Setting Goals and Understanding Your Unconscious Organization of Time
Evolutionary Sales
Jason McClain
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Episode 3 - Setting Goals and Understanding Your Unconscious Organization of Time

Jason teaches you more powerful tools for mental mastery. In this Episode, he discusses the well-formed conditions to achieving your goals. That is that they be S.M.A.R.T. goals. If you have goals or want to set goals, be sure to acquire these powerful distinctions for achieving them. Along the way, Jason demystifies the Secret and the Law of Attraction, and educates you around the reticular activator system to assist you in greater and greater levels of success and possibility. Finally, Jason teaches you powerful tools to assist you in both resolving fear and anxiety, but also to assist you in achieving your goals with greater ease using your unconscious organization of time that, until this episode, may have been out of your awareness. Find out how you can live the life you dream and want-and to create even greater dreams, by mastering the ability to navigate your own interiors.

Transcript

Transcript

Episode 3: Setting Goals and Understanding Your Unconscious Organization of Time

Announcer:  This program is brought to you by personallifemedia.com.

[Music]

Jason McClain:  Welcome to Evolutionary Sales.  I’m Jason McClain, your host and your guide in the 21st century marketplace.  Evolutionary Sales is where 21st century psychology meets ethical sales techniques.

Just to represent a few things before we get into episode three.  Just to remind you if you haven’t already subscribed, please go subscribe.  You need to do it through an RSS reader or you can do it through iTunes so that it downloads automatically.

Make sure that you listen to these podcasts in order starting with the prologue so you can get the most out of it.

Some of the things we have covered so far are the difference between 20th century psychology and 21st century psychology, and the 21st century marketplace, where the integration of service and contribution, a lack of attachment to a particular outcome, but a deep commitment to leveraging people beyond their limitations as a result of your service to their outcomes.  That's where this all comes together.

I told you why you should listen to me.  If you are curious about that, make sure you go and listen to prologue.  We told you how to get the most out of it and that there would be books to read and exercises.  We have already gone through quite a bit of mental exercises, and we are about to some more in this episode.

And again, it doesn't matter which business you are in or how skilled you are or how experienced you are as a salesperson.  You might be a seasoned veteran in the sales profession.  Or you might have just landed your first sales job and you're not even sure if it is for you.

Wherever you are at on that continuum, Evolutionary Sales will assist you in being even more successful.  Even the most seasoned professional, and especially in fact, the most seasoned professional knows that just one good idea can mean the difference in thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands of dollars, in fact, in their income over the span of years.

So whether you own your own business, and you need to inspire a team towards action, leverage them beyond their limitations and inspire them towards a vision or whether you are a salesperson out there in the trenches making cold calls every single day, or whether you are a real estate agent or whether you are working at the enterprise level and you are selling IT solutions, it really doesn't matter what business you're in or how seasoned you are, this is going to have you be even more effective.

Evolutionary Sales and me, your guide in the 21st century marketplace, is committed to that.

In Episode One we talked about how there is a new marketplace, with new needs, a new orientation, and how it is really about opening up relationships and co-creating solutions requiring a new skills and new thinking.  So that you can open relationships and not just close deals and then move on.  You will be much more happy and far more fulfilled and far more financially successful as a result.

In Episode One we went into personal work.  We talked about not only your mindsets, your beliefs and your orientations to the world, but also how your beliefs can actually affect the results because they allow you to be open to possibility or be closed to opportunities.

We actually took you through some sentence exercises that allowed you to dissolve some of those limiting beliefs, some of those beliefs that were putting boundary conditions or borders around what you could actually do, what you could achieve, who you could serve and what your own limitations were.

Then we talked about the structure of your emotions in terms of VAKOGL or Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic, Olfactory, Gustatory and Language, or pictures, sounds, feelings, smells, tastes and words.  This is the way your emotional experience is structured.  You don't respond to reality.  You respond to your internal re-presentation or representation of reality.

In Episode Two we started to teach you how to master your mind.  That is actually getting into the science behind VAKOGL so that you could master your own mind in any given situation for the purpose of being of greater service to your clients and your prospects.

We wrapped it up by giving you some powerful exercises so that you can not only step into, literally, a state of excellence at any given time that you want to, but also resolve any internal self talk, internal dialogue or that internal critic that some of you experience.

In this episode we are going to take a look at your unconscious organization of time.  Mastering this structure will not only assist you in resolving fear and anxiety, if and when you experience it, but it will also help you in assisting yourself.  That's right, assisting yourself in setting goals and realizing them more powerfully and more elegantly, and more quickly.  The unconscious organization of time is a very powerful tool for that. 

And again, I am committed to bringing you all the tools, insights, psychology and practices you will need to stay at the forefront of your professional life.  And again, regardless of your current level of competency, whether you are a seasoned veteran of sales or just landed your first sales position and you're not sure if it is for you, this series of podcasts and this episode will assist you in excelling in that.

As I mentioned in the prologue, I have done a lot of transformational work and a lot of personal development work.  And I am developing Personal Evolution, which is a much more comprehensive model for evolving your very core, how you relate to yourself and how you relate to the events in your life.

At the same time, in the transformational community, time has fallen on, well, bad times.  In the transformational community people talk about, “Well, there's no past, and there is no future.  There is only the present.”

I say, “Balderdash.”  You could just as easily say there is no love, there is no compassion, there is no empathy, there is no such thing as excitement, and there is no such thing as fear.

Why are those the same thing as time?  Because they are all intersubjective structures.  In other words, they are in your mind.  But they are certainly real; they are just in our interior domains.  So in other words, your fear is real for you, because you're not responding to what is ‘real’, that is, what is outside of you, you are responding to your internal representations. 

So when people tell you that there is no such thing as the past or the future, you can just ask them if there is any such thing as love, if there is any such thing as compassion or empathy or excitement or joy, because they are the same thing.  They are intersubjective structures.

So the idea is not to do away with this idea of past or future.  Of course there is a past and the future.  You are responding to it all the time.  The idea is to actually master it.  Master your unconscious organization of time so you can use it to your benefit.  That's one of the things we are going to teach you in this podcast, in this episode.

So, first of all, let's talk about goals.  We are going to set some goals, and then we are going to work with your unconscious organization of time.  We are going to talk about SMART goals, and I will tell you what that stands for in just a minute.

SMART goals.  First, these are well formed in these conditions.  Any goal needs to be a SMART goal.

Maybe some of you have heard about the Law of Attraction.  The movie ‘The Secret’ has recently popularized the idea.  The Law of Attraction is really nothing new.  It deals with your Reticular Activating System.

Let's talk a little bit about your Reticular Activator because it's kind of mystical.  People think it's some kind of magical thing.  It's about aligning yourself with a harmony of the universe.

There is really nothing magical about it.  You can see the Reticular Activating System in action, every single day.  Have you ever wanted a new car and then you started seeing that car everywhere?  Or maybe you had a friend and you thought you saw them often or an ex-girlfriend or an ex-boyfriend and you thought you saw their face.  You thought you saw them walking down the street.

That is just your mind's ability to recognize patterns.  There is nothing magical about this.  It's called a Reticular Activator.  You can Google it, or look in Wikipedia and find out more about this.

This has been known about in the personal development community for decades and decades and decades.  Your mind will acquire that on which you focus.  So if you say, “Well, I don't want that”, because the unconscious mind doesn't understand negation, for instance, “Don't think of a pink elephant right now”, “Don't think of a pink elephant with blue polka dots on it with a palm tree growing out of its head, right now”.  Don't think about that.

And of course, what did you see?  You probably saw all of that.  At best, you saw all of that with a big ‘NO’ sign, a big slashed red ‘NO’ sign across it.  But your unconscious mind, then goes to work finding out going, “Sniff, sniff, sniff, oh, oh, there it is, there it is!”

I like to think of the unconscious mind as the goal-sniffing dog.  So the way to best harness that power is to make sure that everything is always stated in the positive.  It could be that you say, “Well, I don't want ____”.

Well great.  What would you prefer instead?  So make sure that you set your goals stated in the positive.

The ‘M’ in SMART stands for measurable.  Measurable literally means that - measurable.  Maybe it is a feeling, but you will have some sensation, which can be measured by you.  It could be financial, but it could also be some sort of feeling.  The idea is to get it in all representational systems.

We have already talked about representational systems. Visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and linguistic are the one on which we will focus for this particular exercise.

So you want everything to be measurable.  What would you be seeing, hearing, feeling, doing or experiencing?  What would you have achieved?  That is measurable.

The ‘A’ stands for achievable.  The example I like to use is if you told me today, if you came in and said, “Jason I want you to coach me to Wimbledon this year.”  I'd say, “Well, how old are you?”  And you say, “I'm 35.”  I'd say, “Well man, I don't know, no one over 30, I think it's actually 31 has ever won Wimbledon”

Maybe it's achievable. Maybe it's not.  We can certainly break that record.  “But have you ever played tennis before, though?”  “Well, no. Oh, when is Wimbledon?”  And I say, “Six months from now.”

Now the odds of that being achievable - that's a tough case to make.  But once you have it stated in the positive it's measurable, and it's achievable.

The ‘R’ then stands for responsible.  What does responsible mean?  Responsible in this context means that it won't harm you; it won't harm anyone around you, your family, your community, your system, and it won't harm the world at large.

For instance, you could come to me saying that you wanted to dump a bunch of toxic waste in the ocean.  We could say, “Oh well, that's stated in the positive and it's certainly measurable, and it is certainly achievable.  But it's definitely not responsible.”  So of course we would not set that kind of goal.

We don't want to set any kind of goal that would harm anyone else, would harm any system or harm anyone around you, unless it would be what we call a positive system peturbitation.  In other words, it actually disrupts things and creates positive change.  But those are very, very, very, very rare cases.

We don't want to set goals that will harm you, anyone around you, the system, the community or the world at large.  That's responsible.

Then the last one, ‘T’ essentially means set in time, or by when is the easiest way to ask that.  By when do you want to achieve this?

So again, SMART goals are stated in the positive, measurable, achievable, responsible and set in time.  There is some time component or some deadline, or as I prefer to say ‘liveline’.  That is when are you going live with it?

There are a few things about goals, and certainly when we get into these tasks that you are going to do - these tasks, you've got tasks every day, you need to follow up, you need to send e-mails, you need to make cold calls.  You need to make warm calls.  You need to check in with prospects and clients to see how they are doing.  You need to remember them in certain contexts.  Send them new information.

It shows that you were actually thinking about them.  I occasionally send my clients - you know, I am on the Internet and I am researching something.  And I see something that I know is of interest to them.  I send that to them.  That's important to them.  And it's important to you as a service provider in the 21st century marketplace.

So let's set some goals.  Go ahead and pause this podcast.  Pause it.  Write some goals down in every context of your life.  Here is the way I would encourage you to do it.  I would encourage you to go out five years.  What do you want to have achieved in five years?

Then what do you need to do in two years to have achieved that?  And then what do you need to have done within one year to do that?  And then what do you need to have done in six months to have done that?

Then what will you need to have done in two months to have done that?  And what do you need to do today to accomplish that?

So go ahead and set goals.  Set goals in every context of your life.  We're talking about business here.  But you know sales, especially evolutionary sales where you are inspiring people toward the vision and leveraging them beyond their limitations that happens pretty much every day in every context of your life.

Whether it’s in your intimate sexual relationship, whether it's with your family, with your friends, whether it's with your boss, whether it's with your subordinates, those who are on your team that you are leading or whether it's with your clients and prospects these skills will be useful to you everywhere.  So set goals and every single context of your life.

Again, romantic, sexual, social, financial, career, health - go ahead and set goals in all of those.  Do it on the time line that I suggested.  And then, when you get back, we are actually going to work with your timeline, your unconscious organization of time.

Everyone has it.  We can use it to assist you in achieving what you want even more effectively, even more rapidly.  Whether it is dissolving fear or whether it is achieving the next milestone.  So go ahead and pause the podcast now.  And I will see you in just a few minutes.

[Music]

Excellent.  Welcome back.  If you are driving, well, don't be.  For these next few exercises that we are going to do having to do with your timeline it is critical that you're sitting in a comfortable place, that you're not operating heavy machinery, that you're not driving a vehicle and that you will be uninterrupted.

So if you need to stop this recording now to implement those conditions, do so now and then restart the recording.

OK, perfect.  So, if you're interested in researching further what we're about to go through, I recommend the book ‘Timeline Therapy and the Basis of Personality’, by Dr. Tad James. ‘Timeline Therapy, and the Basis of Personality’.  It's a great book, a very in depth book.  It's a little bit dense to get through, if you don't have a scientific mind, but I'm sure all of you do and you are all very competent and very intelligent.

So, everyone has an unconscious organization of time.  A lot of people, about 50% of the population, are ‘in time’.  In other words, the future is in front of them.  The present is represented in their body.  And the past is out behind them.  You can hear people talking about putting things behind them.  That literally means putting it in the past.

Another portion of the population, about the other half are what we call ‘through time’.  In other words, they are looking through time, and they have the past on their left, the present out in front of them directly, and the future off to their right.

Now there are plenty of variations on this.  But by and large, about half the population is ‘in time’.  That is, the future is in front of them, the past is behind them and the present is represented in their body with some sensation.  Then there is ‘through time’ where the past is to their left, the present is in front of them and the future is out to their right.

You can use this.  You can use this for lots of things.  Usually people see things in their future.  They imagine achieving something.  Or they imagine failing at something.  And again, any Olympic athlete knows that they need to see themselves winning, in order to win.

If you saw yourself failing, not only would you not take on the practices that you would need to take on, but you would also probably fail, because your mind lives into your imagination.  We'll talk about self-hypnosis later on.

But really, the point is, you can use your unconscious organization of time once you are aware of it for your benefit.  That is, you can control your mind rather than your mind controlling you.

For instance, for anybody who is experiencing anxiety or fear, it's largely because they have some unconscious, that is out of their awareness, internal representation of an event going poorly.  In other words, it doesn't end well.  Maybe it's a cold call.  Maybe it's a presentation.  Or maybe it's that odd looking person crossing the road towards you and you imagine something. 

But the imagination is out of your awareness.  The imagining is out of your awareness.  So one of the things that somebody involved in evolutionary awareness does is bring these into their awareness.

How are you imagining it going?  If you imagine it going poorly then we know you are going to feel anxiety.  And if you are feeling anxiety than we know that out of your awareness or perhaps in your awareness is you imagining it going poorly.

So one of the things we do is simply have you use your timeline to resolve that.  And we are about to do just that.

So again, my voice is about to shift.  That's just fine.  That is to assist you in fully integrating these learnings.

So as you sit comfortably in your chair, what I would like you to do is to imagine that you are in a safe, comfortable chair.  Maybe it's got some sort of fabric.  Maybe it's a certain style.  Maybe it's a certain color.  But whatever you see and feel, know that you are safe and comfortable and powerful in that chair.  Nothing can happen to you in this chair.

What I would like you to do is I would like you to float way up in the air.  See yourself floating way up in the air in this chair.  Way above the present, with this timeline beneath you out in space. 

Maybe you see the future in front of you and the past behind you as you look over your shoulder.  Or maybe you see the future to your right and the past to your left.  However it is for you is fine.  It's perfect.

Then what I would like you to do is imagine a scenario that you feel nervous about, that you feel some anxiety about or that you feel some straight up fear about.  I would like you to imagine that event, located in time.

Maybe it's something you're supposed to do tomorrow.  Maybe it is some cold calls you're supposed to make.  Maybe it's a meeting you have with your boss.  Maybe it's a meeting you have with your Board of Directors.  Maybe it's a meeting that you have with a prospect or client.

What I would like you to do is to float out and listen closely.

Float out to 15 minutes beyond this successful completion of the event, noticing the anxiety gone.  Again, float out to 15 minutes beyond this successful completion of the event, noticing the anxiety gone.

In other words, whatever you need to see to know that it went well - maybe you see people applauding, maybe you see a prospect signing a contract; maybe you see yourself smiling and radiating with the pride of the presentation that you just gave.  Maybe you see yourself laughing at getting rejected on a cold call.  Or maybe you see yourself setting up that meeting, two meetings in a row, two cold calls in a row led to two meetings, or something like that.

But float out to 15 minutes beyond the successful completion of the event and notice the anxiety gone.  This technique mixed with the Circle of Excellence, which we did in the last episode are powerful tools for you to resolve any fear and anxiety.

Now, let's talk about setting goals with your timeline.  Some people say, “Well all I need to do is set the goals, and they will happen.”  That may be true for you.  But what is also true is that if that is happening for you and you always meet your goals then something is happening unconsciously to align you around that.

I like to think of the conscious mind and the unconscious mind as the relationship between the captain of the ship and the oarsmen down below.  Who is really controlling the ship?  Is it the captain or is it the oarsmen?  Is it the conscious mind, the captain, or the unconscious mind, the oarsmen?

Of course, it is the oarsmen.  If the oarsmen don't want to go where the captain tells them to go what do they do?  They mutiny.  How any times have you ever wanted to do something and you were unable to do it or you wanted to stop something and you couldn't stop it?  Or you wanted to achieve something, and things kept getting in the way?

Well, that's nothing magical.  That's just your unconscious mind being out of alignment.  So when I work with my clients, what I always make sure and do is give them the conscious mind coaching but then also resolve the unconscious mind objections, the unconscious mutinies if you will, for the captain of the ship, which is the conscious mind.  It's the one going, “Hey let’s go there!”

So that's why we are doing this.  It's to get your unconscious mind aligned, to have it happen even more seamlessly for you, with less effort.

So at this time, I would like you to pick a goal.  Pick a goal, any goal.  Pick a goal.  Pick a goal of an appropriate chunk size that is something that you want to accomplish in the next week or in the next two weeks, or maybe in the next quarter.

What I want you to do is create an image.  See yourself first of all floating above the present above your timeline, with the future out in front of you or whatever direction it’s in.  What I would like you to do is create an image out front if you like you are holding a snapshot, like an 8 x 10 photograph.

Create a snapshot of you, having just successfully completed the goal.  Notice how you look.  Notice the qualities of the image.  Is it in color?  Is it black and white?  Is it in motion; is it actually moving inside the frame?  Or is it still?  Is it sharp?  Or is it dull?  Is it high contrast or low contrast?  Is it sparkly or is it fuzzy?  Is it in focus or is it out of focus?

Notice all these qualities of the image.  These are called submodalities.  We're probably not going to have time to get into that in these series of podcasts.  These are submodalities, distinctions within the visual modality.

Maybe there is some sound to it.  Whatever it is, make it just perfect for you so that if you look at that image, you go, “Yes.  I just accomplished that goal.  I'm certain I did by looking at that image.  I see it.”

Maybe you see a check in your hand.  Maybe you see a relationship having some breakthrough.  Maybe you see some sort of accolades you're getting from your colleagues or from your superiors.  Or maybe you see your team succeeding.  Whatever it is, see that happening now.

Then take that image and literally blow it alive.  Blow the breath of life into it.

[Noise of blowing up a balloon]

Energize it with your breath, and then take that image and snap it.  Then drop it into your future at whatever time you are clear is that time by when you want to achieve your goal.  You're going to allow that to slip into your timeline right now.

Perfect.  And now float back down into the present.  Then gently come back into the room.  Make sure you drink a lot of water today.  In fact, make sure you drink a lot of water everyday. [Laughs]

Whenever people tell me they are low on energy, and they feel tired a lot I ask them if they are drinking at least 4 L of water a day.  And invariably they of course say no.  I recommend 4 L of water a day, or a gallon.

Anyway, so that is goal setting and using your timeline, which is the secret of creating your future.

Let me give you a couple of examples of that in my real life just recently.  And this is combining the reticular activator system with the future timeline, all those things.  For instance, it's not as if when you set your intention to buy that new car and then you start ‘manifesting’ - which is a very popular term on the West coast - you don't just manifest it out of thin air.

In other words, the cars were driving anyway.  It's just that now you're noticing them.  You are literally exposed to millions of bits of information every minute of every day.  Millions of bits, pixels, colors, sounds, lights, offers, advertising.  All these different things you are exposed to every single day.

Just so that you don't go insane, you have to filter out a bunch of it.  So your reticular activator system essentially lets you go, “I want this” and then you have permission to see that.  It lets it in through your perceptual filters.

This isn't magic.  This is biology.  In the last couple of months, I literally took a couple of months off generating new leads for myself because I was working on several projects.  One of them was the Evolutionary Sales audio product.  One of them is a whole program for Coaching the Life Coach so life coaches can make sure that they are making at least a $10,000 a month consistently and they can count on that.  There are some other audio products that you can see on evolutionaryawareness.com that I have been developing.

Anyway, so then I decided it was time to turn the faucet back on.  So what I did was set a goal to sign eight new clients in a month, eight new clients in a month.  I took a goal, and I also put it in my future timeline. 

I put eight dollar signs in my future timeline, knowing that there is anybody that can use my work, my comprehensive evolution work.  Anybody can benefit from evolving how they relate to themselves and how they relate to the events in their lives.  It improves everyone's life.

So it's not like there is a lack of qualified prospects.  As soon as I had done that, as soon as I had set my intention and put that in my timeline, someone asked me to do a presentation for them.  I got four clients from that.

Then that one was sold out.  So they asked me to do a second one.  I got two more clients from that.  Then out of the blue I got two referrals from current clients.  Just like that. 

I signed those eight new clients.  This is the power that you can have once you get your unconscious mind aligned with your goals, and you understand how to manage your own mind.

So not only have you mastered your mind, but you've also mastered your unconscious organization of time as a subset of that.  What's available to you through that is that you can create a life that you have always wanted and that you feel that you deserve and that you dream for. 

I'm happy to be your guide in that process.

Be sure that you post your comments or questions on the blog, on the Personal Life Media Blog Network.  You can reach me, your host and your guide in the 21st century marketplace at [email protected].

There are a couple of other things to mention before we go.  First of all, I want to mention ifrogz.com.  They design customized cases for your iPod and all sorts of other accessories.  We have free gifts from ifrogz.com for the best comments and questions on the Evolutionary Awareness blog on the Personal Life Media Network.

For transcripts of this show, and for other shows on the Personal Life Media Network, be sure to visit personallifemedia.com.

Be sure to join us next week when we start to get into the actual skills, the foundational skills of building rapport with anybody at any given moment in any context, on the phone or in person, without having to rely on where you came from, without having to rely on any of these, what we call ‘me too’s’, that is buildable unconscious nonverbal rapports. 

Anyone [snaps fingers] like that!

I am Jason MacLean, your host of Evolutionary Sales and your guide in the 21st century marketplace.  And again, you can e-mail me at [email protected] or you can reach me through EvolutionaryAwareness.com.

[Music]

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