Seagulls

There were about a hundred of us sitting in a conference room with Bob Proctor and he suddenly started talking about ‘identifying your seagulls’.

What? What is he talking about?

Then the slide came up and we realised he was talking about goals – C-Goals.

But let me go back a step or two. This was day three of the 6-day Matrixx event that Bob runs a few times each year usually in Toronto where he lives.

We’d spent a couple of days discussing success and how the mind works and one of the key things to come out of this was the difference between knowledge and understanding.

You see, at school we get ‘taught’ a lot of ‘knowledge’ – facts and figures and how to do things, and then we’re tested (‘examined’) on our ability to recall what we’ve been ‘taught’. If we ‘pass’ we are deemed to be educated and maybe ‘qualified’ in a particular subject area.

Bob’s take on this, which reflects the writings of Napoleon Hill in ‘Think and Grow Rich’, is that it’s all very well if you are then going on to ‘work’ for someone else and basically continue to do what you are told.

But if you want to create your own way in life, do your own thing, then you need to understand the true meaning of all the stuff you’ve been fed with at school and probably learn some more useful ‘knowledge’ as well.

Bob spends a great deal of time and effort in careful study of the key personal growth authors like Hill and Thomas Troward (among others) to understand the true meaning of what they are saying and how he can apply it to his life and business.

Because that’s what success in life is all about – applying knowledge.

Knowledge that arises from learning and experience plus a significant amount of astute ‘awareness’ of what s really going on around us.

Given that you and I have a good level of understanding of the field we wish to operate in (and we don’t have to understand ‘everything’!) the next step is to find a way of putting this understanding into practice – and that’s where goals come in.

But maybe not quite in the way you’ve been used to it.

You see most ‘goal setting’ particularly some of that carried out in medium and large businesses is, not a waste of time, but not very effective.

There is strong element of compromise in ‘corporate’ and ‘business coach’ goal setting which unfortunately creeps into personal goals.

Bob teaches that there are three levels of goal, A, B and C.

An ‘A’ goal is something that you are comfortable with, you know what to do to achieve it, you know exactly how to do it and you know who you need to help you. It’s a ‘SMART’ type goal – and the A and R are where this type of goal falls down – ‘achievable’ and ‘realistic’.

Setting a goal to increase your turnover by 5% or even 10% is straightforward, it’s a task – you just do more of what you are doing now or do it more efficiently.

If you can’t achieve a ‘smart’ goal, you’re just not working hard enough or ‘smart’ enough!

A ‘B’ goal is the next level up, it’s the type of goal that my friend Phil Olley would call an Awesome Special Mission, but it’s still a fairly low-level mission compared with the ‘C’goal.

When you set a ‘B’ goal you have a rough idea of what you need to do, an outline idea of how it might be done and some idea of the resources you might need.

It’s usually something you haven’t done before (if you have it’s probably an A goal), have a passion or need to do, and requires you to stretch.

While the A goal is well inside your comfort zone, the B goal is on the edge or just outside. It’s extending your boundaries but you can ‘see’ it.

B goals take more effort and more thought and more understanding that A goals and they also take something that you really do need before you attempt a C goal.

A ‘C’ goal is what some Americans might refer to as your ‘Dream’, in the UK we might call it a big ‘Vision’. It’s something you have absolutely no idea (or very little idea) how to set about, let alone achieve.

You don’t know what to do, how to do it, or who to ask for help.

What you do need as Von Braun said to Kennedy about the Moon mission is “the will to do it”

The task Bob gave us after he’d explained all this was to identify our C goal – and by the way, you can only have one at any particular time, if you have more they are probably B goals.

Re-enter the seagull.

The seagull’s eye view of your goal/dream/vision, the ‘big picture’ – what it ‘looks’ and ‘feels’ like, the visualisation – what Sandy Gallagher, Bob’s business partner in the Proctor Gallagher Institute calls ‘visioneering’.

We worked on our C goals in groups helping each other to refine those big pictures and come up with a coherent description of ‘brief’ we could use to explain it to others in a couple of sentences.

But identifying the C goal is one thing, getting there is another – we need to deploy both internal and external resources.

Very few really successful people have achieved what they did on their own, in fact I can’t think of any, there were always other people supporting them in one way or another.

Bob Proctor wouldn’t have reached where he is now without Earl Nightingale and Vic Conant and later Sandy Gallagher and all the other people in his organisation.

But it’s not just other people, the primary drive comes from within your Self.

It starts with understanding – understanding your Self and your ‘Dream’ and that comes from learning, experience and awareness. But that alone is not enough.

You need to have the will to do it, the desire to do it, the ache inside that drives you on, and you also need three other things which ‘glue’ it all together: Confidence, Trust and Belief – all in your Self and others – that it WILL happen and that you CAN do it.

Then there are the ‘Laws’ – the Laws of the Universe that you and I need to understand and have Faith that they exist and are true. Because it’s the Laws that govern when your goal will be achieved and how it will actually turn out.

Bob spent quite some time at Matrixx discussing how these work in achieving your goals and I’ll take you there next week.