Achieving Goals
My entire life has been accomplishing one impossible goal after the next.
If you don’t know me, or if you do- just to refresh you of my story, I was raised by a single mother.
I was born in a trailer park and we didn’t grow up with much. We had a lot of love. We had a lot of really great friends and a lot of people who believed in us, but we didn’t have much money. We didn’t have many resources. We didn’t have much in the way of education beyond normal school.
But when I was around seven years old, I set an impossible dream.
And in this video, I want to talk to you about how you can conquer impossible goals.
In fact, I’m going to share with you a four-part process for how anyone can do it and specifically how I have done it repeatedly.
I don’t mean for any of this to come across as bragging.
I want to share with you a process and a methodology that’s not just theoretical, but that is practical.
I’ve used it in my own life and deployed in the lives of others. We’ve created teams of people who’ve helped other people follow this process so that you can follow it also.
But when I was seven years old, I was doing martial arts.
The first impossible goal is I thought, “Gosh, I want to become the youngest black belt in Colorado.”
At age 10, I did that.
I also remember about that time, around fifth or sixth grade, where my mom told me you will go to college. You will absolutely go to college and you will get a full-ride scholarship because I will never be able to afford it.
And she laid that gauntlet down and I remember thinking one day I’m going to go to a private school for college and I’m going to get a full academic scholarship. And so, I set that dream.
When I was a freshman in high school, I went to the awards banquet. I remember they were doing all these awards, right? And they were calling up all these seniors and people winning the academic awards and announcing valedictorian.
I thought, “Well, maybe I could be valedictorian and that would help me get a full-ride scholarship.”
And that’s what ended up happening.
I worked a crazy amount all through high school. I was valedictorian. I was an all-American athlete. I got a full-ride scholarship to the University of Denver.
I got into direct sales. I broke a 150-year-old record as I built the largest team in the history of people working in that program.
That led me to want to be a speaker.
And I pursued a contest called the World Championship of Public Speaking when I was 23 years old. I was the World Champion of Public Speaking first runner up and then launched our first company. I ended up growing that to eight figures and became a New York Times bestselling author along the way.
I don’t want this to sound like bragging. That’s not the goal of this. The purpose of me telling you this is that there is a process.
There’s a system to success. There’s a system to achievement.
And too often people, like the kids that I grew up with in my neighborhood, are either told or grow up to believe that success is a matter of circumstance. That it is somehow external.
It’s a stroke of luck, it’s fate, in the stars, or God’s plan. Which I very much believe in God.
What I’m telling you is that over and over in my life, over and over in the lives of the clients that we have coached, and over and over in the lives of the people that I have studied and been mentored by, we have seen a systematic, repeatable, proven process for how to conquer impossible goals.
When I say impossible, I remember the first time I said I want to be a New York Times bestselling author.
I can’t tell you how crazy that was. I mean, I might as well have been saying I want to be the President of the United States.
For me and where I was at that time in my early twenties, I knew nobody that was one. I knew nothing about how to do it. I had never written a book. I had no credibility or expertise.
For me, where I was in that moment to where it actually happened, the gap of that distance has to be as big as any gap between where you’re at right now and whatever your wildest dream is.
I’m absolutely convinced of that.
And that was the same thing about getting a full-ride scholarship. When I was a kid, I had no idea what that would take or what that would mean when I said I wanted to become an entrepreneur and grow an eight-figure company well north of $10 million a year in annual revenue as an early 20’s individual.
I had just no sense of what that would take but I had this dream.
To have a viral Ted talk, to be inducted into the Hall of Fame of Public Speaking, these are things that I thought maybe I would do one day when I am 60.
And they are things that we’ve checked off systematically over the years.
Not because I’m amazing.
A lot of it has to do with a great team and many awesome people that have believed in me and helped.
But I’m telling you, there is a process that you can follow to conquer the most impossible goals.
And I want to talk about the first step in that journey because it’s proven and you can bank on it. You can bet on it.
I have bet on it repeatedly.
Visualizing
And let me introduce this one to you by saying the number one reason why people don’t achieve these incredible, amazing, flamboyant dreams such as having your dream house, becoming a multimillionaire, having your dream car. Or even impacting millions of people through your social media, videos, platform, books, etc.
Or maybe it’s something totally different.
But the number one reason why most people never achieve these impossible dreams is that they don’t know what they want.
They don’t know what they really want, or if they do know what they want, they don’t take the time to sit and be with that dream.
And my guess is that maybe at some point in your life, you had a dream but it seemed so impossible.
There was something you felt called to that you wanted but it felt so impossible that you just immediately thought that it would never happen.
That’s what happens. We have this dream or this picture of something or we see someone else accomplish something.
And we say, “Oh my gosh, that would be amazing if I could do that or something similar to that.”
And then our brain immediately says, “Oh, that’s crazy. That’s not for you.”
And I’m telling you all of us have that thought.
But the difference is the people who achieve it is not in their DNA. It’s not luck. It’s not fate.
It is that they follow a process.
And this is the first thing that they do.
They permit themselves to see a picture.
That’s it.
You might want to write this down.
Don’t let the simplicity of this make you doubt it. The power is in the simplicity, I promise.
They allow themselves permission to see a picture.
If I had to say that in another word, it would be a vision but I don’t like that word vision because when you hear the word vision, people think it’s silly. They’ve heard that. That’s nothing new.
But here’s the difference.
When I say see a picture, I do not mean a vision that is saying I’m going to be the greatest in something or I’m going to be the number one of something.
I’m not saying it’s bad but that’s not the magical piece of the puzzle. That’s not the first step.
When I say see a picture, I mean that when you have that calling, that instinct, that prompting– call it the Holy Spirit or call it the universe–whatever that thing is that you feel right. I call it the Holy Spirit.
But your calling, this thing that speaks to you that says I would love to do that, when you have that moment, rather than just dismissing it, what I want you to do is write out the picture of what it would look like if it actually happened.
Don’t just write down the goal of saying like I want to be a New York Times bestselling author.
That’s a goal.
I’m saying to describe the picture. What would it look like?
I want to give you a little technique for this.
This is actually right out of my Take the Stairs book. It’s called V.A.S.T.
It’s Visual, Auditory, Smell, and Touch.
Describe a scene. I’m not saying write down a goal.
I’m not talking about one line here. I’m talking about writing out a paragraph, which if you do this right, it might easily become a page. Sometimes it could become five pages.
Let’s go for a paragraph or two.
All I want you to do is describe the visual, not just vision, such we’ve got a vision to be the best in the world.
There’s nothing wrong with that, but that’s not what I’m talking about here.
I’m saying pretend you’re an author. And describe for me the scene of what this looks like. Right?
When I was thinking about the World Championship of Public Speaking, 25,000 contestants from 90 countries, people spend their whole careers trying to win this world championship.
I was 22 years old going, “I want to become a professional speaker one day. I’ve got no credibility. If I won the world championship, maybe that would launch my career.”
My goal was to become the World Champion of Public Speaking but what the picture was the moment where they announced that the new World Champion of Public Speaking is Rory Vaden.
And I described the scene. I wrote it out.
What could I see? Who was there with me?
I remember writing about the lights. I could see all the bright lights on the stage, and I could see the audience. I could see this huge stage and these floating cameras. Those are the things that I could see.
So that’s the visual.
The A is auditory. What can you hear?
I literally wrote this out. I’m describing this as if I were an author. I can hear them saying the words, “Your next World Champion of Public Speaking is Rory Vaden.”
I’m writing out what I would hear.
And this is becoming vivid in my brain because now I’m hearing this.
And then I talk about what I can smell.
I’m trying to talk about any sort of scent. Maybe you’re somewhere on a beach or you’re at a restaurant. Maybe you’re at your house or maybe you’re outside.
For me, I was smelling the stale hotel air of a giant ballroom. Sort of mixed with a little bit of sweat pouring down from my anxiety of waiting for this moment.
But what can you smell?
The smell is the keenest of all human senses.
And you want to activate that here in writing it out.
And then the T is what can you touch? So kinesthetically, what can you touch?
I was describing holding the trophy and I could feel the weight of this trophy and the sharpness of its edges in my hand.
Additionally, what can you touch?
I could feel the stage moving underneath my feet.
It’s also how do you feel and what are the emotions that you are feeling?
This is the first step to conquering impossible goals.
Do not underestimate the power of it.
I have done this every time in my life, every single time of my life.
I’ve created one of these and then I’ve written it down. I’ve thought about it and thought about it.
It has come true.
The more clearly you can see a goal in your mind, the more likely it is to come true in your life.
This is a story that has been repeated to me by ultra-performers that I have studied, interviewed for my podcast, profiled from around the world, shared the stage with, heard them speak, read their books, etc.
This is super powerful.
So this is the first step of conquering impossible goals.
I want you to do this. I want you to actually write it out right now. You need to do it.
If you do it, you’re still going to have a hard time believing it the first time.
That little voice that comes up and says “Nah”. You’re going to read it and experience that.
I’m telling you my vision for becoming a New York Times bestselling author was walking through the airport, seeing my book on a shelf in the bookstore, picking it up, holding my hand on the cover to the embossed title with the big New York Times bestseller badge.
I used to see that but for the first thousand times I read that thing, it felt impossible.
You’re going to struggle with belief but for now, just focus on writing the picture.
How to Achieve a Goal Successfully?
In the next blog post, I’m going to talk a little bit about belief and I’m going to share with you a couple of ideas and some tactical practical things that you can do to help you raise your belief and help you get past that idea that it’s impossible.
This is Part 1 of the Conquering Impossible Goals Series – Click to see Part 2: How to Overcome Self-Doubt when Achieving Your Goals , here for Part 3: How Does Personal Development Help With Achieving Goals, and Part 4: Why 18% of People Can’t Keep a New Year’s Resolution for Even 1 Day
