Today’s episode of 101 things I wish my dad taught me. “Goals are stepping stones to accomplishments in the direction of your purpose.” Is bought to you by the third universal law of nature, “Abundance,” nothing is ever missing just changes in form.

Every day you achieve something. Everyday you move in a direction. Everyday you face a stress and deal with it. Everyday you spend time focussed on doing things. Eating, sleeping, watching tv, walking, talking, thinking, loving, working, smiling, pooping, sexing, texting, and caring. Everything adds up. All of your doing, everyday, adds up to your destiny.

If you handle stress badly, reactionary, you end up somewhere. If you think life balance is family holidays, you end up somewhere. And this is an important awareness. Somewhere, where ever it is you end up, is because of the millions of tiny choices you made along the way.

When you say “I want a new car” but you don’t action that in a savings plan, or an increase in salary plan, or a budget plan, you might end up without the car, or with a car you can’t afford. Or, worse, with golden handcuffs, working to pay off something you don’t really need. That would be the worst result. Like working to pay for a family life they don’t really need.

From this you can see that your choices are pretty important. And equally it is important for you to know where you are going. Getting those two lined up, is critical to life.

My Dad held me accountable. From the get go, if I said I wanted to be the captain of the Australian Cricket team and the best wicket keeper in the world, which I did until my blindness stopped the illusion, I was forced, not really forced, but encouraged to practice for hours throwing and catching the cricket ball off a special wall. I was captain of many cricket teams until the quality of the game and my poor eye sight meant that the increasing speed of the ball was beyond my capacity. When the game decided I was no longer in the first 11, I reluctantly resigned and Dad immediately asked, “so what’s your new dream?” He knew, a person without goals was a danger to themselves and others.

People don’t set goals because it feels better to for them to go with the flow. They roughly know the direction they wish to go, and so, nothing is missing, they really do have goals, just not hard fixed goals. And this is interesting. Why can’t goals be changed? Hard fixed goals sounds almost prison like and life is definitely not a prison.

I hire a physio to set my weekly body management program. I hire a doctor to set my monthly health regime. I hire a sports trainer to set my training program for the month and I hire a financial controller to set my budget for the month. I hire a bookkeeper to set my monthly tax planning programme and I hire a master in helping me set life goals. I hire a web branding person to set my social media programme and I hire a dietician to set my daily regime on nutrition. Accountability for me is not always self imposed. I don’t claim to be a guru in all those things, but I do know where I’m going. I know my longer term goals and I’ve learnt the error of training under my own instruction to achieve a goal. Very self limiting.

Setting goals is not chipping stuff in stone. However it is life by design. What we know about this, and what I do have mastery in is to know that centralisation is the key to happiness.

A purpose as the core and highest principle makes all stress resolved in a good way. Seven visions that lead to purpose is vital to order the mind and prevent that one eye view of the world that we all end up regretting, the sacrificial visioning that brings pain. 3 goals in each of the seven visions so that the vision, which can be long term, can be chunked down into bite size annual or monthly targets. But then comes the hard part. Daily action.

Daily action are the stepping stones to vision, goals, targets and purpose. When daily actions align with visions, you are considered to be a success. Sadly, most people do not align how they think, with what they think, with what they do, to what they feel to how they behave and then it’s like having seven horses each tied to a limb pulling in opposite directions. That’s called anxiety, disappointment, depression, exhaustion and ageing.

The key is planning. The plan.

Now it’s very important to realise that disorganised knowledge leads to confusion. So the key to planning is not so much how much you know about the future or how clever your vision is written but more, it is about how organised that knowledge is into a lineage. For those who are reading this there is a graphic below demonstrating how your vision inspiration and purpose, VIP, is best organised. This total organisation compresses into a single page and must be visible on one page.

Every time one of your actions is driven by a choice that is driven by a goal that is driven by an affirmation, that is driven by a visualisation, that aligns with a vision that aligns with a purpose, you begin manifesting exactly what you want. Whether it is to be a global musician or own your own business it is this process that leads you to wards your destiny where free will and divine will are one.

unfortunately most people desire things but their actions do not align with that desire and therefore they have low self-worth. When our self-worth is low we are filled with emotion and emotion is in simple language the devil. The mind that is not organised in VIP is the playground of the devil and then we start the rough and tumble process of thinking that the more angry or disappointed we are with something or someone the more likely it is that they will change all that we will get happy. We also become addicted to substitute because reality is not providing what it was intended to do and that is a lineage between action and purpose.

there are many people who implement this process without the sophistication of the diagram above. They simply understand that life has a purpose to it, they work to achieve that purpose, and they don’t act or behave in ways that might sabotage it. My dad was one of these people. He had never read about this material. However my dad did study sales, and was very invested in being good at it because he wanted to own his own car yard and sell cars and therefore sales training was a big part of his purpose and destiny. In all old fashion sales training programs goal setting and clarity of vision was primary. I remember going through his sales training manuals, so old that they were actually printed on paper, and seeing these questions about goals and achievement that he had to fill-in annually, monthly, weekly and daily. The format was incredibly cumbersome but dad filled them out every single day because he wanted to be a great salesman.

there is a great story that I would like to share with you. After I sold my engineering business I set up an office in Artarmon in Sydney. That office was the beginning of my consulting business and helped me migrate away from the engineering business. While I was there there was a community around the coffee machine. There were about 40 service offices and therefore 40 different businesses functioning out of this centre. One of these businesses run workshops and sold life planning manuals. I bought one and started working on it. There was a two day workshop involved where motivation was delivered in spades and then there was the manual that you bought these pages to fill-in every day. To say that my life at this point in time was disorganised was an understatement, but with this hand delivered manual, and writing down my daily weekly goals, my steppingstones, suddenly all the emotion and all the drama and all the turmoil of my life evaporated. Not only that I became much clearer on what I wanted to achieve and started moving in that direction with what I thought was incredible luck.

and investor in this business of life planning manuals was a man I fell in love with as a mentor. We were standing at the coffee machine and I introduced myself and he to me. His name was Walter. I had no idea at the time that he was quite famous in the world of speaking in Australia. When I expressed my vision of becoming a professional speaker Walter said would you like to come to my speaking engagements and I will train you. It was the most generous offer I could imagine. But Walter did not make this offer naïvely. He had noticed that I was using one of the life planning manuals and therefore had invested in myself, he had realised that I was committed to this vision, and on that basis, he had invested in me. Nobody does to you more than you do to yourself.

Walter was very old school. His audiences loved him. At each one of his presentations that I attended she got me to stand up and present 5 to 10 minutes of something that he had asked me to prepare. I stumbled through these presentations but he created such empathy in the audience that they gave me space to fail. I was really hard on myself because I practised and trained for each 5 to 10 minute segment and never really got the words out of my mouth the way I thought they would come. The Walter was really strict about how I approached the debrief. He didn’t use these exact words but what he said was “if you don’t appreciate what you’ve got you will lose it.” And he also was very strict about complimenting yourself. In different words he was saying “if you don’t appreciate it the way that you’ve got it you won’t get it the way that you want it.”

I never really found out much about Walter. He was loved and appreciated by both professional speakers around Australia and the clients that we delivered presentations to. I met his beautiful wife at his country property. What I knew about Walter is that he loved sharing and caring for people as a professional speaker and people knew that. He knew a lot about his topic and people knew that. He was very similar off stage as he was on stage, generous, kind, appreciative and in that way a great leader. After two years I moved on from the office and started with my own consulting firm. My consulting firm was not based on my speaking career but moreover based on business turnaround. After a few years in that consulting business and having built it up to a multi million turnaround business, I sold it because it was not taking me in the direction of my vision, the vision that Walter had helped me start. Once again I started my career from zero. But the clients that we had for consulting also ran Company retreats and so I had an existing client base to simply migrate them across to my real passion. And with that I began my professional speaking career after 500 free speeches. That was the number Walter said I needed to do before I charged for one.

there is a beautiful ending to this story that five or six years later I was asked to open a major event in Brisbane. I stood up in front of that very warm and friendly crowd and spoke about vision inspiration and purpose. One of the stories I told, and loved to tell, when I spoke about this topic was about the support and love of Walter. The amazing thing was that Walter was in the audience. I didn’t know he was there. At the end of my presentation there is always somebody asked to come up on stage and present a token of appreciation from the audience and somehow Walter step forward and became that person. Walter told a story about how, five years ago, when I first met him he was flying high with his speaking but that in the meantime his wife had passed away and he had lost his drive. He declared before the audience that the speech by me, talking about vision inspiration and purpose, had awakened him to his own possibilities, re-engaged him, made him realise that he was wallowing in the past and he was re-committing himself to his speaking and training programs throughout the world. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house. Including me. It is so beautiful when you follow your purpose and your actions are true to that purpose. Everything seems to connect. What the audience didn’t know was the amount of things that I had said no to, the number of relationships that had come and gone, the kidney stone that I had removed and the heavy metal poisoning that I had had to deal with from my past engineering business. It really looks from the outside when you live your purpose that you are sailing on a high connecting the dots but that is not as simple as it is.

Walter knew that too. But when you have a link between your actions on a daily basis and your purpose these speed bumps do not represent anything else but a challenge to your commitment to be true to yourself and your purpose. For me the idea of daily behaviour that links to my purpose, through the steppingstones of my goals, aligned with my vision, prioritised with my values, is the only thing that makes sense. The pursuit of pleasure leads nowhere, the enhancement of our ego is incredibly short-term and has no resilience built into it. Everything happens for a reason even a kidney stone or a broken relationship happens for a great reason and that is to put you back on track on purpose. That is why steppingstones, goals, broken down into daily actions are truthfully the only authentic way to bring your body, mind and spirit into alignment for the purpose of happiness in this life, in this very short life.

That is the end of this episode. Thank you Walter Dickmann RIP

With Spirit

Chris