imPossible Goals E-Book

Gerhard J. Mandalka

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 147

Beschreibung

This version is the first edition of Impossible Goals in English. In this fourth version of the book, the author has taken into account the feedback of the readers and elaborated the core messages even more strongly, also graphically. Already the change of the preface has led some test readers to the realization: "I am currently not ready to tackle my goal, because I . . . !" This realization is very important as it saves them a lot of time and frustration. The test readers have thanked for this insight and now know what they need to change beforehand in order to reach their goal. The book provides an inspiring map to help you find your goals and take the right path. It shows you how to spot obstacles and stay on the right course in the fog or return quickly. You will learn how your unconscious thinking patterns influence your decisions and how to better align these patterns with your goals and better decisions. The book draws your attention to new opportunities that you might miss if you focus too much on threats and disadvantages. It helps you to focus your thoughts more on your goals and shows you that many happy and successful people have similar motives and make their decisions on a solid basis. The author, a three-time world record holder, entrepreneur, scientist and family man, shares his knowledge to help you be happier. He emphasises that we can only change the future in the here and now and through action.

Leseprobe

Foreword

The book motivates you to catch your goals. It is built like a journey and starts where most people fail. It deals with the recurring negative thoughts and behaviours that put obstacles in our way right from the start. You will learn why you often put these obstacles in your way and how you can prevent them in the future. You will see how your memory processes information and helps you achieve your goals. The answer to why you often don’t even notice this help is also in this book. This makes this book different from all other books in this aera. After reading, you will know how to use your beliefs for yourself and what are the basic tasks involved in achieving new goals.

Crises, e.g. a pandemic, are our chance to test and improve the flexibility of our cognitive abilities in practice on a daily basis. People who focus exclusively on threats and disadvantages during this time, and preoccupy themselves with defending against risks, run the risk of missing out on the new opportunities of this time. Recognizing the opportunities in life as these also requires a way of thinking based on openness, hope and trust.

The content of the book is guaranteed to present you with new food for thought, methods and alternative courses of action that are scientifically sound and tried and tested in practice. Each of us needs information from different sources at different times, so that then almost suddenly this enlightening and surprising experience can lead to the removal of obstacles. For this I work in this book as in my coaching sessions with many examples, situation explanations and questions. This book will very certainly lead to some important enlightening and surprising experiences for you.

I have been a coach for more than 20 years and I am concerned with the influences of the psyche on our lives. So I have always been interested in how I can train, learn or set a world record as quickly as possible. The will to compete at all costs has also led me to professional sports and two world records “greatest distance covered in one hour” and “12 hours in indoor cycling” (Guinness Book of Records).

My qualifications are: Master in the field of prevention and health psychology, business psychologist (BA), Bachelor Professional of Physical Fitness CCI, NLP Master and many more. I started my active education with a degree in mathematics, computer science and economics (to the horror of my environment, I broke it off during the thesis).

Recognizing that we should first let go of some goals in order to be able to achieve others is a very painful and important step in life. Even though, or perhaps because, I also had to let go of many goals, I am currently very happy with my life as a direct lockdown sufferer and am now using the time to write books, realign my businesses and recover after a serious operation. I would like to show you as my coaching clients how you can test your own limits and restrictions in order to train your courage more and more often and to be proud of yourself and your actions.

To enable us to deal with the multitude of different possibilities, our brain forms coarse or even very fine grids in which we store our experiences according to category. These grids also influence our perception in that we label certain things as the same and others as different. Every person is different, and behavioral patterns of people can be grouped into categories. This gives us the opportunity to learn from other people or to find out why some are successful whereas others are not.

Chance or bad luck are very rarely the decisive criteria in our lives. Almost never is the first mistake punished with the loss of life chances or even life. Rather, bad luck is often just a compensation for good luck, from which we have previously failed to learn or learned incorrectly countless times. Almost no one is caught driving under the influence of alcohol for the first time! Then you just want to move the car once, slightly tipsy, and the police catch you. Bad luck? Yes, after many times of luck.

The only chance to be happy and successful is to learn to evaluate the events in our lives and make better decisions than before based on these evaluations.

Every one of us has travelled by bus at one time or another. In a way, life can be seen as a bus ride with many stops. Only by knowing where we want to go can we find the right bus to our destination. Only if we are prepared to look at the bus timetable can we see which bus we will reach at which stop and when, so that we can then change buses appropriately. If, in addition to the timetable, we also look at the routes we have to take, we can see where we might be able to take a short cut on foot and possibly change from one bus to the next.

Some people prefer to walk their own way all the time and wonder how others overtake them without making any effort, even enjoying the scenery. Some just jump on a bus and get annoyed afterwards when it is the wrong bus to another destination.

After reading this book, you will be better able to direct your thoughts towards your goals. You will eliminate your own excuses before they can spread in your mind. You will be more cognitively flexible in responding to many events in your life. This will help you recognize when copying methods is better for you than inventing new ones. Many who are happy and successful follow very similar motives and have a decision-making basis for their actions. If you use this basis for yourself, a great many new doors will open in your life.

In order to achieve specific goals, you must be willing to question and change yourself.

Are you ready for change?

Often our goals are hidden behind behaviors that we like to avoid or avoid!

Table of contents

Foreword

Common reasons for failure

Use of skills

Favorite topic

Inner attitude

Summary

What thought patterns shape your behavior?

Auditory Digital

General vs. Specifics

Left vs. right brain

Procedures vs. Options

Away from vs. toward

Reactive vs. Proactive

Internal vs. External locus of control

Solo vs. together/proximity

Maintenance vs. Development

Match vs. Mismatch

Summary

How to create reality

Decisions

Imagination

The fast good decision

Basis for decisions

Tip for direction-givers (decision-makers)

Formulate and structure goals

Negations as goals

GOALS must be SMART

Conflicting goals

Structure goals and milestones

Two special features that are often forgotten

The journey is always the destination

Goal: Earn sum X each month

“You have a sporting goal Y!”

Training and then a great job

Become a department head

Getting out of debt

Winning a new partner

Those who can let go can also receive something new

We always have time!

Beliefs

Positive psychology

We always have three options

We develop and grow with our challenges!

If you get angry, it’s your own fault!

We reap what we sow!

Treat yourself with respect!

Recognition of misconduct is positive

Behavioral modelling

Everyone needs their stress level

Build frustration tolerance!

This way you can improve your frustration tolerance:

Motivation, planning and volition

Three phases on the way to success

Community and environment

This is how you increase your self-efficacy

The challenge of the day

Be positive and good to yourself!

A word at the end

Common reasons for failure

Many of us very often lack the necessary frustration tolerance to achieve their goals. Frustration tolerance is the ability to do something now only to receive a reward later. The more vague and indefinite the reward might be, the greater this tolerance needs to be. We also need frustration tolerance to be able to better deal with defeats and our own shortcomings.

With young children, it is easy to test frustration tolerance. This test only makes sense without prior practice! Give your child something sweet to eat and tell him, “I’m going out now and if I come back in 2 minutes and you haven’t eaten it, you’ll get a second sweet with it.” If you come back and your little child has already been able to resist the urge to try it, then the chance for your child to master difficult tasks in life is very high.

It’s about reward procrastination, we might go to a party today or we might sit down in the evening to finish our project extra well. It’s about being able to wait calmly for the moment and being ready to practice something often enough!

If we want to achieve goals, we should like the associated tasks and hardships or deal with the frustration. For example, many self-employed people fail not because of their core work, but because they don’t like the bureaucracy (accounting). They find this area too annoying, which is another description for: “it frustrates me too much”.

Frustration tolerance is extremely important and plays into many subsequent points again and again. It is a basic competence for success!

Are you now of the opinion that if I improve my frustration tolerance, then I will definitely achieve my goals? Then this IF-THEN relationship is unfortunately wrong.

From an early age we are taught IF-THEN relationships. So parents are very fond of using this relationship to make something happen with us children. “If you sit quietly now, I will take you to the playground later.”

Just as our parents often failed to fulfil their IF-THEN links because it suddenly rained and yet there was no time to go to the playground, we now also use these links carelessly and even negligently by not doing something we have set out to do.

In doing so, the link suggests an important connection to our brain that can limit our volition (implementation of motivation). At some point, our brain no longer believes that we are really rewarding ourselves after an action.

More and more our mind automatically deletes our reward after most THENs and replaces it with: “Blah blah blah” or even worse: “It doesn’t matter what you do, nothing good will ever happen for you!” Accordingly, we don’t need to wonder why we don’t feel like taking action despite being highly motivated.

Even if our personal IF-THEN link is well established, we can fall into a dangerous logical trap.

Does my IF-THEN logic really fit? Does B really follow automatically IF I do A or is it different?

Many people come to my gym and say: “When I’m fitter again, then I can do more sport!” Isn’t it rather the other order that fits more often: “If I do more sport, then I’ll get fitter and fitter and then I can do even more sport.”

Many of us only want to change when they have achieved something. Only the sequence works exactly the other way round! Or have you ever heard of a world swimming champion who only started to take swimming lessons after winning the world championship?

So first we have to change the behavior in order to then be able to achieve (swim) the result.

What kind of lifestyle do world champions in swimming lead? They do commercials and are mega-famous, afford exclusive holidays and drive luxurious cars, don’t have to work, can go swimming from time to time. They simply enjoy a very relaxed life.

Bullshit!

Swimming is YOUR job, and usually no trade union pays attention to the respect of working hours or the right to a minimum holiday. Their working day starts right after they get up, often as early as 5am, and ends only when they go to sleep. Their job includes a good diet and conscious periods of rest, only it is not done according to their own wishes, but is firmly planned. If they want to remain world champions, they have to train for many hours and, above all, work on themselves to be able to push themselves harder and harder. It’s about constantly pushing the limits and paying attention to a lot of things besides swimming. Swimming is then only one part of the job: there is also optimal nutrition, getting up early even at weekends, competing at weekends in ever new places and completely gearing one’s life to the sport. It’s about giving all this and coming to terms with the fact that success may not come for weeks, months or even years! It’s about getting back up after every defeat and saying to yourself, now more than ever!

This logical trap is even meaner when we have established our IF-THEN relationship and implement it in that order and still do not get our result.

In cycling, we liked to joke with the coaches after a training camp about its quality. Since it was often common to finish a training camp with a cycling race there was only a chance to get a good result in this race if the other riders also came exhausted from a training camp or if only bad racers were at the start. In these races, I was mostly busy being on the back wheel of the second to last rider. After this race came 2 or 3 rest days with very little cycling. After that we finished a lot of races on the podium or even as winners. Then we went to the coach and said: “If we train less, we will win more bike races!”

But this last IF-THEN relationship would have been correct only if you did something else before it. Often, IF-THEN relationships are rather IF-THEN-IF-THEN-IF-THEN logic chains, where all IF-THEN relationships have to be completed in order to reach one’s goal with the last IF-THEN link.

a. This mistake arises because we have not dealt with the situation thoroughly enough!

b. Or because we do not fulfil the prerequisites for one of the preceding and important IF-THEN relationships.

Maybe you meet many very important requirements to become a high jumper: high mental strength, strong jumping power, like to train jumping and have a good jumping feeling and timing for the complex movement. Only, like me, you are a broad stocky 5.75 ft. dwarf. Of course, as dwarves we can jump well by our standards, but we lose out to anyone who has half our diligence and similar jumping power, while being slimly built and perhaps even taller.

You have all the prerequisites for a successful high jumper: you are slim, 6.25 ft. tall and, apart from your age, you meet all the requirements to become successful in professional sport. If you want to start in this sport at the age of 30, you can become world champion in an age category, but it is too late for the ‘normal’ professional career. If success is also linked to money for you, then it is the wrong sport anyway.

Many also fail because they want to pursue a goal too late or too early, although good frustration tolerance learned early on can get you out of trouble.

Use of skills

Almost all of them fail not because of their intelligence or their abilities, but because of their use of them.

There are those who do not think twice and simply go into the forest with a blunt axe, without having a possibility to sharpen it on the spot.

And there are the others who make 101 plans about how and when they want to go into the forest. They also download the “When is the best time to cut the tree?” app on their cell phone! And when everything is prepared and the axe is sharpened twice, it’s evening ... and unfortunately too late to go into the forest. So tomorrow it’s all over again and maybe a little faster ...

The first manages to cut down a tree at some point and will have wood, albeit with ten times the effort. The second will prepare until the first has already cut down the whole forest.

Only when we test our skills in the right environment can we become better and also achieve satisfactory results for ourselves. So we should improve our swimming skills in the water and spend more time swimming than planning to swim.

It is frightening how often only action is talked about and implementation is almost completely forgotten. Some already know what could happen before they have tried it themselves. Especially in the area of approaching other people and explicitly dating, you can hear a lot of stories around it while observing NOT ACTING especially often.

Each of us can speak in their own way, so it’s all about using the skill. Especially in contact with people, action counts because the “true reaction” will change depending on when we address a person.

Often we discuss something for hours, although it could be done in 5 minutes!

Favorite topic

Some topics of conversation we bring up again and again. We endlessly discuss the same “favorite topics” and thus cause them to continually dominate our thoughts. What do you talk about again and again? What thoughts occupy you again and again?