When it comes to goals, we set them easily but to make them actionable and achievable, you need to have a process in place that makes them come to life. Your goals have to be ASMART: Aligned with your vision/mission, Specific, Measurable, Actionable or Achievable, Results driven and Time bound.

The Ladder of Achievement

If we don’t create a process to accomplish goals, then there is a gap that keeps you away from success. This action plan is meant to get rid of that gap.

Personal Growth

The desire to grow is the natural state of humanity and without it we start to question our worth. We need to dream big with great aspirations that keep us from being mediocre. You should be committed to specific growth elements like building relationships and skills in your life.

Perseverance

It’s the stick-to-it-ness factor, so that even though things don’t go according to plan, you still persevere and are ready to move through obstacles and challenges.

• Purpose: Only reaching financial outcomes should not be your purpose; have something that is meaningful and fulfilling.
• Passion: To keep your life in balance and have a holistic success, have that emotionally compelling “Why” to drive you towards your passion.
• Patience: You can’t control everything, so you need the patience to move through the process and be flexible in the journey.

Practice

It’s about your discipline in taking actions. There are three elements under it:

• Plan: Everything changes, so our plans need to be broken down into bite-sized chunks so that the long term vision can be reached.
• People: Success and achievement are not solitary pursuits. You need people, the driving force to take steps in the right direction.
• Positivity: Approach everything with a positive expectancy. If you develop the ladder of achievement, then positivity becomes easy as you know how to navigate past the obstacles.

— Begin Transcript —

Hey there, I’m Mel Abraham, the author of the #1 best-selling book, The Entrepreneur’s Solution, the Founder of Thoughtpreneur Academy where we teach you how to capture, package and monetize what you know. The ideas in your head so you can have more impact, more time to yourself and more income.

And welcome back to this episode of The Entrepreneur’s Solution show. This one is going to be kind of cool. I’m actually going back over something that I do every single year with you and that is achievement. During this time of the year, we are always, constantly looking at: “What are my goals? What are my goals? What do I want to do? New Year’s resolutions.” All those types of things but we never talk about a process to make them come to life.

And that’s what we’re going to talk about here. I’m going to talk about my Ladder of Achievement. It’s what I’ve used in my life to accomplish the things that I have done and it’s what I’ve used for my high-level clients as I mentor them or in my workshops like Thoughtpreneur Academy or Business Breakthrough Academy to help them achieve what it is they’re looking for.

So, I’m going to give that to you today in this episode, right after this brief introduction. We’ll be right back. But if you want to make sure that you get the guidebook, the action guide, The Ladder of Achievement action guide; go ahead and go to MelAbraham.com/session051 or just text me MYLEGACY one-word no-spaces 38470.

I’ll make sure I send you the download link so you can have the action guide right by your side as we go through this. And I’ll see you back here right after this brief introduction. See you soon.

Hey there, welcome back, I’m Mel Abraham, the author of the #1 best-selling book, The Entrepreneur’s Solution and welcome back to this episode of The Entrepreneur’s Solution show and this one is going to be kind of cool. There’s a lot of new things that are going on in a lot of people’s lives as I’ve talked to them through this type of season and I know that you are probably looking around and going, “That’s a different background”.

You’re right, we’re in a different place and in still in the process of finishing a move right now and so I’ve got boxes. If I turn the camera around, I got boxes all around me and stuff all around me. We’re still unpacking but we’re slowly building out the new office and the new digs that we’re going to be coming to you from.

This is the first episode coming from here and just it’s kind of a cool episode, and just kind of start a new year, a new fresh year and like I said, we’re going to talk about, in this episode, the concept of The Ladder of Achievement; this framework that I use.

Around this time of year, there’s a lot of talk about goal setting and there’s a lot of talk about New Year’s resolutions. There’s a lot of reflecting on what you did in the past year and what may be, what you didn’t do in the past year and wondering, “Gosh why didn’t it come to fruition. Why didn’t it come to life? Why did I or why did it? What was it that allowed me to be such a success in this last year and how can I duplicate it again and magnify it in the coming year?”

And so, what this is all about really is not necessarily goal setting. All we’re going to talk about, we’re going to talk about goal setting, we’re even going to talk about smart goals and I think that there’s some great things about smart goals, there’s also some things that are lacking.

I’m going to give you what I think is the missing link, two missing links:

• To make SMART goals a little more actionable.
• To make them more achievable.

To create a process that’s the fuel to making the goals that you create come to life because we never focus on the process. We simply set a goal and I’m going to tell you, I’ve heard it over and over and over again, “Oh just right your goals down. Put them on a wall. Read them every morning. Read them every night before you go to bed.”

Well, I got news for you. Just reading your goals isn’t going to make them come to life. It isn’t going to make them come to fruition. What’s going to make them come to fruition is

• Your actions,
• The discipline you apply to those goals,
• The process that you create to make them come to life.

And that’s what I want to focus on here and it is to give you a process, something that through that process the goals you set will be achieved over time. So, the fact of the matter is that: Yes, we’re going to set some goals. We’re going to talk about it. But I want to give you more importantly the process.

Let’s talk about the goal setting process for a moment. We’ve all heard SMART goals, SMART goals, SMART goals, SMART goals, “Ugh!”. We’ve heard it over and over again. Now, I’m not disagreeing completely with them. I think that they’re great and I think there’s some really cool things about it: (1) It stands for, those of you that aren’t familiar: SMART goals is an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Achievable or Actionable, Results oriented, and Time driven.

Now, those are great characteristics for goals. I do want it to be Specific. If it’s some generic general goal, we’re not going to be able to achieve it because it’s nebulous. It’s like trying to grab on to a cloud—you can’t do it. So, when you’re setting your goals in this ladder of achievement process they do need to be specific. They need to be very, very specific.

Then we want them to be Measurable. In other words, this is one of the key questions I often ask when I’m working with someone or often teach when I’m working with businesses or that my mentoring, my high level mentoring clients and in my workshops is that:

What does success look like for you?

And we ought to be asking that same question.

What does the destination, if there is such a thing; it’s the destination of success, at least, in this circumstance, what does the destination of success look like for you?
It could be in a relationship. What does that good relationship feel like or look like for you?

And being that specific because here’s there challenge: Is if we don’t know what success looks like, we’re never going to know when we get there.

And this is a great question to ask when you’re working with businesses and clients and other folks is, and even in relationships, “What does success look like for you?” because now we know what we’re going towards. Now we know what it is we’re trying to achieve?

So, what does it look like for you?

• Make sure it’s measurable
• Make sure that you have a system in place that tracks it so you can see how much closer you’re getting to it and where you are so you can adjust and tweak as necessary.

So, measurable is a great characteristic for a goal.

Actionable or Achievable: I’ve seen it/said both ways. Is it achievable? And I think that given time and resources or resourcefulness, almost everything is achievable. There were times where people said, we’d never walk on the moon, we did.

When you look at some of the great technological advances, the great accomplishments in society, all we have to do is look a decade earlier and see, said it was impossible but today we’re doing it.

• Today we have 3D printing.
• Today we have cars that are starting to self-drive.

We’ve got all kinds of amazing incredible things that were just a figment of an imagination or an idea at one point of time. So, I do think that almost all things are achievable given time, and approach, and all that.

So, we need to think about it in that context but what I don’t want you to do when I look at this element of achievability or the “A” part of the smart goals is, I don’t want you to make them so grandiose that you don’t have to take action on them.

Here’s what I mean: If I turn around and say, “Well, I’m trying to build my business into a 100 million dollar business.” And you’re just starting out, “Let’s start with making a 100 thousand dollars.” Make it achievable because a 100 million dollars it’s easy to procrastinate because you really can’t see it; it’s so far in the distance. So, make it achievable in a timeframe that makes sense for it.

So, achievable then Results driven. That all the goals are going to drive the needle towards the results you want and then Time bound. So, the concept of time bound really becomes, if one is putting a deadline, a timeframe on things—scheduling it.

I have a very close friend of mine, Bow Eason who said, “Schedule your fears.” When you schedule your fears, things in your mind and things in your life start to shift; start to change. You start to think things differently.

This came to full circle to me. It was an incredible reality. One day, I happen to be standing backstage with a good friend. I’m always backstage with him, Brendon Burchard and we were sitting and chatting. It was before I ever did any kind of live events of my own. I would do a lot of speaking on other people’s stages but I was thinking about doing a live event and he was trying to get me to do my live event.

He says, “Hey, do me a favor. Just put it on a calendar.” He said, “You don’t even have to do it just put it on the calendar and then we can talk about it.”

And so, I calendared the date for my very first Business Breakthrough Academy. This was a number of years ago and we were backstage again.

He says, “Did you put a date on the calendar?”

And I said, “Yeah.”

And he says, “Cool. When is the date.”

And I said, “Well it is June 4^th, 5^th and 6^th.”

He said, “Great.” He says, “That’s before Experts Academy.”

I said, “Yeah.”

(I mean after Experts Academy)

I said, “Yeah.”

He says, “Good. Bring a jacket to that Experts Academy. You’re getting on stage and we’re going to fill that event.”

I freaked because now all of a sudden because it was scheduled it became real and now things had to shift to make it come to life. It was an absolute blessing because those of you that know me, you know what the journey has been like with the live events. This is Breakthrough Academy and Thoughtpreneur Academy, and some of the things, and Titan’s Thinktank and all the different things that we’ve done. It’s been an incredible ride for me and a blessing for me. But it’s because someone made me schedule it and when you schedule it,

• Things had to shift,
• It had to change,
• Had to do things differently.

So, that’s the thing that I want you to consider is, time driven.

So, those are smart goals. Here’s the thing that I think is missing from the SMART goals. Here’s the one aspect that I think when you do that whole SMART acronym, when you put this in place before it and through the process, it’ll shift and change things and then we bring in the ladder of achievement to make them come to life. And that is the “A”.

So, instead of smart goals, I call them ASMART goals, and the “A” for me stands for Alignment. The question that we sometimes fail to ask, it’s a great idea to sit back and go, “Oh, I want to be a millionaire. Ah, I want to make a million dollars. I want to have my own plane or I want to do this or I want to do that.”

My question and this is a question that those of you that know me know that I ask in a lot of businesses and a lot of my mentoring clients and a lot of times is always a values-driven question. I think values will start to, will lead everything we do and the question is this: “Is the goal that you’re setting through the SMART process aligned with your vision, your purpose, your mission and your values?”

If it is not aligned, I can assure you this, one of two things happen. You will never accomplish it because it’s really not aligned with what you want to do and there’s going to be this internal conflict constantly going on, this tug of war between your values and vision and what you set as goals or worse yet, you actually do accomplish it and it’s this empty success that has no meaning and you get there and you go, “Well, is that it” and you’re disappointed.

And you start to reflect on goals and say, “Maybe this isn’t what I was meant to do. Maybe this isn’t.”

Well, so what I want to do is that before you set goals that you get clear on your vision, your values, your purpose, your mission. However, you want to call it in your life. And that all the goals that you set are the needle mover goals that are in alignment with self-actualizing that vision, those values, that purpose, that mission.

When that happens, when it’s truly in alignment with that, when that happens, that’s what fuels the goals, that’s what gets you up out of bed in the morning to do the things that you do. The things that I do, I enjoy doing because they’re in alignment and so, I don’t go, “Uh, got to shoot another video for you guys.”

No, you can see my energy and it is early morning here right now. And we’ve been moving for days but my energy, because it’s in alignment with my values and my vision and my mission, my purpose to be here to support you, to give you what I can for you to be the greatest success possible.

And so, the question that we always need to lead with is I think is Alignment.

And so, instead of SMART goals I’d like you to think about what I call ASMART goals, the needle movers because without the alignment, what happens is you can create goals that are left-brained, that are left-brain stuff; it’s logical stuff that seems to make sense.

“I’m going to do my retirement. I’m going to make certain money. I’m going to buy this or I’m going to do this. I’m going to be a good parent.” But when we connect them through the alignment process, it joins the left brain and the right brain together. It brings the emotional fuel to those goals to bring them to life and so before you set goals, let’s make sure that all goals that you set are in alignment with:

• Your vision,
• Your values,
• Your mission, or
• Your purpose.

And so, once you’ve done that and you’re clear on that, now we can bring in the process. Now we can create the process to make them come to life and that’s what I call, The Ladder of Achievement.

Because here’s what happens: We set goals up and we put them in place and we say, “Here’s the goals that I want for the next 12 months or 6 months or 9 months or 3 months.” However you do it and I, those of you that know me, know that I set some long term goals, 1 year goals but I always break them down into 90 day, 13 weeks, if you will, 13 week win-sprints to accomplish them. We’ll talk a little bit more about that.

But here’s the challenge is: We set the goals but we don’t create a process.

So, there’s this gap between the goals and then success, the achievement of those goals, and that gap needs to be filled with a process and that process is what I call the Ladder of Achievement and that’s the key to achieving those goals. That’s the key to coming back here 12 months from today, 9 months from today, 6 months from today and looking backwards and saying, “Yeah, we can tick that off. We did all right” and that felt good because (1) they were in alignment with the vision, values, mission and in purpose for what you’re coming about.

So, here’s the ladder of achievement. This is something that has served me well for many, many years; served my clients and the people that have come through my workshops and my high-level mentoring clients that I’ve worked with.

And it primarily focuses on three things.

• It’s about personal growth,
• It’s about perseverance, and
• It’s about practice.

And I know that some people hear that the term personal growth, and say, “Oh God, personal growth.”

Here’s the deal and I’m a left brain thinker. I’m an accountant by education, I’m a CPA by trade but I’m an entrepreneur by exhilaration because it energizes me, it juices me to see people’s dreams come true.

And here’s the thing: Personal growth—believe it or not—is where it’s at. Our desire to grow is what I think the natural state of humanity is, is that there is this desire to grow and what happens when people stagnate without growing is:

• That’s when they start to get depressed.
• I think that that’s when they start to shrink down.
• That’s when they start to question what their worth is.

And I think that there’s this and it’s not about not being satisfied with where you are; it’s about seeing how you can be of greater service, of greater impact from a positive standpoint on society and the people around you to be better than you were. It’s not about, some of you will see the quote that goes around that I say, “It’s not about being the best out there. It’s about being the best YOU out there, and can I better myself today from where I was yesterday.”

And I think the answer is always, “Yes” and there’s plenty of room to improve. I’m learning that being married now for the last five years—there’s always room for me to improve. And it’s an incredible, incredible journey. So, I think that what happens is that there’s this desire to be more as a humanity but society poisons us; they poison us with this thing called mediocrity. Think about it.

As a child or those of you that have children out there and if you ask a child or if you recall when you were asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Does the child turn around and say, for my case it certainly wasn’t, “I want to be an accountant.” Okay? I’m not even sure I understood what an accountant did even when I was in college but someone told me I needed to be there at any rate, it worked out well in the long run.

But, the bottom line is that when you ask a child what they want to do when they grow up, they don’t give you one thing, they give you a list of things. “I want to be an astronaut. I want to be a fireman. I want to be a policeman. I want to be a doctor. I want to be a nurse. I want to do this. I want to do that.”

And they give this laundry list because there are no boundaries on their possibility of thinking and what happens is that society trains it out of us. They educate it out of us in the process of education.

I love education and I believe in education, and I believe in all the education programs that are out there whether they are an online university and I think that we as a society, the more educated we can be, the better we will be prepared to deal with all the shifts in society and be better, more productive citizens of a global community. So, I am not belittling education at all. What I am belittling is the societal tendency to have people shrink down their dreams.

I think we need people that dream big. I think we need people that have great aspirations. I think we need people like an Elon Musk or rest his soul, Steve Jobs or a Bill Gates that see a vision greater than what it is today and

• Are willing to run the miles
• Are willing to go after,
• Are willing to go against the naysayers.

And in order to do that we need personal growth. In order to do that we need skillsets that maybe we don’t have right now.

And so one of the questions in this ladder of achievement when I look at my goals is:

• What are the skill sets that I need?
• What are the things that I need to develop inside of me to make that happen?

And fact what I do is once you get your ASMART goals set up, and they’re in alignment with your mission, your vision, your purpose and your values, and you have that set up, ask yourself this question, “Who must I be for these to come true?”

And when you answer that, you now see, “Am I that person? And if I’m not that person, personal growth has to come in because without that, then we’re not committed to do what it takes to make those come true.”

• And that may be education.
• May be taking classes.
• May be association with other people.

We will talk about people in this ladder of achievement in a moment. The key is this—be committed to specific growth elements in your life,

• Whether it’s in relationships.
• Whether it’s in technical skills.
• Whether it’s in writing skills.
• Communication skills.
• Whether it’s in health.
• Whatever it is.

And be committed to it and strip away the rationalizations of why you can’t. That’s what personal growth is about. That’s this process of doing. We don’t want to allow society or society’s norms poisonous with this poison called mediocrity. Agreed?

So, once we get this personal growth piece in place, then it’s about Perseverance and practice that really starts to drive us in the process. So, perseverance; when we look at perseverance, I think there’s three elements to perseverance, and this is really about what I call the stick-to-it-ness. Now I don’t even know if that’s a word and if it’s not a word, I’ve just coined it stick-to-it-ness. Because here’s the thing that I know is going to happen.

• We’re going to set goals in place.
• We’re going to set plans in place.
• We’re going to put things in this journey.

And as soon as they are in place; it’s like the computer; as soon as you buy a computer, it’s obsolete. As soon as your plan is in place, things don’t go as planned. And if we’re not prepared to persevere, if we’re not prepared to move through those obstacles, those challenges, those re-routes, those detours then we’re not on the ladder of achievement. We’re not going to achieve those goals.

Our achievements isn’t a line, it’s a squiggly and a couple of turns, and all kinds of other things that go along that way and so, perseverance is the key and the three things for perseverance that I see is about:

• Purpose,
• Passion, and
• Patience

And so, when we look at Purpose, we kind of talked about this in the A part of the ASMART goals is that if you’re in it and your goals are tied to money only, “Oh, I want to make a million dollars or oh, I want to build a 20 million dollar company.” If that’s your driver then you’re coming from a place; in my belief, you’re coming from a place of greed and it’s not sustainable.

I know a tremendous number of successful people in their eyes from a monetary standpoint. In my eyes, I don’t believe that they are successful because they’re not holistically successful. When I think about success, I think about holistically successful.

It doesn’t make sense for me to be running a 100 million dollar company and this is just my personal belief system and you can tell me I’m wrong that’s okay. I know that others might think differently but it doesn’t do me any good to run a 100 million dollar company if my health is declining and it’s suffering because of it. If my relationship suck because I’m an awful boss to work for; I’m an awful person to my wife or to my kids or anything.

Now, maybe that is success in some people’s mind but I believe success is a holistic thing. It is about your life in not balanced, the challenge with these in the balance is you think equality but balance in the context of intentiality. In other words, being intentional with how you create your life monetarily.

So, financially, spiritually, emotionally, relationship-wise, health-wise, all of those things contribute to success. What is the purpose of what you’re doing? And tie that down. If it is solely to accomplish, achieve, to acquire then I can tell you that it’s not going to be sustainable. I’ve watched it over and over again.

And if you think it’s a sustainable what happens is that it’s empty when you get there. This is your emotionally compelling “Why” and those of you heard the story about Jeremy drawing that picture of me when I was raising him as a single full-time dad, he was young, is that I lost sight of the “Why” and so I lost the meaning in my business in that moment and I was reminded by a 6 year old boy what’s important.

What’s your why?

And take every goal that you set and write next to it, “WHY?”

What is that emotionally compelling WHY?

Because I need the money. That’s not necessarily emotionally compelling. Emotionally compelling is something that stirs you inside. What is the Why?

And then, once we go from that, then we can turn around and say, “Alright what’s the passion? What is it about this “Why” that brings it up, that allows me to say, “If I need to get up at 3 o’clock in the morning or work 12 hours to make it happen, I can do it and it doesn’t feel like work.” You feel like you are in a state of flow and you’re moving and you’re doing things

So, what’s the passion part of this?

And identify it and when we list out the goals in the process at the same time that’s what starts to bring life to it.

And then, this last piece of perseverance, what’s going to really start to bring me through this is this concept of Patience; patience in dealing with that. So, as you move through it, you will realize really quickly that you can’t control everything.

And I know that, especially entrepreneurs, some of us are re ally, really control freaks and we got to let go and be okay with it. I know it’s a challenge for me too.

So, we can’t control everything and there are certain things that we can affect and control them, we can do that. But here’s the thing. We need to be patient; we need to find patience in this process. And I am not the, this is not one of my strong suits. I will tell you this.

In fact, years ago when I was training in Japan; many of you know that I’ve been in the martial arts for 4 and a half decades; almost 4 decades now. And I was training in Japan with my sensei and I was trying to get this technique and I couldn’t get the technique and I’m like, “Oh” and I’m sitting down with sensei and said sensei, I’m trying to, he looks at me and he says, “Oh, just be patient.”

I said, “Patient?”

He said, “What happens if you don’t…”

And it was like, he gave me this Zen like answer that irritated me but his second answer irritated me even more because I said, “But sensei, what happens if I don’t have patience?”

And he looked at me and he says, “Pretend you have patience.”

“Ah!” It wasn’t what I wanted to hear but he was right. We got to have patience; we can’t control everything and it’s not necessarily going to happen in the same timeframe we want it to and we need to be able to adjust and be flexible in the process.

Now, one of the things that we do at this point is to give us that flexibility, to give us that variability is to create alternatives—to turn around and ask ourselves this, “What is an alternative approach to accomplish the same thing?”

So, if I’m setting my goals and what I want to accomplish, and I create a path to get there, “What’s an alternative path?”

So, hear what I’m saying because this is really, really important, an important distinction. I’m not telling you to come up with an alternative destination. I want to keep what your goal is, the same. I want the destination to be the same. What I’m asking you to do is to create alternative ways to get you there. To have 2 to 3, I would say 3 to 4 ways that could accomplish the same thing.

I had a conversation yesterday with a good friend of mine who is building a business and he was looking at acquiring different equipment and he came to me and he says, “Look I’ve got three possible ways to do this. Can you help me kind of evaluate which one is the best right now?”

Well as you see, that’s a great place to be because he’s already got 3 ways to get it done. We’re going to take the most effective way first but we also know that if that starts to go by the waste or not work, we’ve got another way to do it.

Here’s the thing. I want to have alternatives before I get on the journey and know that I have those in my back pocket if I need them. It makes it much easier. It builds your confident because you have already through the challenges and how you might be able to navigate them.

When I do business planning and strategic planning with my high-level clients and even in some of the workshops, I ask them to, “let’s create multiple paths to the same destination, multiple paths to the same outcome”.

So, we have exercised the muscles in a way that gives us the nimbleness, the agility to accomplish what is it we’re trying to accomplish. So, what we want to do is build that in which then gives us a little basis for that preparation in that process.

So, building alternatives as you’re going through goals. I’m going to land this plane a little bit here for you. As you’re going through your goals, I want you to answer the question why under Purpose; answer the question why. Now, that answer of why needs to be an emotionally compelling why. And the guide, the action guide is going to help you walk through this process.

Then I want you to understand how much passion you have for that. And I would tell you to do this: Rank it on a passion scale 0 to 10. If your passion for what that outcome is isn’t at 8 to 10, it’s probably not in alignment with values, vision, purpose and mission.

So, rank them on a scale of 1 to 10 and then patience. Make sure you have at least 2 to 3 possible ways to the same outcome before you start on the journey. And that’ll help you with the perseverance part and then we got to come to this last piece of The Ladder of Achievement which is called Practice.

And in the practice part, it is really about your discipline of action. Now we’ve gone through the planning process. We’ve gone through the documentation process, and in order to do this it’s really about creating a plan, it’s about the people that you have to help you execute on the plan and around you, and then the positivity. We’ll talk about that as the last piece.

So, here’s the plan. When we talk about plans and I have already mentioned this is that we can take these grandiose plans, we can create this journey for 10 years; I’ve seen it so many times with businesses. Let’s do a 10 year business plan. That’s great.

But do you know what?

• Stuff changes in 90 days.
• Stuff changes in 30 days.
• Stuff changes in 6 months.

What are you going to do in the short timeframe to make that 10 years come to pass?

So, that’s fine if you want to make a long-term plan. But in order for that long term plan to become a reality we need to break it down to small bite sized chunks, small bite sized pieces. That’s what we want.

Now, my bite size is typically like I said, I want to run 13 weeks sprints. I want to run 90 day plans. I’m going to create a one year, I’m going to create a three year, a one year plan and I’m going to break it down into 90 day chunks and then break it down into weekly actions. I’m only going to do 2 to 3 action steps at a time to move me forward on that process. So, I need to create that plan.

Now, here’s the challenge with it, is that many people create a plan and we have a society. Remember, I said that society has this poison called mediocrity. It also has this other poison. It’s got two poisons and may have more. But it has this other poison of celebrating negativity.

And here’s what I mean: Turn on a news station. How many negative news stories are there compared to positive news stories? And how that shows up in our life becomes important because I think that we as humanity have gotten used to:

• Pointing out the negative,
• Pointing out the lack
• Pointing out what’s not there
• Pointing out the mistakes, and
• Criticizing and becoming critics.

Which I’m okay with because through some of the process of that we can grow and prove and get better. What I’m not okay with is that we don’t celebrate the successes.

• Why shouldn’t we celebrate the successes?
• Why shouldn’t we point out what was good in doing that?

And we as individuals are probably the worst when it comes to ourselves because we, for some reason, and I include myself in this, we seem to step over our little successes.

Remember, I said at the very beginning is what is the definition of success?

So, if I’m going to create a plan, I’m going to create a bunch of micro-steps. Those micro-steps are little milestones. Those are little success points for us to celebrate. So, when you create your plan, “Here’s my 1 year, my 90 day, my micro-success steps that are maybe week or 2 week steps; what are the that I need to do?” And then I attach to it: “What I’m going to celebrate when we achieve it?” I’m going to program in the celebration process, the ability to go, “Yeah, it’s okay.”

And you know what? It’s okay to pat yourself on the back. It’s okay to recognize that you did something and you did something good. Celebrate it. That is so important for some reason we seem to be lacking at that level.

So, create the plan and the action steps to get there. Document it. Write it out. I’m not even thinking of putting it on a computer. I’d sit there and handwrite it in a journal. There’s something different about putting a pen or a pencil to paper than fingers on the keyboard.

Then ask yourself this, success is not a solitary pursuit. Achievement is not a solitary pursuit. Business is not a solitary pursuit. My success and what I’ve achieved is on the shoulders and through the honor of the people that have blessed me in my life including you out there.

I feel blessed that I’m sitting here having a chance to speak with you, digitally at this point but hopefully live at some point where we get a chance to have a dialog but I feel blessed that my success is because of the people around me and not because of me. It’s not a solitary pursuit.

It’s not; I hear the term oh self-made millionaire or self-made billionaire. There’s no such thing as self-made; self-motivated maybe. I don’t know but the fact of the matter is for me to be a success, for you to be a success, for others, for Bill Gates, for Steve Jobs, for other people to be a success; other people had to be involved in the process.

So, who are those people for you?

• Who are the mentors you need that are going to encourage you,
• That are going to move you,
• That are going to direct you?
• Who have actually ran the miles before you in a way that they understand what it is you need to consider.
• Who are those people?

And then I talk about, I got a framework for the different kinds of mentors. It’s in one of the earlier episodes that you can look up if you want to understand the different types of mentors that you have.

And there’s the Ally. There’s four different types of mentors but I think we need a level of mentorship in our lives. I have got mentors, I’ve got colleagues, I’ve got friends that are all in my life for different reasons and they support me in different ways as I do that.

And indirectly, you being here, I feel like I’m in your life in some way trying to support you in your journey in that process. So, the question is, “What are the mentors that are in your life that can help you?”

Now, you may say, “I don’t have any.” Great, let me ask the question in another way. “Who are the mentors or the people that you need in your life or would want in your life to help you on this journey?”

And then, ask yourself, “What does it take to get them? What does it take to connect with them?” And start to look through that process to figure out how you can connect with them.

Now here’s the thing when it comes to mentorship and again I’m going to encourage you to go back to that episode on mentors, is to not go out there and go, “Hey, I need your help. I need your help. I need your help. I need your help. I need your help.” Because they’re going to look at you and they go, “I get that all day long.”

Now some people will be willing to do that but here’s the better way. Serve them first and they’ll serve you. What can you do to support them, to support their causes, to support what they’re doing, to show interest to understand?

And then they turn around and say, “What can I do for you?”

Because if we’re always going with our hands out and they’re empty, expecting them to be filled, that’s different. If we go with our hands out with a gift and that gift might be just service, that gift might be something that serves them. Serve first and see what comes back later. That’s the way you start to build those mentors.

But I would sit down in this process, let’s land the plane here. Create the plan. Break it down one year, 90 days, action steps and the celebration points. That’s the key.

• Then who are the people in your life that will help this plan come to life?
• Who are the people that you need in your life to help this plan come to play?

It might not even be a mentor. It might simply be, “I need someone that understands technology. I need someone that can help me write copy better” and all that. And write those people down and say … then next you’ll go, “Alright, do I have a connection with them. If I do how am I going to contact them and when (remember time-driven)? If I don’t have a direct connection with them; who does and when am I going to initiate that contact?”

Then once we have the people dialed in, we have this last piece of the achievement ladder. That’s Positivity.

Here’s the deal with positivity and it’s something that I call, “I want to approach everything I do with positive expectancy.” It’s rather than going, “Yeah, well I’ll give it a shot. I don’t know if I’ll make it.” That isn’t positive expectancy.

I want you to be real but it’s the question of how you think about what you’ve set that starts to set thing in motion (If I’ve got hesitation because I’m unsure and I don’t have that positive expectancy). Now maybe it’s like, being able to say, “Look, I know that I’m going to achieve all my goals. It’s just the way I am. Now, I may not achieve it in the same timeline and I may not achieve it in the same pathway that I had originally anticipated but I’m going to continue on it because I know that they’re in alignment with my mission, my vision, my values, and my purpose.”

I know that I’ve created an emotionally compelling why and that I know that they’re high on my passion scale and I’ve set alternatives in place to make that happen, and I’ve created a plan that I’ve broken down to action steps and celebration points that allow me to do that and I have associated it in and served the people to help serve me to allow that to come to happen.

So, positivity really becomes easy when I’ve done the process of the ladder of achievement and this process, it’ll allow you to navigate past the obstacles as you move forward.

So, here’s the deal. I hope that in this short segment, we can go deeper on this ladder of achievement. I can spend a lot of time in it and I do it with my high-level mentoring clients in some of the workshops and stuff but if you just take this and say, “Alright, let me shift my smart goals and make them ASMART goals aligned with mission, vision, a purpose and values.

And then let me put a process in place, the ladder of achievement process, to make them come to life; to give them life by making sure that I’ve got personal growth elements in place to give me the skills and the tools necessary to make them real, to make my goals real.” Set a perseverance plan in place and get my practice in place, your execution in place. Success is 90 percent done at that point.

Now, we just got to travel the journey because

• You’ve tied it to purpose.
• You’ve built the passion.
• You’ve got the alternatives and the patience in place.
• You’ve got the plan in place.
• You’ve got the people in place.

And because of that you have positivity in place.

And I hope that you found this of value to you. I trust the process. Build this process out. I assure you that when you look back 12 months from today, if you do this process on a regular basis, things are going to be totally different for you.

And so, again thank you for being here. Thank you for being part of this journey with me. You are a blessing in my life, in my wife’s life, in my kid’s life. It is a blessing and an honor to be here with you. So, if you found this of value, do me a favor?

Share this with a friend because I think that this is what society needs. I think people are starved for a new way of doing things and starved for a way to accomplish, and this is the process to bring life and energy into electrify and energize those goals and bring them to life.

So, share this with a friend and if you haven’t done so already: subscribe, stay with me. Let’s stay on this journey together. Let’s see what I can do to try and serve you and support you in the process.

And if you have a question for me, that’s what I’m here for. I really want to be your entrepreneurial mentor, your success mentor, your wealth mentor in this process. Go to AskMelNow.com and simply leave me your question. We’ll make sure that we get it on one of the upcoming episodes and try to get it answered for you so you feel supported in this journey.

And to make sure that you get The Ladder of Achievement action guide, go ahead and go to: MelAbraham.com/session051 or just text me MYLEGACY one-word to 38470. And I hope to hear from you. I hope to see you around and get a chance to meet every single one of you as we go through our journeys together and if I can serve you please reach out to me.

And until we get a chance to see each other again, talk again,

May your vision be grand, your journey epic, and your legacy significant!

See you soon. Cheers. Bye!!

— End Transcript —
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Like this? Please share it and help a few more people bring their dreams out of the darkness and give life to them again. Cheers, Mel
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