and enjoy the journey. If it’s a goal close to your heart it won’t seem like hard work; rather, it will be a joy as you’ll also be coming more of yourself, and the growth belittles the goal. We are on this planet as a mere blip in time and if you set your intention to the Universe without a realistic date in the near future, you may be looking at a good million years’ time before it manifests itself!

  10 REASONS WHY GOALS FAIL

  • It’s not your goal – You’re doing it for someone else.

  • You have no emotional relationship with it – Devotion requires emotion!

  • Your goal is boring – You must be excited by your goal.

  • Your goal is greedy – Focus on one goal at a time.

  • You haven’t appreciated the obstacles – Pre-warned is prepared.

  • Your future picture is not clear – Clarity defies confusion.

  • You appreciate your limits over your goals – Your limits become your reality.

  • Your goal doesn’t know when it’s due – You must define a due date.

  • You didn’t write and repeat daily – Remain dynamic.

  • No plan survives first contact! – Keep the goal, evolve the plan.

  MAPPING THE TERRITORY

  When you come up with a goal that excites you, it’s vital you write it down. That helps create the seedling. Looking at the big picture, what’s your first step going to be? You need to get to know the landscape around your goal and do some investigating. While your overarching goal might be ‘I’m going to run a successful five-star restaurant’, that’s too big a leap coming from nothing and you’re setting yourself up for a punishing failure that will knock your confidence. What you can do though is begin reading about people who started restaurants, the challenges they faced and how they resolved them, lifehacks, tips from those who have been through it already. Forewarned is forearmed, isn’t it? In making your own initial investigations you will slowly build your confidence and knowledge, finessing your vision until the point that you’re ready to go ahead. You can’t do anything without knowledge, so start making it real. Do your due diligence and mental mapping. And, just like with the Mission Success Cycle (see page 160), plan for what obstacles might come up, both ex
ternal and internal.

  BREAKING YOUR GOAL DOWN

  When setting up Break-Point, I made sure my goal was broken down into bitesize chunks I could tackle: I looked at creating the website and constructing the programmes and course agenda that allowed me to visualise as I put them together. I set dates of when we would have our first corporate and public offerings, and figures of what I would be earning per month. I considered the cost of the equipment we’d need to run the course, should we buy it on HP or rent it?

  Setting positive and realistic goals is crucially important. If your goal is overwhelming, and it should be, break it down into manageable steps. Short, medium and long-term goals. Choose goals that mean something to you, not what someone else expects of you. Remember Bruce Lee, confined to his bed unable to walk, placing affirmations around his room so he never stopped visualising walking again? Write down your goal, take a photo of it so it’s on your phone, on your screensaver, on the fridge. Or if you’re a person that responds more to images than words, make a vision board with pictures. Wherever you go, repeat the goal to yourself under your breath. If you want to make a lifestyle change and create a better you, then you must focus purely upon that goal.

  Now my goal was a big one, creating a globally recognised brand from nothing. I still haven’t achieved this yet! But anyone hearing it would have said I was off my head. In order that I didn’t feel overwhelmed to the point of abandoning it in favour of something easier, I stopped looking at the bigger picture and broke it down into digestible sections. The easiest way to climb a mountain is not looking at that menacing faraway peak and thinking, ‘Shit, I’ll never have the energy to go all that way, it’s too daunting.’ Instead, it’s about putting one foot in front of the other and having waypoints to head to, camps en route where you can catch your breath. It’s about getting your head down, taking your eye off the prize and digging in.

  And instead of looking up at the mountain, take the time to look back and see how far you’ve come, how well you have done, it’s an amazing view! Before you know it, you’re halfway, then three-quarters of the climb and soon enough you’ll be riding that bad boy like a rocking horse!

  EXERCISE: BREAKING DOWN THE GOAL AND CREATING A SMART GOAL

  Think of your goal. What are the stages you need to break it down in order to make it happen? Create a timeline for each stage. You could use the clock method mentioned earlier.

  Now try to make your goal SMART. SMART stands for the following:

  Is your goal specific enough?

  How will you measure its success?

  Is it achievable?

  Is it relevant towards your greater goal?

  Does it have a timeframe?

  Apply the SMART framework to your goal:

  THE JOURNEY OVERWHELMS THE GOAL

  When you achieve your goal, remember that all those milestones you reached and mistakes you made were all part of the journey. Churchill once said, ‘Success is the ability to bounce enthusiastically from one failure to the next.’ If it was smooth running all the way, it wasn’t a big enough goal. Be proud that you kept going and fought through the obstacles, the learning, negativity and mind telling you it was pointless.

  Once you get to the goal the journey overwhelms it. In other words, all the experience and wisdom you’ve experienced on your journey is so much more than the goal itself. Once there, do we rest on our laurels and return to sloth? No, the human brain and body thrive on new challenges. We need to constantly draw up new goals and fill our days with a sense of achievement. Achievement begets confidence and self-belief.

  Often you could be halfway through achieving your goal when you find yourself suddenly compelled to create another. For instance, somebody whose goal is to go back to college and get a degree might find the self-respect they were looking for and then go off and do something else more fulfilling. People are muddling through life like it’s an endurance test, earning enough money to pay for the house, the mortgage and the finance on their cars. There must be more.

  RUN THROUGH THE FINISH LINE

  Many of us fail at the point of success. For some it’s because we don’t feel we’re worthy of the achievement, for others because of the stress and the pressure we place on ourselves. It’s the moment when you feel yourself veering towards the negative, when you self-sabotage and allow the voice of doubt to start talking you out of it; instead of encouraging you to dig deeper, your mind is telling you to take the shortcut and end the stress. Regarding evolution, you are now starting to threaten the species – this is the survival blueprint in full flare! In this moment, Breathe – Recalibrate – Deliver.

  Breathe – Deep breaths and focus on what you want to achieve (lower cortisol levels)

  Recalibrate – Disengage emotion and feelings that are not serving you

  Deliver – Take positive action towards your goal

  The process above should take no more than five seconds. While on missions we understood the risk when we hit our targets and eliminated the threat, for at this point we were more aware than ever of the possibility of counter-attack, and mission failure was highly likely; hence our focus went beyond the goal and didn’t rest on it.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE ROLE OF VISUALISATION

  My head is always full of pictures and possible scenarios. If I was a Mr Men character, I would be Mr Daydream. Since I was a kid, I’ve had this ability to allow my mind to wander and vividly imagine things happening to me and others. On many occasions they have turned out exactly as I imagined. At first it was troubling, now I find it reassuring as it proves, at least to me, that we are more in charge of our destiny than we give ourselves credit for.

  One of the first times this happened was back in Staffordshire in the eighties. The matter concerned a girl who was well known as a spiteful bully from a bad local family. She grassed me up for having a sawn-off shotgun, which though I concede was the case, landed me in a police cell for the weekend. I kept idly thinking how I would like to get my revenge on her, and on my release, I was bombing down a very long steep hill lost in my daydreams and not really concentrating when I ran straight into her at full speed at the bottom of the hill. She appeared from nowhere, as if I had willed it. Let’s face it, she could have been anywhere else in the town, she just happened to be in that exact place at the second I was flying past. I felt like Damien Thorn from The Omen!

  I fully believe that our lives are a product of what goes on in our heads. If your life is a mess, it’s because you accept those thoughts in your head. You and only you can change the colour of those thoughts.

  I’ve always been an optimist; I could find a silver lining in a mushroom cloud. People who know me often remark that no matter how bad a situation I’ve got myself into, I always seem to come up smelling of roses. I flip bad situations into better ones just by focusing on what good has come from that situation. It may be slim pickings at times but from every circumstance there comes an opportunity. I analyse exactly what’s happened and I always find something good in every situation, so that’s exactly where my focus is. I always say to myself: ‘It could have been a lot worse.’ Having a positive mindset is half the battle in life and allows you to take risks others wouldn’t touch with a bargepole. It’s also a case of trusting that the solutions are within you no matter how bad the shitstorm gets. You have to triage the problem: ask yourself, ‘What can I control in the chaos?’ If you have a growth mindset rather than a shut-down negative one, you’ll always find a way out.

  A major component of optimism is the ability to visualise something good happening, to see it in diamond-clear detail and to be able to place yourself in that imaginary scenario and feel how you would feel if it was real. Visualisation is so powerful that it can be dangerous if not directed consciously, which is why people who build negative future scenarios in their minds usually get what they ask for. We’re quite happy to sit and worry for hours and days about something we don’t want, so why don’t we change that to something we do w
ant? The more you practise it, the more it delivers and so on . . .

  BUBBLES & BULLETS

  In 2003, a few months after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, I was in post-war Iraq working security for ABC News, ferrying journos across Baghdad and beyond. It was tense and bombs were still going off but there was hope the worst was over. News companies started cutting the level of their security protection and I found myself team-leading an operation to pick up a very precious ‘package’ – the new ABC bureau chief – from Jordan on a 28-hour round trip. Part of his job was to assess the need for the rather expensive security detail he had hired (i.e., us). What should have been at least six of us ensuring the safety of him and his team of eleven was shaved down to myself and one other operative, Dave. It was a crazy situation to be placed in, but we desperately wanted to hold on to the contract with the news company, so we agreed to cut corners, which is what you did in the absence of the awe and might of military tools and protocol.

  Up to this point in my life I’d been pretty good at visualizing – it had got me into the Royal Marines and the SBS. Without realising what I was doing, I had focused on how getting accepted by them would make me feel, how it would affect my life, and how it would affect those people around me when I passed. I hung on to the desire for that outcome and felt the emotions around it. I used all my senses to evoke it: touch, smell, feel, hearing, taste. I placed myself in the situation of passing Selection, imagining the people who really mattered to me. I felt their warm hands closing about my own and shaking my hand. Visualisation comes naturally to me; I am more of a creative person than an analytical one, so I’m somewhat of an expert when it comes to painting pictures in my mind. Attaching a layer of emotion to these pictures makes them feel real.