How to Set Meaningful Goals in 2020

Chris Albert 00:00:00 (link to this point)

The Warrior Soul podcast is written, produced, and edited by me, Albert. Our mission is to provide tools, tactics, strategies, and ideas to US military veterans and anybody else willing to listen to help them to navigate toward living their absolute best lives. If you find these episodes helpful, please share them out with somebody that you know of that can use them. And if you really like the podcast, please also head over to iTunes and write us a written rating and review. It really helps us to spread word about the show, and it really helps to get these tools in the hands of others who really need them.

This podcast is sponsored by f bomb nutrition. They make awesome delicious packets of macadamia nut butters. They mix them up with chocolate, with sea salt, with pecan butter. They're absolutely delicious, and they also have a number of other fat fueled snacks, like their meat sticks and their cheese crisps. They're amazing people who are sending boxes of this stuff out to the troops on the front lines, and they're offering 20% off to our listeners on their first orders.

If you head over to www.dropanfbomb.com and use the code Warrior Soul at checkout, you'll get 20% off of that first order. And I'm gonna keep the announcements short and sweet today. You can stick around to the end. I got a really special announcement about a brotherhood that we're creating here at Warrior Soul. So hope you enjoy this episode.

I hope you get a lot out of it. And without delay, let's get into it.

This is Chris Albert, and I'm here to remind you of one thing. Someday, you're going to die. That's not some morbid statement or scary idea. It's solid fact. Your time here on this earth is limited.

We need to be reminded of this as much as possible for one simple reason, to live your best life while you can. This is the Warrior Soul Podcast.

What is going on everybody? Chris Albert here with the Warrior Soul Podcast and today I want to get into a Warrior Notes episode with you. This is where I'm talking about an issue that is going to help you to grow, you to become stronger, help you to become a more capable human being. And I'm going deliver some tools, some tactics, some strategies to you to help you along on your way. Normally when I'm here, I'm talking to somebody who's very smart, very accomplished.

I've had guests like Robert Greene, Ben Greenfield, Grant Cardone. I just had Nick Bare, the CEO of Bare Performance Nutrition. And he's a US Army Ranger, Ironman Triathlon and a heck of a business owner. And through that, my mission is to empower The US military veteran community to live their absolute best lives. And I do that because over the past decade and a half, veterans have faced extraordinarily high suicide rates, extraordinarily high rates of veteran homelessness, and extraordinarily high rates of chronic disease.

Most people are trying to raise awareness about these issues and awareness is great, but this podcast is about solutions helping veterans to help themselves. And if you're not a veteran stick around because anything I talk about here can obviously apply to anyone else out there. Today, I want to talk to you about a subject that is going to be on the top of everybody's minds over the next month. And that is goals. Setting goals.

And right now we're in early December, we're heading into the holidays and it's gonna be New Year's and goals take the form of New Year's resolutions during this time of year. And what you're gonna see out there over the next few weeks, there's gonna be a lot of commentators here on YouTube or in the podcast sphere that are gonna come on and say New Year's resolutions are a joke. They're gonna say they're useless. They're gonna say you shouldn't set you New Year's resolutions. You should always just try to make yourself better.

And my message to those commentators, those those armchair quarterbacks out there, so to speak, is to shut the hell up. If people are trying to make their lives better, if people are trying to do something to improve themselves, who are you to denigrate them and who are you to tell them that the way they're going about it is wrong? At least they're trying. All right. So if you've got New Year's resolutions and you're with the crowd on that, I applaud you.

I applaud you for trying to get better. I applaud you for trying to get stronger. But we have to deal with one of the uncomfortable facts when it comes to goal setting. And that is this. Statistics show that amongst everybody who sets New Year's resolutions or goals, only eight percent will have accomplished those goals.

We're operating at a ninety two percent failure rate. And you have to ask yourself, well, why is that? Why do so many people fail at accomplishing their goals? And why do so many people let their New Year's resolution slip? Right?

And we all know the story. You go into the gym, January 2, it's packed. But by February, March, the thing is empty. Nobody's there anymore. Right?

And and everybody's complaining about all the influx of New Year's resolutioners coming in, to work on themselves, but then they know that by March most people would be gone. Here's the big thing I want to say. Number one, we have to think about why we're setting those goals in the first place because that is going to translate into success or failure. So why do we set goals? A lot of times we're setting them because we're picking things that we see other people doing.

We see other people losing weight, we see other people starting businesses, we see other people reading books. We want that too. We want to become smarter, we want to become wealthier, want to become better looking and more fit. We follow the crowd on a lot of this stuff. Also popular culture plays a role.

Popular culture tells us that six pack abs are attractive. So we want to get six pack abs. Popular culture might tell us that we want a 500 pound squat. So a lot of times we'll focus our New Year's resolutions upon, on strength. Maybe we are unhappy with our jobs and the self help community is telling us, hey, if you really want to live out your passion, should start a business.

So, you know, we go and we start businesses because they tell us to. And at the end of the day, a lot of the ideas we're getting for our goals and and and for how we're gonna advance in our lives, well, we're getting them from other people. I see a lot of vets coming home thinking, hey, I need to go, I need to continue my education. A lot of times, they're getting the idea that they need to go to college from their parents or somebody else, not because they want to go to college. So the first step you need to take if you're going to set goals that you're going to stick with is rather than thinking about what everybody else wants for you or what everybody else is telling you what you should do, you should sit down and write a vision for yourself.

Think about what you want your life to look like in a perfect world. What do you want to be focusing on? What type of work do you want to be doing? What who who are you spending your time with? Who you know, what's your house look like?

That kind of stuff. You want to get really really specific with this. I've done a few episodes on this before and I'm not going to go into the mechanics of writing your vision out right now because that's not the subject of this episode. But you are going to need a good idea of what your vision looks like and and what you want to accomplish in this life before you start trying to go after any type of goal. Right?

Now, why is that important? Well, it's important because if you're going after a goal that that, you know, doesn't mean much to you outside of the fact that somebody told you it was a good goal to go for, well then, your willpower is not going to be there. And you need willpower to do this. Right? Why is that?

Well it's because, anytime you were trying to change yourself, anytime you were trying to make yourself into a better stronger person, there's going to be a tension there. And that tension is between the person you are now and the person you want to become. And that's because, well, the person you are now has obligations. You've got a job. You've got work to do.

You've family. You've got things you've got to do every day to maintain your life. Right? And and by the end of the day, a lot of times, you're coming home from work, you're taking care of the kids, you're getting dinner ready. When it comes time to to work out or to work on that book or to work on that business, well, you are gonna be spent.

You're gonna have low energy. You're not gonna want to do that. And you're going to have to go through some pain if you want to accomplish that goal. So guess what happens? A lot of times people just give up.

They don't want to deal with the pain. They don't want to deal with the inconvenience. Right? They might want to lose weight, but they like their time with Netflix and they like turning their brains off, more than they want to go and get on the treadmill or workout or lift weights or do any of that stuff. They might want to write a book, but they value sleep, which you should value sleep, but or they value other things in their lives right now, the way things are, more than the opportunity to write that book.

And the problem is that without having a vision and without having meaning derived from that goal, then essentially that goal in your mind is just an extracurricular activity that you're doing as as kind of like a hobby. And that's why people give up so much. That's why people give up fitness. They treat fitness like a hobby. That's why people give up on business because they see it as a side hustle and they don't want to commit the time and they don't want to go through the pain in order to do it.

Right? Now a lot of people, a lot of experts have, set up these things called SMART goals. This system called the SMART system and it's a good system. It stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time bound. Right?

And if your your your goals are SMART, supposedly, are going to to to have better time working on those goals because you break them down into doable chunks. And that's a really awesome way to going of going about it. But I'll tell you right now, whether your goals fit the SMART criteria or not, if there isn't a deeper meaning behind those goals, you're still going to give them up. Right? So the question then becomes, well, how do you bring more meaning to the goal?

How do you get yourself to a point so that you are going to be going after goals that are so important to you that you wouldn't give them up? And the answer is that you have to take a step back after you write your vision and you have to say, Okay, what am I going to accomplish here and why is it so important? You have to ask yourself that question, Why? Why am I going after this goal in the first place? Now, I'll tell you from from a fitness perspective, right, why I am no longer a bodybuilder, I am no longer a competitive power lifter, I am pretty much no longer really in the fitness industry.

Why do I still train? Why do I still train? The reason I train is because I'm 40 years old right now. I'm not married yet, I have a beautiful woman in my life, and I want to start a life with her, I want to have children with her. And in order to do that, I need to live long.

And I don't want it to come to pass when I'm 60 years old, and my kids are 18 or 20. I don't want it to come to pass that I'm an invalid at that point. And so every time I'm going out and I'm thinking about doing a workout, if I don't want to do that workout, my thoughts are, well, if you don't hold the line right now, if you don't train right now, then what's going to happen when you're 45? And what's going to happen when you're 50? And how are you going to have the energy to be a parent?

Because that's something that's extremely important to me. So what you need to do is you need to take that goal that you have and you need to tie it to something that's so important to you in your life that that you'll stop at nothing. Even when when the the proverbial shit hits the fan and you're you're you're you're going through stress and work is building up, you need to have a reason, a why for doing it, that is going to keep you doing it no matter what. Similarly, you know, if you with my business, right, I could give up now, and I could go and I could try to get a job. But my mission here at Warrior Soul is so important to me.

Empowering US military veterans to live their best lives. Empowering this community so that it can come back and shape this country for the better. That's what gets me up in the morning. It's not the prospect of making a little extra money. It's not the prospect of becoming famous or anything like that.

It's the deep meaning that I get from helping this community. Right? And that's so important to me that that I couldn't give that up. And so, again, you need to find a deeper meaning here. A deeper meaning for why you're doing it.

Don't just set up a goal. Don't just pick a goal because you think it'd be cool. Don't just pick a goal because you think it'll it'll lead to some cool stuff. Once you have that goal, need to figure out why it's going to be important to you for your life. And so important to you, that no matter what happens, you're not going to give it up.

The other thing I want to say here is this. A lot of times we let our past get in the way. And based off of fear, we get to a point to to to where we don't want to try anything new because we think we're going to give it up anyway. Right? We think we're going to fail.

And we we fear that failure. And what I'll tell you is this, fear at the end of the day is a liar. Right? We are not here forever on this earth. I say that at the beginning of this podcast.

Someday you're gonna die. A hundred years from now, every single person watching this in the present moment, I don't know, a hundred years from now you might still be watching my videos, probably not. But but everybody who's watching this right now, a hundred years from now, is gonna be dead. Right? Your friends, your family, they're gonna be dead.

Right? So this state we're in here on on this earth, it's temporary. And that means that any concept of risk that we have when it comes to improving our lives, well, that's an unfounded fear. Right? And so what you need to understand is that you need to take advantage of this time while you're here.

Right? Don't give up on yourself. Don't allow yourself for the the the precious remaining years that you're on this earth to to give those up and to spend that time so frivolously. Right? Drive yourself to do something that is gonna allow you to get the most out of your time here on this earth.

Right? And if you can remember that every day, and if you can bring more meaning to everything you do, then you're gonna live an amazing life. Alright. So I hope that made a lot of sense to you guys. And I also want to say that over the next month we're going to be doing a lot of work in the private Facebook group, the free private Facebook group, Warrior Soul Agoge Empowerment and Resilience Facebook group, about goals, about staying on top of your goals and creating more meaningful goals.

So if you guys want to join that group, it's absolutely free. If you enjoy the Warrior Soul podcast, please share these episodes out, share this episode out with somebody who can use this information, share it with a veteran, tell a veteran about the show. We are always trying to get into the ears of more veterans around the country and the more you guys share, the more we're helping this movement. And then if you can, write us a written review up on iTunes. It really helps to let people know that the show exists.

So I want to thank you guys so much for listening and I'll be back at you really soon with another awesome episode. Alright. Hey, guys. Before you go, I just wanna tell you really quickly about the Warrior's Obituary Society. It's a group of men who get together to empower each other to live absolutely epic lives.

Lives worthy of epic obituaries. And I started this group because I was noticing that there was a lot of people out there who wanted extra camaraderie in their lives. A lot of men as they get older, they drift further and further from their friends, they drift further and further away from their social circles, and they start to let themselves go. And what I wanted from this group was to create a fraternity of sorts, much like we had in the Marine Corps, and in the Army, and in the infantry. And I wanted to make it a group where we were held holding each other accountable. And the way this group works is this, we've got an eight week development program upfront, every member has to go through it, it's kind of like your boot camp.

And in that development program, we are focusing on helping you to develop a vision. First and foremost, get very clear about what you want. From that vision, we help you to develop those meaningful goals that I talked about in this episode. And then we get into specifics. We help you to customize your own personalized fitness and nutrition plan.

Then we work on your personal finances. And we help you to develop a plan so you can knock down debt, start saving money, start investing, and start building your dreams. And then from there, we're working on your skills. We're working on your relationship building skills. We're working on your networking skills.

We're going to help you to focus on your business or career. And as we're doing that, we're helping you to develop business ideas. We're helping you to develop ideas for marketing yourself if you wanted to go that route, or ideas for how you can bring extra contributions to your place of work, bring extra impact to your life, and seek extra opportunities for you to lead in your job and in your community. This program is absolutely outstanding. We got a great group of veterans, active duty military, and civilians in the group, so we get multiple perspectives.

And we meet live once a week. We've got a a a night call on on Thursdays, and then we got a morning call on Fridays for those who have a bunch of different time zones that they're working in. We got people in Europe. We've got people in Afghanistan. We've got people here in The United States.

So there's a huge group of of active military vets and everything like that. And the other aspect of this is we're communicating live over our forum on Slack. So we're constantly chatting, constantly pushing each other, constantly putting tips out there to help each other out. If you're interested in this, if this is something you think you'd like to be part of, head over to www.warriorobituarysociety.com. Or you can email me at chris@warriorsoulagoge.com.

Either way, I'd love to sit down with you. I'd love to talk about this program. I've kept the price for this very very reasonable. It's not like a super thousand dollar program or anything like that. It's it's something I wanted to do to create a bigger social circle for for myself and a bigger social circle for this community.

So hope to see you guys in there, and we'll be back at you later on this week with some more awesome content.