Content

1. Foreword

2. Introduction

3. Chapter 1 - The first step out

4. Chapter 2 - Creating actions from our goals

5. Chapter 3 - Vitamins

6. Chapter 4 - Pitfalls

7. Chapter 5 - External factors

8. Conclusion

Foreword

Living life being yourself leaves a sweet taste in life. But how do we achieve it when barriers are setup in nearly every corners of life? Living in the moment, being a middle age person, sometimes we just laughed off a blip as a mid-life crisis. There is more to just a mid-life crisis when everything fumbles and could not get started.

Being depressed is subjective, it may seem superficial to anyone else on the outside, but from the inside looking out, it is full of darkness. Sometimes, life just takes a turn to improve, vice-versa plunge into a new low because of a decision.

By thinking positively, empowers yourself to the first step to bring out your best self. This is a leap of faith where any failure could lead to catastrophe. Only by gaining step by step rewards where self-confidence will recover and lead to a new methodology in life, this is where life kicks off to a new era and goals becomes more achievable.

When your life was previously a white sheet stained with regrets, why not lead a new lifestyle and start doing things right? In this book, we want to find ourselves, find what is right to do and the right motivation and meaning to create a new chapter in our lives.

Introduction

Goals are thoughts from what we desire, what we usually do not have. Motivation is the tool that enables us to achieve our goals. So what is hindering us? Why is that so that not every goal, or most of the goals we set out to achieve did not reached its desired outcome?

What you are about to read may already be what you already knew. Yet repetitive actions and thoughts are key to what that could lead to progression and success. Likened to a martial arts master prac-ticing everyday, repetitively. The result? Gaining muscle reflexes in instinctive situations.

Goals that were shortlisted may seem overwhelming, structures of goals may be undesirable or not even knowing where to start. How do we clearly differentiate a goal and a dream?

Motivation, confidence, focus or even a clear direction of goal could also affect the outcome of any goals set out.

Every now and then, doubt sets into us and hinder us from progress, turning desired outcome to blank thoughts only. What seems to be a goal becomes more undesirable than it was, be-cause of the process of achieving it.

So how to we stop the rot, break out from the slump?

And if we are provided an alternative scenario, where goals seems more achievable, through well thought out plans, clear intent of goals and reciprocal rewards. Does it seem attractive to invest ef-forts into it and realise the goal?

Starting out

How to we set out goals? And how do we devise steps of progress? If a goal is too simple and easily achievable, then it would be less desirable. Likewise if the goal or dream has too many barriers, the desire could deplete before achieving the goal.

What is the goal, or what should be a goal? Desires derive from wants and needs, usually wants. How do we know what we want? Or do we want it because many people already acquired and ob-tained it. Is it niche that it is uncommon and only a handful of privi-leged have it? A goal should be set with common outcome, differ-ent scale and timeline. Setting out reasonable short term goals as prerequisites to the long term goal. These milestones will be indica-tors and gauge of progress, portraying small steps like a flight of stairs to your greater goal.

Confidence of achieving a goal is another barrier in progress, if the goal is just a dream, it will remain a dream only for most of the time. There will not be any incentive in setting out the plan in achieving since it feels out of reach. It will therefore lead to re-minders of past failures, magnifying of personal weakness and maybe excuses of failure. Jealousy sets in and anybody else’s suc-cess seems like a random walk.

While setting up a goal, how do you know what do you want? If you do not know what you want, how do you set a goal? By setting up a direction, schedule of progress to follow, we can eliminate procrastination.

Chapter 1

The first step out (Affirmation)

Through spoken words, affirming on working out and towards your goal. Saying out loud, and be positive. Most of you might have al-ready read about self-fulfilling prophecy and triggering the brain to be imprinted with the spoken words. However, too much of affir-mation may lead to over reliance and egoistic. Resulting to over confidence and not being realistic on the process towards the goal. It could also blindside some setbacks that are tell-tale signs on ad-justments of the goals.

By using the affirmation method keeps the brain in check and fo-cus. Clear of the next process and not veer away from the goal in situations where the process takes a longer period to achieve.

On hindsight, it can be also because of a long term goal, where people may affirm it in a negative method instead. Thus producing negative thoughts and giving up in the midst of slow progress.

Once the negative thoughts sets in, the brain will dangerously sub-consciously program the brain to focus on failing rather than achieving.

Preparation

For every new goal, the preparation is essential. You can never be overly prepared and therefore it is paramount to start of the right foot. If you feel good, you do good and we start feeling good by dressing up, having ample rest and absorbing good food and nutri-ents. For example, if you dress well or have a great taste in food, and this is affirmed by the others, it will naturally feel good and lead to positive mindset and confidence in dressing up or introducing others to other new food products.

Everyone has a set of affirmation imprinted in them. Whether was it told by someone or from watching a movie, once the affirmation sets in, it will be difficult to veer. Therefore if the affirmation affects

the person in a negative manner, it will lead to serious conse-quences if the affirmation occurs time and again. For example if someone were to mention about a work done by you in a negative manner, it affects the person and will lead to a mindset that this work is unsuitable as the result is undesirable. Comparably, if someone were to be praised for a job well done, the person will eventually prefer to repeat the process as it provides a feel good factor.

Tips

1. Knowing what and when - By exactly knowing to the specifics of what you want clearly, will empower yourself to know what to understand and avoid the pitfalls with a suitable timeline, follow-ing it throughout.

2. Pre-requisites - Understanding and researching the preparation required before setting off the first step of your goal. These steps serves as a guide towards the goal slowly by surely in the initial phase.

3. Process and progress - The number of mini steps, segregated to allow progress but yet simplify enough to not feel overwhelming. Celebrate these milestones by rewarding on and off, yet do not compromise by placing too many small milestones together. Rather plan for a mixture of simple and longer term milestones than to saturate with to many easy milestones. Placing too many difficult milestones may hinder visible progress and backfire.

4. New is always better - Not necessarily, but in this manner, keeps the challenges fresh and no doubt need no other motivation

5. Responsibility for your own goals - Nobody else will care more than yourself, external factors may affect but it is up to individual to add further impetus to make it work and dilute external fac-tors.

6. Living at the moment as if the future - Depict the future as if you have achieved, imagine how you would lead your life after your achievements

7. Writing - To put things in writing may seem primitive, but never undermine the impact of constant reminder of writing in action verbs

8. Pitfalls - Murphy’s law sets in from any perspective, list out any plausible hiccups and a workaround, if possible

Now that we are ready to set goals, we shall review in the next chapter on executing the actions from our goals.

Chapter 2

Creating actions from our goals

After affirming our goals, we will be required to create an action plan. The action plan will be a deviation from your actual lifestyle, and we want to do things differently this time. We start by changing the most basic yet important phase in life, sleep.

Sleeping is a habit, and habits are hard to change. Only when your body feels good, then it can do well, so the body must be ensured of sufficient rest. Not only the hours but the timing as well. Start off by eliminating night habits and turn in early. Adjust time and again after every week to an earlier timing till your body is adjusted and the timing suits your lifestyle at sleeping at the correct time.

After ensuring ample rest, your body will be in need of nutrients. Read up about the nutrients required for a balanced body and en-suring that overloading of caffeine or sugar will cause more harm than good in the long run. The body will react to the inputs you provide, therefore take note of what you eat while balancing with what you like to eat so that your body can function in the best condition and fulfil your schedule that you planned.

Next up, is to create a time-table for your actions. For example, creating empty slots of time for your actions. Start off by having a short time slot for your activity. 30 minutes will be a great start.

What we want to create is slot where there is insufficient time to complete your task but yet ample to see some progress.

Creating a plan of what to do by thinking of the simplest method. It can be simple exercises that you can do at home and not intensive like in the gym, in the shortest number of repetition that you can complete, or maybe pick up through light reading. The key is to complete the task.

Having fun is the most difficult while doing according to our plan, since this is a brand new plan that you have carried out, or have not being doing for a long while. Therefore only by doing in the simplest method, could help adjust and create a better plan for us to execute.

Once you reached an attainable level, create another milestone, or more difficult situation to challenge yourself. Keep yourself in check, and not let complacency sets in. Now you are setting the mood for yourself, having the momentum to attain more than what you might have set out to.

Chapter 3

Vitamins

For every body or goals, there will come a time where there is a saturation point. Where the results show that there is less incentive to work harder since there is little rewards to reap. What else can we do? Or liken an athlete maintaining their body with the best meals and most intensive exercise, but the body fails to react any-more and does not progress.

The following are the vitamins that can spark a second level of progress in your goals. Now that you have already started off with progress, it will be great to visualise and review.

Setup visualisation boards or charts is the greatest reward for yourself for a new project, goal or mission. Seeing that there are

progress keeps yourself wanting more. It builds self-confidence and allows you to understand some troughs that you might have been through. For now, focusing on the progress and good that you have done is ample. Keep doing it the right way to maintain momentum as well as pushing to the limits.

In view with setting visualisation boards, 2 key component in the visualiser will be timeline and a measurable achievement. No mat-ter what we do, we cannot escape from the timeline or the time dimension. Everything will be affected by time. If you can be a mil-lionaire within 5 years, comparing to achieving it within 10 or 20 years, therefore you understand the importance of it. By setting a timeline, albeit a reasonable timeline where most people can man-age, this will reduce procrastination and also measure the ability of one to achieve even more or slow down for a start. Any slide and delay in timeline will also reveal the level of motivation in every re-view.

And of course, we want to measure in tangible quantity of what we want to achieve within a timeline or as a progress. The goal should not be that I want to be a better or happier person with no actual measure in product. It could be in terms of weight loss, number of repetitions in an exercise or monetary where it can be measured and deduced from. By having a tangible measure of the achieve-ments helps us visualise and plan out the next set of achievement or milestone. Whether to increase or decrease reasonably due to practical reasons.

Other than having a visualiser to remind yourself, we can have something lighter for us to read back rather than pure statistics. Keep a journal of your daily routines, even for some that are not re-lated to your goals. Small things that are keeping you happy and motivated. We want to note down these things, as well as the blips that occurs, which may or may not affect. Then after, maybe a week or fortnight, read back the journal as casual reading away from your hectic schedule.

Small actions like reading back your journal enables you to take short breaks away from your focus. These short breaks are impor-tant as your body pulls away from routines and recharges before

doing what it set out to again. If you keep going, unintentionally you may hit a pit fall which we will touch on later.

Learning a required new skill, which is a prerequisite towards your goals. This is another impetus to stepping up your game, preparing yourself to do better in what you set to achieve. It also pulls you away from your schedules and yet unknowingly allows you to do better and keep up with progress.

Chapter 4

Pitfalls

By now you should already have been on the right track, reaping rewards or seeing that things are moving at the right direction. Everything seems smooth and you are ready to make the last step, seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. This shows that you are doing things correctly and you deserve some recognition. Success breeds success, or even so close to your goal already seems like a win for you. You are even more determined to go for more as things are going well.

At this stage, it is paramount to have our feet grounded, many a times when we hit pitfall at this stage where progress seems like a given, is where we are more vulnerable to blips and cannot recog-nise what hit us. Therefore we are likely to return to ground zero if not managed properly.

At this stage where everything is rosy, one might be too greedy to set a few more goals concurrent to the initial one. Where there are too many goals set out, some may be conflicting or that may not be ready to have multiple goals to work concurrently at that point of time. When goals start to deviate, results too and doubts sets in. This is a definite no go as it deteriorate all the efforts that was put in. Devotion of your goal therefore is the upmost important.

When everything you touch becomes like Midas, it provides a feel good factor, which is positive in every way. But not everyone takes setbacks in a similar way. Some people become perfectionist along the way, breeding from success or progress and when a few set-backs comes along the way, where the results are not satisfactory, confidence dips and giving up becomes an option. Once the men-tality of giving up sets in and becomes an option or the only option, it influences the mind instead of being determined to pull through. From what becomes an achievable goal suddenly becomes distant and unfamiliar. While there is a difference between setting a rea-sonable and achievable goal versus an unreachable goal, the

negativity that sets in slowly devours the confidence also plays a part in the crucial period between success and failure.

Whilst some people may be determined to pull through, we some-times forget that everyone have their own limits. Limitations such as timeline instead of ability, therefore we need to review and ad-just timelines sometimes to achieve the same success but over a longer period of time. There is no shame in achieving any goals set out, even if you are taking a longer time than others. You only have to beat yourself first and then set out other challenges to better yourself. Our brain is like our muscles, comparing to athletes where there are peaks and troughs. It does not mean that the more you exercise or push yourself, you will be better off. Instead taking breaks completely away from your routine will freshen up the rou-tines, and by refreshing yourself back into your routine will create freshness and greater impetus to do more and better than previ-ously done. After exercising, your muscles require rest and proteins to recover before growing. This is where greater rewards comes when you take a step back instead of one step forward and two steps back.

Sometimes when procrastination takes place, it is most difficult to eliminate it off. Therefore practice the rule of thumb where it is ac-ceptable to take a short break or day off to deviate from your schedules but never in consecutive days. Set a limit on the number of breaks per week too so that this will not eventually stretch the process or plan. Will-power to overcome procrastination have a limit, when you fail to use it, it will fail you too eventually.

Chapter 5

External factors

After doing all you can, independently and skipping the foreseeable pitfalls, we are very close to what we have set out to achieve. Our last push here mostly consist of additional positives that we can add to our formula, so that we can finally put icing on our cake.

But let us start off from what to avoid, if possible. By avoiding does not entirely means we eliminate. Like the following where we may not want to eliminate due to relationship matters.

Negativity from peers or colleagues is one of the external factors where we want to avoid, because it influences us from what we might want. There may not be right or wrong but to set in negativity will defer us from what could have been good for ourselves. There will definitely be one or two peers by our side or colleagues even superiors where we have to face every day or every other day, with negative thoughts. Not that they want to, but because they could have been overly realistic about everything and mostly have nega-tive thoughts about everything. They are the people that are more weary about things, skeptical about all the positive that might have been. Or even that they are realist that wants to know all the bad before they can evaluate on a decision. They could be people that are concerned about you failing but stop short of encouraging you to step out of the slump. Everyone is different but if they influenced you in a less than ideal manner, it may be what you want to avoid while absorbing all the positivity and doing well.

Another negativity that may set in is your past. Most people have baggages and they bring with them for a long time, using it to judge or make decisions that may not be applicable. Through ex-periences made us make better judgement, but also being too judgemental encloses us to a limit that we actually are able to breakthrough.

For all the negativity, we now want to focus on the good. What we want to achieve is the direct opposite of what we have mentioned previously. For all the sulking and negative people around, there

must also be positive people, that are successful and driven. This is where you might want to be around for good because if you posses positive attitude, these are the people whom wants to have you around them too. Sharing individual ideas and commenting positively about the ideas and even improving them, what is not to like about such situations?

And when you have such positive group around you, do not be embarrassed to request for assistance or advise. These are the role models where they have achieved some or most of their goals and know more that what you might have missed. Figure out what you might be able to implement for your plans will make things easier for yourself.

Goal sharing is another great tool where you find like-minded peo-ple and invite them to a group. As each and every has their strengths, accommodate to each others strength, motivate each other to a common goal, in this manner the team will achieve greater sums than its parts for sure.

Keeping motivators around your is surely a plus for anyone, these peers may be overly optimistic but their encouragement surely makes a difference while your are in the midst of your project. It is easier to find a devils advocate than a motivator and therefore keep them beside you, close to you so that you know these are the peo-ple who will encourage you along your journey.

Other than specifically looking for motivators in your group, good company are also essential. These are the people that you might not see often but when you converse, you know that they can pro-vide good advice and positive thoughts.

And how about stating out loud about your goals? Writing on social media or saying out loud to a group of peers or colleagues really sets out the tone. It shows that you are ready for the challenge and cannot fail. While all these add greater impetus to not embarrass yourself, even though this method is not ideal due to the intent, the intent should be focus on the goal instead.

One powerful tool is the ability to help others. You may already have many achievements and is able to sort out thoughts and achieve what you set out to do, but being able to help others in their goals or a goal together empowers and motivate yourself to do even better. Because you do not want to let anyone down has a greater impetus as u are answerable to others now as well.

Another variation that we could apply from helping others is doing for others, usually a loved one. There is nothing more powerful and meaningful that a strong relationship driving us to achieve more for others. By making others happy, we feel more happiness that just achieving it ourself.

Lastly of course, we need to feel good in what we do, feel its im-portance and take pride of it. When we know that, we will naturally want to do well, it creates a win win situation where our achieve-ments are important not only to us but others as well

Conclusion

Towards the end of this book, we want to conclude our thoughts that we have gathered so far. By living a motivated life brings meaning as we set goals and different milestones in life to achieve, for a greater call that we might have missed over the years aim-lessly.

For most of the people, we suffer from peak and troughs in life, for some, maybe just troughs. All these can altered, if we believe and we can add meaning to what we thought is meaningless on our sheet of paper, scattered with stains previously.

Our intent here is to motivate and empower people to allow them-selves to a better and meaningful life, one that will eventually be full of achievements and even if not all goals are not achieved, there will be no regrets.

Many a time where there are also similar situations of people moti-vating you, encouraging you to execute your previous plans, but yet it has fallen all over the place. Let it be the last time that will

ever happen, and let this be a brand new start of something that will consistently occur in your life. This will be a new constant where you have more control over yourself and add meaning to not only yourself but also the people around you. Let the decisions and goals be meaningful to not only yourself but also to people around you, even people that you may not be acquainted with.

This is a truly powerful tool that I want people like myself to go through and experience it.

I look forward from hearing the positives that you have gained real soon!