Transcript: Taking Massive Action to Reach Your Goal

Hello, how are you doing today? All right, so today we're going to talk about what prevents us from gaining the traction that we want when we have a big goal. Because sometimes we can just feel like we're spinning, like we're not making any progress. And the reason is always a thought. But I want you to know that depending on the thoughts that we're having, we might be taking massive action or we might be taking passive action.

So we have some really big topics to talk about. Today we're going to talk about what exactly is massive action and how exactly do you know when you're not in massive action mode. We're also going to talk about a process that you can work through to understand where you can take massive action towards your goal and do it in a really methodical way. And this is not something that I had when I was starting out trying to create a business, trying to create what I wanted in my life. I felt like I went through a lot of pain and suffering to get where I wanted to go. And then I discovered some tools that would just make it so much easier if I had to do it all over again. And of course I'm always doing it all over again because I'm always creating big goals for myself so that I can grow.

So the result of this podcast, when you listen to it, you're going to have a clearer path on how you can move forward from where you are right now. No matter what your goal is, whether it's weight loss or creating a financial goal or you know, even waking up earlier in the morning, whatever your goal is, you will be able to see a clearer path if you implement what you're going to learn here today. So before we get started, I want to make sure that you know about the busy lawyer guide and I have updated it because I felt like there were some things that I could make even more clear to give you a better path forward to create more time in your day. If you go to Dina cataldo.com forward slash busy lawyer, you can get that guide there and it will walk you step by step on what is going on with your day and why can't you get things done.

Why do you feel so overwhelmed and, and busy and is, it will help you crystallize what is not working and what you can do to make it work. So go to Dina cataldo.com forward slash busy lawyer to get your hands on that guide. All right, so what exactly is massive action? And the first time I heard this phrase used it was by Tony Robbins and Tony Robbins. You know, I did a whole podcast on him because he has been really influential in how I look at goals, goal setting how to make evaluations as to what the next best step is. And if you, if you're not familiar with him, he has made a huge transition over the last, what, 40 years from, you know, kind of seeming like this. What do you call it? Call it a commercial, one of those guys who sells things on commercials, whatever you call them.

And just somebody who has become this billionaire who has developed multiple companies, has helped other millionaires develop bigger companies, has helped people take their lives to these unimaginable spaces. And that is something that I find incredibly inspiring and it drove me to look for other people who were doing similar things that spoke to me even more. So I want you to know that these concepts are out there and that's, you know, I'm, I'm so thankful that for some reason you were drawn to this podcast. You were, you were drawn to listening today. And you know, sometimes we can hear things 20 different ways and then we hear it that 21st way and suddenly it clicks. So hopefully this is the day that it clicks for you if you've been at this for a while, massive action means continuous focused action towards your goal. No matter what.

No matter the doubts that sometimes pop in your head, no matter whether your brain tries to tell you that it's not possible. And our brain wants to focus on the past for evidence of possibility in the future. But of course you can't find it right? You cannot find evidence that you can create something you haven't created yet because it has not yet happened. So anytime this happens to you, your job is to refocus your brain. It's to take back control and then take the very next best action towards your goal. And you know, our brains are really, you know, they fail us in a couple ways, right? Like they have these automatic thoughts that are a reaction to what happens in the world. But then we've got to take responsibility and reign our brain back in. We're so practiced at these old thoughts for creating or, or believing what we can create in this world that we forget.

We have to re remember how to take charge of our brain. So I want you to think about the story I'm going to tell you. And when we use our brains to look into the past to create the future, then we don't see the possibilities that are there. When you think about the story, I want you to ask yourself what you believe the most likely life would be for this child. So there was this boy and he grew up in this really impoverished family in Brooklyn. In fact, he lived in a housing complex on the seventh floor with his two siblings. His mom and his dad and they had, you know, kind of a tumultuous relationship. This family. The dad was a truck driver and he also did a lot of other low paying jobs, just, you know, to keep food on the table.

But there were really, really poor and the mom and the dad, neither of them finished high school and somehow this little boy, he would sit, you know, in the stairwell and he would dream of a different life. And he made his way to college. Like you work really hard. He made his way to college. He paid his way through college. He, he took student loans out. He had to take some part time jobs and he even sold blood. Right. And looking into his past, I mean, you could see, all right, well he was really impoverished. There's no logical way he could make his way to college with the model that he had for himself. I mean, his parents couldn't even afford to go to his graduation and there was no reason to really expect big things of this kid. Right? Like he just, you know, was, was living his life.

But I'm gonna tell you that he had a focus and his focus was succeeding and to create something bigger than himself. And that focus led him to create Starbucks. And this is Howard Schultz that I'm talking about in his very first job was selling office equipment door to door and he always gave half of his paycheck to his parents and he just had to keep refocusing on his goal. Eventually he bumped into the owners of the little Starbucks coffee shop in Seattle and he had this really great idea when he traveled for work one day was he traveled to Italy. He had this great idea like, Hey, let's use your Starbucks store and let's create more of them and let's make this like this community space for people to come to and enjoy coffee. And no one at that time had done that before. There is no model in the United States for anything like this.

I mean the people who owned Starbucks, they thought for sure this was a failure. There was no one else who could do this, who was doing this in the States. And Howard jolts, he did his own thing. He decided he was going to start his own coffee shop. It was, I think it was called IL Giornale and he had these little spaces that were just coffee shops. He wanted to make this dream come true and he was trying to find ways to finance, you know, purchasing Starbucks and to really make this a big thing. Eventually he convinced the owners of Starbucks to sell to him and convinced investors after being told like no over 200 times. Like there was no reason for him to believe that he could make this dream come true. Right. And put, subjecting himself to rejection over and over again and feeling uncomfortable and scared.

You know, when they didn't have enough money to make ends meet. And eventually he had created what we now know as Starbucks. But if you look at his past, there's no reason to believe that he could create what he created in the time that he created it or, or even at all. So I want you to really recognize like the impact that the stories that we tell ourselves really impact how we are in the world. Now he was telling himself stories that it was possible that he could do it and that was massive action. He just kept taking action until he created what he wanted to create in this world. And he created a massive success with Starbucks. No matter what you might think of the company itself, like everybody has a different opinion. But if you look at it objectively, it is a, you know, billion dollar company.

So I want you to recognize that the stories that we tell ourselves, whether we're looking at them from like, I can never do this, I've never done this before. Looking at that past focus versus looking at the future focus is like, okay, what's the very next thing I can do to get to what I want to create in this world? And you just keep taking action until you create it. So the second thing I want you to know is how to know when you're not in massive action mode. So I created some signs, like these aren't all of the signs, but there were a couple of big things that stood out to me when I started thinking about how you can really tell when you're not taking massive action. Because it's important to know this because once you notice this, then when you find yourself thinking any of these thoughts or getting into any of these patterns, you can recognize, okay, I am not in massive action mode here.

This is not where I want to be. I want to shift my focus. I want to shift my thoughts. Let's get going on this. All right? And this is not meant to beat yourself up with like we can use these, these things to beat ourselves up when we're not, when we're not doing what we think we're supposed to be doing, it's to bring a awareness. So the very first step to changing anything is awareness. All right? So one sign to know when you're not in massive action mode is this. You don't take a hundred percent responsibility for your results or the lack of your results. You are in blame mode. All right? You'll say things to yourself like, they made me angry. I've got too much to do. I'm so busy. It's just hectic. I just can't seem to get anything done, right? It's these very vague statements.

We're not being decisive. We're not taking charge. We're not understanding that we have control of the situation. We make everything else out of our control, right? It's not us. It's something else. It's just the way the world is so, right? So we're looking at all of these things outside of ourselves. So we say things like this to ourselves because it protects us. It protects us from the pain of not achieving what we want for ourselves. It gives us a reason why it's not our fault, because it hurts to think that it's our fault that we're creating something that's painful for ourselves, right? It hurts to think that, and of course our brain doesn't want us to feel pain. So it creates these stories to explain why we're not creating the results that we want. It's somebody else, right? They made me upset. It's, it's out of my control.

I just have too much to do. And when we think of the world in that way, as if something outside of us has this power over us, we're giving all of our power away. We're not taking responsibility for our results. And you know, you can watch your brain do this all the time, like it wants to save ourselves from that pain. So I just want you to recognize that this is one sign that you're not taking massive action towards your goal. Another thing you might notice is that you spin in this confusion, right? Like you're indecisive. You might say things to yourself like, I don't know how to fill in the blank. Lose weight, stop overdrinking. Stop thinking about what you're thinking about. I don't know how to create a website for my business. I don't know how to make a Facebook funnel. I don't know how to, you know, you name it, right?

Like anytime you think, I don't know, I want you to think I can figure this out. All right? Another thought that you might have is, I don't know where to start or I'm confused or I need to learn more before I start. That's when I hear a lot. I'm not ready yet. Now isn't the right time. Right? And we'll have all these thoughts that just kind of get us in this confusion mode. And these thoughts really prevent us from taking any action, any real action in the world. Now, learning is one of those things where we think we're taking an action, right? And in some ways we are right. Sometimes we need that as like a strategy to overcome something. We need to learn how to create a website. We need to learn how to think differently. We need to learn, you know, different things in order to create what we want.

But here's the things. Sometimes we get stuck in this learning mode. Like we want to figure out the how. Like there's this perfect way and there's only one way to do it. Well that is when you know your impassive action and what I suggest if you find yourself doing a lot of consumption, like you're reading a lot, you're listening to a lot of podcasts, you're just kind of thinking a lot. Then I want you to take action half the time that you would be spending in learning mode or thinking mode. So if you spend 30 minutes learning, I want you to take 30 minutes and do some action, all right? That's how you will prevent yourself from staying in this passive action mode. Like you know, you want to absorb all the things because you think that you're going to get that right. How they're going to tell me step by step how to do it.

And that is going to be the how. But you will never know how to reach your goal until it's done already. You can have a lot of ideas about how to reach your goal, but you've got to re, you know, go through the failures. You've got to see the successes, you've got to see exactly how that's going to play out in your own life before you actually create the result that you want. There's not going to be a single how to get what you want. Everybody's going to have a different how. So several years ago I found myself spinning and it was when I was starting my very first business. I didn't know anything about selling online or how to create a website or how to reach people online. I didn't know anything about Facebook ads, funnels, all that good stuff, SEO, you know, you name it, but I felt like I had to know it all at once and I had all these ideas.

I had all these ideas of what I wanted to create, how I was going to create it, how I was going to get there. It's like my brain was full of all of this stuff and I felt really unfocused and that led me to inaction. I would sit on the couch thinking and I would feel horrible because I wasn't getting anything done. I didn't have the framework I'm going to give you. So I saved, stayed stuck for quite a while and I muscled my way into creating the business one step at a time. I mean I just had to think to get out of it. I had to think, okay, what's one thing I can do right now? What's like the very first thing I can do when I get up off this couch that will get me in the direction I want to go?

I really had to muscle through this. So I'm hoping that the framework I give you helps kind of put your mind at ease and we'll get you into some sort of action when you start using this framework to get where you want to go. Because I made it way more stressful for myself than it needed to be. So I'm going to give you this framework to help you move forward. So here is the framework for taking massive action towards your goal. The very first step is to evaluate where you are right now in relation to your goal. What are you doing right now? What are the thoughts you think about where you are right now? What do you think is preventing you from moving towards your goal? These are your old stories. You know them so you can, when you know them really well, and when you actually write them down on paper and you see them in front of you, you're going to see when you get tripped up by them as you move towards your goal.

Then when they're in front of your face like this, you can remind yourself, Hey, these are old stories. They don't matter. They're about the past and you are creating a new story. You're going to become more future focused this way. You're going to look at your goal in as if it has already happened. And that is where you're moving into the second step, which is creating the after picture. So this is the picture of you already having what you want to have. You are embodying the feelings of the person who already has it. And what you're going to do is when you do that, when you embody the person that already has the body that you want already has the habit that you want, whether it's cutting back on the sugary snacks or the alcohol or your time management, like somebody who's really organized and focused and decisive, you're already in that person's body, right?

Like you're getting your brain future-focused before you even start writing down. What I'm going to tell you to write down in the second step, and once you're there, once you really thinking about, okay, who is that person? The person who already has the business that they want, the person who's already decided exactly how to run their calendar and runs their life to make it easier, describe what it feels like. I want you to write it down. What does it feel like? Word for word? What are all the emotions that come up? Somebody who's already achieved your goal? What does somebody who already has that, what do they think? What do they feel? How does that person show up in the world? And you're going to revisit this sheet that you write down every single day as you work towards your goal. It's going to keep your brain future focused because you're rewiring your brain to move from somebody who is past focused into somebody who already has what they want, right?

You're keeping that in front of you at all times. That's going to help you also remind yourself, okay, this is what a person who already has feels and you are going to start living into that. You're going to start already feeling that so that you're living into the person you want to be. Now, when you, when you, when you think about this, right? Like your before picture where your past focused and, and you have a lot of negative, negative thoughts about how you're going to get there and all of that and your after picture, this person who maybe is more energized and determined and confident. Well, when you look at these two side-by-side, your before and your after, there's this huge gap between your before and your after. And you know, usually it's a huge gap. And so I want you to recognize the third step is really going to help you move from the before to your after.

And that third step is making a list of all the obstacles you can see between your before and your after. And you should spend some time on this, maybe 20, maybe even 30 minutes on this, just writing down everything that's between your before picture, right where you are now, and your after picture where you want to go. So you can write down all the negative thoughts you know you're going to have along the way, right? You, you know that you're going to think that there's something wrong with you. If it's not working, you're going to think that you should be going faster than you are. You're going to think that you're doing something wrong. So you're going to feel despair. Maybe you'll be tired. You're going to say to yourself, you know, I don't know how to fill in the blank. You're going to tell yourself that you won't, don't have the resources, that you don't have the time, that you don't have the energy, that your partner isn't supportive or you need to find childcare so that you have focus time to work on, you know, a business that your goal is, is building a bigger business.

I mean, all of the obstacles, every single thing. Keep asking yourself, what else? What else? Like maybe you don't know how to build a website. You don't know how to attract customers. You don't know how to build an email list. You don't know how to create a plan that works for you. You don't know how to create a calendar where you can get things done. You don't know how to stay committed to that calendar, right? Like everything that you don't know, everything that you think is between you and who you want to become. And then the fourth step is then writing down a strategy to overcome that obstacle for every single obstacle that you've listed. Right? So let's say you, you won't have the time, right? And that's when you've got to come up with your strategy for overcoming that, right? You think to yourself, all right, so I know I want to devote two hours a day towards a business, right?

So for me it was, it was all right, I have a full time legal job. I also want to create this business. How I know that I don't have a ton of time, right? And I'm full time lawyer. Where can I find that time? What can I do? And I know I don't want to feel stressful. I know I want it to feel easy. How can I make it easy? And so I had to go through my calendar. I had to see exactly where I was spending my time. I had to cross out all of the things I didn't feel were valuable for my time. I didn't want to spend a of time on Netflix. So I canceled my Netflix subscription. I didn't want to spend a lot of time on TV. So I canceled my cable subscription. I didn't want to have my energy devoted towards drinking and have like a whole day just wiped out.

So I, I stopped drinking. I wanted to have the time to devote towards my business. And so I started just chipping away at the things that took away my time. And that is how you can create a strategy to overcome an obstacle. Same thing for let's say you have childcare issues, right? Like right now a lot of people are at home and they've got childcare issues. People think they're little people who want their attention all the time when they want to do some work, like very difficult for them, right? To create that focus time. Well, how do you create that focus time, take responsibility for it and you can see, all right, I can find activities for my children. I can ask my partner to take charge for a couple hours while I get this focus time done. I can, you know, make sure that my focus time corresponds with when they are napping.

I mean, there are lots of things that you can do once you start taking control of what you can take control of. So there could be a million things that are out of our control, but how we respond to them is totally under our control. You can't control the fact that you have little people in your house, but what you can do is start to look at, okay, well now that this is something that exists in the world, how can I respond to it in a way that I can create what I need to reach my goal? So that's what I mean by creating these strategies to overcome your obstacles. And you can do that with every single one of these. So now you have the awareness. You know what massive action is. You know the difference between massive action and taking passive action. You understand the thoughts that are keeping you from taking a hundred percent responsibility for not reaching your goal.

And you can start implementing right now you have a framework for implementing. So what I want you to do is don't just like sit there with this information because if you just passively consumed this podcast and you're not sitting down and taking action, then you just did all this passive action. You wasted all this time just listening to this and you're not actually implementing it. So I want you to sit down and go through this again. I want you to write down your before, evaluate exactly where you are. I want you to go through writing down, not just thinking about this, but actually writing it down because you've got like I talked to coaching clients all the time and they tell me, gosh, when I started writing it down, it just made so much more sense to me. I felt like I was getting more attraction and it's because that's just something with our brain.

We need to have that tactile connection between our brain, our thoughts, and putting it down on paper helps. So when you start creating this awareness about where you are evaluating where you are, you're going to write down exactly where you want to be. You're going to write down a list of obstacles between your before and after picture. And then you're going to write down every single strategy that corresponds with overcoming each obstacle you wrote down. And then you're going to get an action. You're just going to pick the very first thing you want to focus on and focus on that. If it's getting your time in order to focus on that, that'll be the one thing you focus on. Okay? And so one of the tools that I have to help you get your time in order, if this is something that you really struggle with, is the the busy lawyers quick start guide.

So if you go to www.Dinacataldo.com/busylawyer there, you will find your free guide. And I'll walk you through seven steps to help you get your time back in order. And I encourage you, if you are, you know, working through one really big goal just to pick one goal at a time, get traction in that goal, overcome that goal, and you'll start proving to yourself that you can do it. And once you start getting that momentum where you can prove that you can achieve anything you set your mind to, it'll make having other goals easier. And that's when you can start incorporating like these other big goals, like you don't have to start, stop working towards them, but when you're energized and taking massive action, you will want to work at one goal at a time until you start building that competence that you can do anything you set your mind to. All right, I hope you have a wonderful day and that you take action on this podcast. I'll talk to you next week. Bye. Hey, if you enjoy this podcast, I offer one on one coaching using my be a better lawyer framework. That's where we rewire your brain to help you create the life and the practice that you want. Go to Dina cataldo.com to schedule a strategy session.