064: How to Set & Keep Goals

Setting and keeping your goals is a big piece because there’s only one life that we’re living. Why not live it to the fullest and live it to the exact way you want? A lot of people don’t set goals and keep their goals out of some weird self-esteem hit. Remember that you’re here to enhance your life and you’re worth it. One good way to setting and keeping your goals is to think of SMART goals. SMART stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bounded. Learn more about SMART goals and Zig Ziglar’s ten ways to set and keep goals. And as you achieve your goal, remember to set the next one because unless you do, you will flail.

—

I’m very excited to be here talking about things to have people feel more excited, more in love, more inspired, more energized in their bodies. This show is the concept of setting and keeping goals inspired by my crazy 80 classes of yoga in 90 days because I’m speaking on the stage soon. I want to look good. We talk about my personal experiences, bring in a little Zig Ziglar, and hopefully get you some good tips of how to set and keep goals to make your life even better and better. We then bring Joshua who’s from Los Angeles, but speaking from Dallas. He talks about where he’s at. He’s 25 years old and suffering with his own viewpoints about who he should be and what he should do. I gave him some solid thoughts on how to chill out, to enjoy life, and feel good about himself in this world. For more shows, please visit us at TuffLove.Live.

Are you in the right place to enhance your life, fill your life, and get excited because I sure am. Tuff Love is here. We talk about things that matter. We talk about ways to help people and how to have life exactly what you want. This show is how to set and keep goals, which for some is very easy but for most is very challenging. That’s on some level why the coaching business exists, for helping people to set and keep goals. I know for me, my entire life, I’ve been pretty good at it. There’s some innate skill. There’s some grounded part of me where setting and keeping goals has always been relatively easy for me. I do know from my thousands of conversations and workshops and also in one-on-one coaching that most people don’t. Most people suck at it, to be honest. They set goals, they want something, they think it’s important, and all of a sudden they’re miles away from their goals.

This show is about some specific techniques and stories, my current inspiration. I also want to thank Joshua. We’ll talk about what’s going on with him and we’ll see how the show goes. The first thing I want to talk about is where the show came from and what’s going on. I want to tell three stories. One is old, one is relatively recent, and one is current. The first thing is I was a fat kid when I was growing up. I’ve talked about this on the show a few times. I did a show on body image. I was an overweight kid. I don’t know what it is about overweight kids but it stays with you your entire life. I would not call myself overweight at this point. I’m going on 47 and I feel in good shape relatively. I don’t feel myself obese or overweight. I look at some of my high school friends and I’m like, “They got big.” When I look in the mirror, I feel quite good about how my body looks. At the same time, there’s always this plague, this sensation, this question of being overweight, the body image. There’s this tension that happens every time I look myself in the mirror. Even when I look good, there’s still this question, “How do I look?”

Body image is something we’re all faced with. Throughout the years, my weight’s fluctuated. In my senior year at high school, I met with a nutritionist and did that for about seven months and lost 40 pounds. I went to college svelte and looking good. Then over the years my weight blossomed up and gone down depending on what’s going on. As you get older, it happens. You maintain your weight. Your body changes and things change. It doesn’t mean that’s any excuse, but there are physiological changes as you get older, as I get older. I’ve been noticing this especially in the last five or six years.

There was a time in the winter of 2012 where I was traveling and working for OneTaste. I was eating poorly a lot of food out, a lot of food on the fly, the cup of coffee and the Starbucks cookie, a lot of boxed food, a lot of sandwiches. I lived on sandwiches because sandwiches are the best things to eat in your car. It’s the most compact thing. You don’t need a fork, you just pull down and grab your sandwich. I was feeling bloated. I was feeling out of shape. For the fat kid in me, that led to a form of depression. I landed back in Los Angeles, coming back here to run the Los Angeles OneTaste, and I said to myself, “I want to do something crazy. I want to commit to doing 30 days of yoga.” For someone who is not doing a lot of yoga at the time, this was a big leap. Worse, I said, “I want to do CorePower Yoga.” For those who don’t know what CorePower Yoga is, there’s yoga that’s spiritual, CorePower Yoga is not spiritual. It is a gym that does yoga. It is young, beautiful, handsome men, young women, young, enthusiastic instructors, they’ve got music. It is not spiritual. There’s namaste at the end. That’s about the only thing we do that would be kin to be namaste as sweat from the class. It is a kick-ass class. I bought my monthly membership and I said I’m going to do 30 days of yoga. Then I said, “I need to step up the energy of this because I know me and I’m not going to keep this.” What I did is I put on my Facebook post. I said, “I am now starting a 30-day commitment of yoga and I’m going to post once a day about my experience.”

You see lots of these things these days where people are saying 100 days of gratitude or 30 days of this, all these different things. Back then, there wasn’t a lot of people holding themselves accountable on Facebook that I saw that show up on my feed. I felt this was something new. What I did every day is I would post, “1 of 30, 2 of 30, made to CorePower, sweat my ass off, exhausted, that weight class was crazy, hated it. Day 16, pulling myself from my bed to make myself to the 8:00 yoga.” I made it human. What happened is my friends started to keep me accountable. On day eighteen when it was 4:00 PM, they’re like, “Rob, are you doing yoga?” They would nudge me and I was like, ” I’m going to an 8:00 class. Get off my back.” The point was I had accountability. I did 26 of the 30 days of yoga and I was excited about that, and then I went back to my old habits. That’s what happens a lot when you set your goals. As you achieve your goal and you don’t set the next goal, then you flail. The point was that I felt highly successful. Even now, that was four years ago, I still remember the feeling of accomplishment every time I went.

I did CrossFit when I left OneTaste in 2014, 2015. Then I had trouble walking basically. If you know much about CrossFit, there are a lot of weights. I was working in a place where there were 21 steps from the ground floor to the mezzanine and I go up and down constantly. After doing 10,000 squats at CrossFit, I couldn’t walk. I quit CrossFit pretty much in May of 2015. For almost two years, I’ve been struggling keeping an exercise schedule. I joined Equinox, which is a beautiful gym. It’s one of the most beautiful gyms I’ve been in. Again, very attractive people, nice facilities, very clean, great locker rooms, great classes. In the beginning, I was doing spinning and I was working it, and nothing clicked. Then for the last six months, it’s been challenging because I have known that I want to get in shape, but I haven’t been able to. There has been some block between me getting to Equinox on a regular basis. What was happening is my weight was fluctuating up. I was feeling it. I was not in agreement.

What happened was I got the gig to teach at Lightning in a Bottle. It is a music festival on Memorial Day in Bradley, California. This will be my third year speaking. The last two years have been awesome. This year, I’ve said to myself, “I need to get a lot of video from this because it’s important if I want to start to build my speaking career for me to have a tape, to have a reel, that I can show to people and say I am a badass speaker.” I have three one-hour or an hour and a half talks at Lightning in a Bottle this year. I’m going to videotape them all. I said to myself, “If I’m going to be on that stage getting videotaped, I am going to look good.” It was important to me that I was going to look good. I went back to my playbook. I went back to where I’ve succeeded in the past. I remembered my yoga 30-day challenge and said, “I’m going to do 80 yoga classes in 90 days.”

I went back to CorePower Yoga. “Hi, welcome to CorePower Yoga. I’m your happy, enthusiastic, young yoga instructor who is going to kill you in the class today. How may I help you?” I was like, “I’d like to get the black tag special with the $155 per month unlimited.” They’re like, “Thank you so much. It’s so good to have you back. Here’s your new swipe card.” I got myself into my shorts and I sat myself in that class. It’s hot and it’s enthusiastic and there’s a bunch of young people. I am having a total blast. I’ve done eight yoga classes in nine days. I skipped Sunday, which I think is smart so I could walk. I’m having a little trouble walking now. I’ve done eight yoga classes in nine days. I’m going to do that fucking 80 in 90 if it kills me, if I need to do double someday. The point is that my life feels so much better that I’ve set a goal and I’m keeping it.

That’s the core part of this show. It’s for you to know when you set yourself up with something that seems challenging, terrifying, beyond your scope, your life will improve if you start to make motion towards it. For some, those goals could be monetary. Those goals could be relational. Those goals could be work. I have a goal to write a book this year and get that published. That’s a big piece of my puzzle. I’m going to a writer’s conference in April, I’m moving myself towards those goals. I write every Tuesday from 11 AM to around 6 PM. I turn off my cell phone, I turn off my Facebook, and I focus on that. I’m very dedicated to my goals. I notice when I’m in this place of my goals, my life feels better. I’m happier, I’m more accessible, I feel successful, and that’s a big piece.

Know that you’re worth it. That was a big piece of the puzzle when I started writing my notes about this. It’s just for you to remember that you’re worth setting goals to improve your life. You’re there to enhance your life and you’re worth it. A lot of people don’t set goals and keep their goals out of some weird self-esteem hit. They think, “Why bother?” You are worth it because as we know, that we remember, there’s only one life that we’re living. Why not live it to the fullest? Why not live it to the exact way you want it to go? Setting and keeping your goals is a big piece.

I looked online and I got some cool little things. I want to bring up some other concepts. Zig Ziglar, who I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of, I’ve done some studying with him or read a bunch of his stuff. He’s a crazy man and motivational speaker. I like his stuff. I’m going to talk about his ten suggestions for how to set and keep goals. I’m also going to bring up something from my CTI training called SMART goals. SMART goals are great foundations. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bounded. You can look it up. There are lots of references up on the internet. Sometimes the T, I put in there is Terrifying. You want a goal that gets your genitals flaring, your breath shortening. Sometimes you want those goals, but the official one is time-bounded. Let’s talk about that.

S is for specific. You can set a goal, “I want to be a great person.” How do you know what a great person is? That’s a horrible goal because your viewpoint about what a good person is can change. You want it specific. For me, it’s 80 yoga classes in 90 days. That is my specific goal. It is definitely detailed. That goes into M which is measurable. I’ll know with my little spreadsheet that I’m going to build about my 80 in 90 if I hit that goal or not. I’m going to know that it’s measurable. I can test it every step of the way. It’s attainable. This yoga goal is attainable. It’s possible for me to do this. If I want to make $1 million this month, it’s possible but it’s not very close to an attainable goal. I want a goal that I can get to. A lot of people set goals that are not attainable and what they do is they blow themselves out. They put themselves in a situation where they’re shooting themselves in the foot right when they started.

You can look at the whole first bill for replacing Obamacare. It’s a totally non-tangible goal. You can look at the first budget that they proposed. It’s totally not attainable. They know it’s almost dead on arrival. You want goals that you can get. If not, you’re shooting yourself in the foot before you even start. R is for relevant, which is great. It means relevant to you. Set the goal that will enhance your life specifically. Look at the detail. For me, it’s getting up on that stage and looking and feeling buff. That’s a relevant goal for me, and the reason is because I want a good reel. The reason for the reel is I’m working on my speaking career. The reason I want my speaking career is so I can have an impact on the world, travel and explore. That’s my life purpose. If you could look at the relevancy of the goal, the thread; fit, good reel, build my speaking career, make an impact on the world. Find the goal that’s relevant to you and work inside of it. The last is time-bounded. I’m not saying I want to do 80 classes in three years. That’s not going to help me that much. Set a time bond. Make sure that inside the timeframe, you can make it. I have certain monetary goals for this year for my business. In this year, I want to make X amount of dollars. It’s not setting a five-year plan. Those forecasts are good, but I’m having a very specific goal for this year in how much cash I want to make. Zig Ziglar says, “One person who is committed is worth more than 100 who are interested.” I am committed to this yoga goal to the core of my being. I can tell you today was hard. I was in bed. I had to get out of bed by 7:15. Morgan was there, she wasn’t wearing a lot of clothes. It’s very warm. We were having a little make-out. It smelled good and she felt good. I said, “There’s no way I could not go and keep my goal on the day of the show.” It was challenging. Your mind starts to think, “It’s fine. I can just not do this today.” For me, my integrity, especially around doing it the day of the show is super important to me. There are studies that say if you say you want to work out three or four times a week, if you miss one of your scheduled workouts, it’s significantly more difficult to make it to the next workout. If you miss that one, it’s significantly more difficult to make it to the next workout. At some point, you just stop going. It’s when you’re in the routine that you build the momentum to succeed. I wrote “dream big” and “you have one life to live,” as cliché as that is, but it’s important. You have one shot at this life. You have one shot to live your life exactly the way you want it. Set goals that work.

I’m going to finish up with Zig’s ten ways to set and keep goals. I like this. I looked up a whole bunch of them, this was my favorite. I’m going to go over this quickly and see what works. Zig said number one is to build a solid foundation to goal. Find your integrity, giving the foundation, having this foundation where you have a solid shot of achieving it. Two, make the commitment. You’re at the top of that mountain and you’re looking at that double diamond, big mogul, scary thing. Just make the commitment of getting down this hill. If you want to do that, 80 in 90, make the commitment. If you want to cut out gluten from your diet, make that commitment. Make that commitment down to the deep core of your soul.

Number three is to break it down. Break down your immediate and long-range goals into increments. This is an important piece because what we do often is we set a goal and then what happens is that the first step of the goal seems huge if it’s a really big step. Baby steps making things into small items so you can succeed. Four is see it. You have to see it. You have to imagine it. It’s already done. We just have to connect to it, see it, feel it, know it, and believe it. See that you’ve already achieved the goal. Hold yourself accountable. I do that sometimes via Facebook like I did in 2013. I wrote down and made myself accountable to the world. For me, it’s to hold myself accountable every single day. I say to myself, “I’m going to keep my goal.”

Six, expect change. I like this a lot because my goal could change and I want to hold myself available to that. It could be that I want to go down to 70 in 90 because my health is suffering. Maybe at some point, my leg starts to hurt. I need to take five or six days off. That’s okay. It’s important for me to allow to have change, but also to make sure that those changes are solid in alignment with my goals. Seven, tell people. Throw yourself out there. Put yourself onto the mercy of Facebook. I’m going to keep myself a goal. Eight, be a team player. Be willing to work with other people and allow them to help you and support you. Nine, write it all down. Document it. Write on your journal entry. Create a spreadsheet. Keep it on Facebook. Whatever it is, write down your goals. Ten is reflect. Step by step, feel into the success. Also when you achieve that, reflect and bring that success into your soul because success begets more success. When you believe in yourself, that’s where things happen.

Steven says, “My problem is when I set a goal, then it becomes irrelevant so it doesn’t get completed.” That’s part of the change. That’s important to look at, but also look at the motivation of why it became irrelevant. Is it frankly laziness or is it your life’s truly changing? Are you in a place where you want something different? If it’s okay, let it change. It could be that at some point I decided to be fat up on that stage and stopped doing my yoga goal, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. That is the rant for the week.

Live Coaching

I’m going to bring Joshua. Hello, my friend. 

How’s it going, Robert?

Good. How are you doing today? 

I’m doing well. I just flew in to Dallas from New York City. I’m glad it’s not as cold here.

What are you doing in Dallas? 

There’s a rock and roll marathon here. There’s an expo that goes on and I sell a fitness recovery device. It’s a body buffer. It buff all the athletes that have been training for a while and make their bodies feel amazing.

I ran the Suzuki rock and roll marathon in San Diego in 2002. How can I make this time most optimal for you? 

I resonated with the story that you were telling. I used to be a fat kid too. I like that thing about body image. That’s like me for a while. I still have the inner fat kid consumption part of me that always comes out. I noticed also that when I travel a lot like I have been, those demons come out a little bit more and more when I’m not necessarily around people or having set goals that I’m striving for. I feel like all my goals aren’t relevant. I moved to LA a year ago and I wanted to act and model, and I do want to work my way into public speaking also. I got sidetracked with this body buffer. It’s like making that jump once again like I did from when I moved from Pennsylvania to California, jumping from one job into another. Putting aside all the old, irrelevant and not necessarily to my core soul goals. I’m now redefining my new goals that are coming in and stepping into this next person that I see myself becoming.

You moved to Los Angeles. Your goal was acting and public speaking. You took this job, buffing athletes, taking care of the athletes. Do you feel like you’re losing track of the goal of moving away to Los Angeles?

Yeah. I needed a job to sustain myself in way. It was a great opportunity. It’s a truly fun company. They make you feel good which is great, but I’m traveling and I’m not being able to eat right and not being able to work-out all the time. Those things are important, especially for the modeling, which is where I like to inject myself first. I’ve lost track of the original goals to this. There was an opening I saw. I can make a lot of money through this product, but it’s not the fulfilling thing that I’m wanting to achieve in my life, like my purpose. If you could speak to staying focused on life’s purpose without getting distracted by all other ebbs and flows of temptations and opportunities that come and fly or experience.

I’m going to say some contradictory things. The first is you need to take care of your foundation. A lot of people move to Los Angeles, move to a town, especially for something as challenging as acting and modeling, and say, “It’s just going to happen,” and they don’t take care of their foundation. They end up with not a lot of money or living in a bad situation or homeless or broke. Your first action of taking care of your foundation was smart and important. I want to approve of that. I feel like there’s a little angst inside of you around that, but it was a smart move, especially since you’ve only been there a year. We beat ourselves up a lot about a lot of the choices and we forget what the motivation was which is you’ve got to eat. You always got to eat. You want to have a certain lifestyle and so that’s an important piece.

What’s happened, which is very common, is this foundational piece is swallowing up your purpose. There is this movie I like, Mr. Holland’s Opus. It’s a Richard Dreyfuss ’90s movie. It’s very heartwarming and it’s a chick-flick heartwarming thing. He’s awesome. The story is basically this guy is in music. He wants to be a piano player and a musician. To make money, he ends up working as a substitute teacher and then a teacher in the ’60s and ’70s and starts to make an impact on the kids. The whole movie basically is him saying, “No, I am a rock and roll music person, but I’m stuck in teaching.” The movie ended with a positive spin, but what happens a lot is that we have these diversions away from our life purpose. 

The second contradictory piece is if you’re not being pulled to modeling and acting, it’s possible that’s not your life’s purpose. You need to dig into your own personal belief system and keep reevaluating that piece. For me, I got involved in a business last year that I thought was going to be my life purpose, but I ended up basically owning a space rental in Hollywood and consumed my life. I still was able to live and do my purpose, but it got deafened by this other business. I had to figure out that balance between the two. I had to say, “This business is not what I want to do.” The universe then took the business away. My point is that I had to keep reevaluating and seeing. There’s a time now where you have the foundation built, you’re enjoying the distraction, but another piece of the puzzle is you’re questioning what the balance is between the two. I would first look at, is acting and modeling truly what you believe your purpose is today?

I don’t think that it is. I think that my purpose here honestly is to help others to discover who they truly are and why they came here, to work through their own programming that they’ve accumulated over there experience.

Sit in that for one second. I totally believe you. One time I met you, I felt that. Acting and modeling could be a passion project and something you enjoy. When you said that, “I want to help people,” that’s a profound shift from what you started the call with.

Thank you. It’s this place where I’m not necessarily implementing that in my life right away. I don’t see the immediate next steps. When there’s these other more surface level things that come around that seem more attainable right now, they catch me for a ride. I feel swept off.

That’s okay too. Here’s the thing about coaching. I’m not saying you’re going to become a coach. I’m going to say one of the things about coaching. I mentored a lot of coaches. I used to teach coaches how to coach. The thing is people thought they were supposed to be perfect, they’re supposed to know. I’m like, “No, that’s not what coaches are. You don’t want to be coached by someone who’s perfect. You want to be coached by someone that fell down some serious holes and figured out how to climb out of it. You want to be coached by someone who’s had failed businesses and then pulled themselves out of it. You want to be coached by someone who’s had total deep depression and jealousy rages, and learned how to get out of it.” You living your life and you’re on the younger side, mid-twenties? 

Yeah, I’m 25.

You’re at this place now where you’re gathering life experiences. When you get older, and you can still do that when you’re older, you have less time but you have a lot of time to gather life experiences. Enjoy it. Check out everything you want to check out. Go check out every nuance. Go to every acting gig and get totally rejected. Put yourself in all those places. When you do, you are ready to impact the world. You have substance. You have integrity. You’re not talking theoretical, you’re talking real. When people come to me in jealousy, I’m like, “Jealousy? I remember back in 2000 when I wanted to run my scooter into a bus.” I have the story. That’s what makes me a good coach is I’m not bullshitting people. Take the pressure off yourself that you need to know right now and explore all the edges of life.

My friend teaches coaches how to coach. I don’t think this is his, but he’s the one who taught me, so I’ll give him the credit. He said, “You always want money projects and sexy projects.” He said basically the money projects are the ones that pay the bills. They’re the ones that set your foundation. I have a few of those. They’re not the ones I totally look forward to. I’ve gotten to a point now where I can say no to projects that I don’t want, but you want your money projects, the ones that set the foundation. Then you have your sexy projects, the ones that don’t necessarily pay the bills that turn you on. I have a good balance of that in my career right now, which I’m fortunate. Writing the book for me is my sexy project because it’s not going to make me money probably ever per se, but it might open some doors for me. My point is I’m putting about 20% of my time into writing this book. Find the balance between the two. Find the balance between your money projects, your work, and your sexy projects, the ones that form you and light you up. We’re in this life to explore and expand and find things. What I’m sensing from you is that you have a form of beating yourself up around it, like, “I should be somewhere else that I’m not.” 

There’s definitely a lot of that. I come from a small town. My dad own two businesses and I had to be this rigid individual and stand up, with everyone knowing who I was in town. I felt like I had a lot to live up to, which is one of the reasons I moved 3,500 miles away. There’s still this voice that I decide to listen to for some reason that tells me that no matter what I am doing, that it could’ve been done differently or your time could have been spent better somewhere else. I don’t know why. I’m getting better at listening to better voices for sure. It’s definitely something that doesn’t plague me as much as it used to since I moved away, but it’s still like little snippets here and there.

My dad’s not too happy with the way I’ve lived my life. He’s happier now that I’ve become more mainstream and normal, but he’s not happy. He wasn’t happy for a long time. I can tell you that voice, my dad’s voice, which I said, “Fuck you,” to move me far. I’m like, “I am not going to fail and let him be right.” It’s like judo. The guy throws a punch and you take the energy of his punch and flip them. That’s how I deal with that critical voice in my head. It’s hard because society says you’re doing it wrong.

We live in a society of disapproval. Your ability to take these voices to motivate you and to energize you is a master’s trick. Elvis talked about meditation. Sit and feel in to those voices, let them empower you and light you up and charge you, because you are not your dad. You are not living your dad’s life. You’re living Joshua’s life and you’re right in how you want to live it. You’re going to make 10,000 mistakes in this lifetime, if you’re lucky, and every one of those mistakes can be a lesson. Embrace them and embrace your courage for moving 3,500 miles away from that town, from that gravitational pole, to live your life authentically and real. You’re a good guy. You’re a good man. 

Thank you.

You’re 25. It’s okay. I was an idiot at 25, the depth of lack of knowledge and awareness I had of who I was at 25. I was married at 26 because I thought it was the right thing to do. I was working a corporate job and extremely overweight and unhealthy at 27, and totally out of agreement with my life. You’re many steps ahead of me, your self-awareness. Leverage it, use it, read, connect, be vulnerable and be approving of yourself. It’s important. Thanks so much for being on the show, my friend. 

I appreciate the invite.

Thanks so much for coming. Please show up on iTunes. Send me a review, that would be helpful. Tell your friends that they can go to TuffLove.Live and hear the archives. You can sign up for my mailing list. I’m writing very entertaining emails once a week with pictures and little snippets of fond wisdom from Rob Kandell every week. You can sign up. It’s free on my mailing list at TuffLove.Live. Thank you so much, Joshua, for coming up and being real. Good luck in Dallas. Everyone else, go forth, face the day, be real, get some nookie, have fun. Think of us fondly and we’ll talk to you soon. Take care.

Thank you so much for joining me on Tuff Love. That was a fun show for me. I’m glad that Joshua came on. He was very vulnerable and real, and I felt touched by that slight moment where his eyes teared and I could feel him taking in and letting go of that self-imposed pressure that we have so deeply inside of us. We love reviews. We love attention. Please visit us on iTunes. Leave us a review. It helps me and helps other people find it. I’d appreciate it if you can leave a review on iTunes. You can also find the archives of the show at TuffLove.Live. Start the mailing list and please share it with your friends, your enemies, your lovers, and people you want to get smarter. Send them to TuffLove.Live. Thanks so much. I love you. Go forth and face the day.

Resources mentioned:

• • Tuff Love’s episode on body image
  • CorePower Yoga
  • Equinox
  • Lightning in a Bottle
  • Zig Ziglar
  • Tuff Love iTunes

• Here’s How »

• robertkandell.com
• Tuff Love Facebook
• Tuff Love Instagram
• Tuff Love YouTube
• Tuff Love LinkedIn