How to achieve your fitness goals in 2020 using the Tony Robbins method. So, you made New Year’s Resolutions…but will you ACHIEVE them?? In this video, I give you the 5 Steps To Create Lasting Change so that YOU can BE SUCCESSFUL!

Happy new year! I hope you are as excited as I am about the 2020 competition season. I can’t wait to see what everybody’s up to this year. Hey, if we haven’t met yet, my name is Michelle Harris and I am a mindset stage prep and posing coach. So I want to know are you a maker of new year’s resolutions? Why is it so easy to write them out, get jazzed about it, and then a month later it’s like, “Oh well I tried but, but.” I know me too. I don’t know about you, but this year I really want to make some changes in my life to be a better version of me, and I needed a method to keep me motivated throughout the year.

So as I was doing my own planning for the new year, I was looking at some different frameworks from successful people and I really enjoyed and got a lot of value from a video I watched from Tony Robbins. And he talks about the five steps to creating lasting change in your life. So I’ve adapted these to fit our goals for competing and I want to share them with you now.

Number one is, have a compelling vision. Yes, yes and yes, if you don’t know what you’re aiming for, it’s pretty hard to know how you get there or when you get there. And you might think that your vision is for the show that you signed up for, whether it’s your first one or your fifth one, and that’s a good place to start. But I challenge you to look a little deeper at the characteristics that you want to embody to get you there.

Most of the resolutions we make are physical and I think that’s a big reason why it’s so hard to make them happen, is because we don’t focus on the emotional component that holds us back and that’s a huge focus for me this year. For example, let me share a few sentences from my compelling vision statement. “I am a strong, empowered woman who knows her worth. When opportunities knock, I open the door. I have the discipline it takes to reach my goals. I am a woman of my word. I finish what I start and do what I say I’m going to do. Even though it’s scary, I face my fears. When I feel my needs are not being met, I speak up for myself. When I have a desire or goal, I go after it. I am worthy of asking for and receiving all that I desire. I am constantly looking to increase fulfillment in my life.”

Wow! I want to be her. For me, this has a lot of emotional intensity. It makes me want to do whatever I can do to achieve this vision and just saying the words out loud has power. Maybe you can relate to some of them. Let me know in the comments. Feel free to use any of it for your own vision if it resonates with you. And this is just my personal area, I also have statements about relationships and wealth and abundance. You want to envision what you truly want and something that’s so exciting that it pulls you forward. So please make a vision statement that you can stand by and is meaningful to you.

Number two is to have strong enough reasons to follow through. Okay guys, it’s super awesome to have that compelling vision, the one that makes you feel excited and driven to reach it, but guess what? It’s time to dig deep again because you need to have strong enough reasons to follow through when the going gets tough, because it will. We tend to be on point with our goals until the roadblocks come up. I am strong and empowered. Hear me roar. Oh, wait, what? You said, “I can’t do this.” You said, “I don’t look as good as she does.” You said, “My opinion doesn’t count,” and then it all starts to fall apart. But we can stop ourselves right in our tracks. As Tony Robbins says, reasons come first, answers come second. And what he means by that is that to get the answer you’re looking for, in this case, fulfilling your vision, you need to have a strong enough reason to get there.

Now, you may have both positive and negative reasons. What does that mean? Think about this. Our brains respond to moving either toward pleasure or away from pain. So moving toward pleasure or a positive reason might be, “Wow, when I achieved my vision, I’m going to be full of energy and feel so good. I can speak up for myself and feel empowered and know that my opinion counts. My confidence is through the roof.” You can also be pulling away from pain by saying, “Dang, if I don’t follow my vision, I’m going to stay right where I am and I’m not happy. I feel sluggish, I feel unworthy of pursuing my goals. I’m going to believe everything my inner critic tells me and spiral into a bad place. This time next year, nothing will change.” So the point here is to make it dire enough that you don’t want to go there. I think it’s good to have a positive and a negative reason pulling you because oftentimes when one doesn’t work, the other one will.

Now, the best way to find your strong reasons to follow your compelling vision is knowing your why. And I’m sure you’ve all heard this, it’s not new, but it’s popular for a reason. If you actually get down to really knowing your why, it can make all the difference in your forward progress. Dean Graziosi is a well known author and motivational speaker who has a simple but powerful approach to getting the answer, and I’ll put the link, the description for you to his video.

So essentially you ask yourself why you want something, for example, why do you compete? Then write down your answer. Then ask of that answer, well, why is that important to you? You’re going to do this seven times, yes, a full seven. And you’re going to find that the first few answers are from your head and the last few comes from the heart. So when you find your real why, you’re going to have a very strong reason to follow through on your vision statement.

Number three is, review it and feel it every day. When you look at your vision statement every day, your brain starts to get trained to look for opportunities. Remember the last time you bought a car and all of a sudden you noticed all of that type of car on the road. They’re always there, but your brain didn’t notice until you made it a focus. So it’s the same concept here. When you bring your focus to your vision, your brain will start noticing ways to make it happen.

Now, the even more crucial part here is to feel that compelling vision, like I got a little tripped up a minute ago. You might be familiar with the studies that are done on athletes where they had the athlete run through their event in their head only and see it, every detail and feel it as if it was happening. Well, they monitored their brains with a functional MRI and they found out that when there’s a strong emotional component attached to visualizing something, the brain does not know the difference of whether it was real or not. God, this is powerful. It’s so powerful in fact that this is how people in situations and opportunities start materializing into your life to move you toward that vision.

So here’s the caveat. You have to look at this every day. Why? Because we’re creatures of habit. And pretty soon we stop looking at it, the focus gets blurry, we forget what we’re doing and we’re right back where we started.

Let me share a story with you. When I was prepping for a show back in 2014, I would go to the standup County every day for a month before the show. This was my fifth show and it was the one. I was going to get my pro card this time or die trying, and it was not an option. So I worked my hardest on this one, had a five month bulk and a five month cut. I never looked this good and I gave 110%. so when I was standing in that tanning bed, I would do my quarter turns, I would visualize moving on stage, hearing the audience cheering, the judges call outs. And then the best part, I would see them calling the competitors for fifth place, fourth place, third place… Excitement’s really busy building now, second place and then name was called for first place. And I got so into the feeling place of it that I brought myself to tears of joy several times. Talk about power. And yes, I did get my pro card that show and I feel certain that that piece of it was essential to my success.

Number four is, raise your standards. Okay, this one sounds a little harder, doesn’t it? But it’s not really. It’s partially about changing your identity. So let’s say for example, you’ve never competed before, so you might say, “I work out at the gym, but I don’t compete,” and that’s part of your identity. Now, when you make that decision to get on stage, hire a team, make a commitment to yourself and others, you can say, “I’m a competitor.” And just raised your standards because you just changed your identity. You changed from, “I work out at the gym,” to “I’m a competitor.” That feels different and good and like a stronger level. We need to make identity shifts in order to really get behind a vision because humans follow through with who they believe they are. Let me say that again. Humans follow through with who they believe they are.

Have you ever noticed that you kind of always had the same amount of money? There’s a certain belief that you have about saying how much you should have. And it might fluctuate, but will always come back and level out. When you have the belief that you’re a competitor and that is your identity, you will put in the necessary work without question because that’s who you are. Make sense? So using the first three steps is how you do it. Creating a compelling vision that you can attach to and feel daily, will start to shift your identity in a positive way. And once you see how things can be better, you have raised your standard, never going back.

Number five is, daily rituals. So one last step, and this one is crucial. You wrote down your compelling vision, maybe even have a vision board to lock it in and you’re making shifts in the way that you believe in yourself and how you define yourself, now you need a daily ritual. Why? Well, how many times have you had good intentions of changing something in your life and not done it? Or maybe your researched something to death only to never look at it again three days later? We’re all guilty. Having a ritual is what makes a habit and re wires your brain to achieve all the steps that we talked about today. And you already have rituals. You get up from the same side of the bed, you brush your teeth, you take a shower, eat breakfast, drive to work, you can fill in the rest. But more than likely, most of your days are very similar. So how can you tweak your morning and evening routines to make steps towards your goal?

Now, I know this can all sound like a lot of work, but you can do simple things that don’t take a lot of time but can have a big impact. So some of the things I have in mind, morning routine are waking up with gratitude. I lay in bed for about 10 minutes and I’m grateful for everything I can think of, from my body parts and my health, to my relationships, to my warm bed and my soft pillow. And then I add in some mirror work, which for me is looking in the mirror and repeating to myself, “I love and accept you exactly as you are,” 20 times. And sometimes I do it while I’m putting on my makeup on. So literally it takes three to four minutes. I eat breakfast and while I’m eating, I review my vision statement and I do my best to feel it.

And then I also meditate either in the morning or evening, whenever I can fit in the quiet time, but I make sure it happens. Would you guys be interested to see what my full morning and evening rituals are? If so, comment below and I’ll do a video on it.

So when you lock in the importance of your vision by including it in your daily rituals, you’re telling your brain, “Hey, this is part of my life now,” and you will start to notice positive changes in your life. Okay, let’s recap. The five steps for lasting change are, have a compelling vision, have strong enough reasons to follow through, review and feel it daily, raise your standards and daily rituals.

I hope this helps to inspire you to take some time to set you up for success. I’ve been doing my new rituals for my vision since the first of the year, so two weeks, and I’ve already seen some changes. I feel stronger within myself and I feel more connected to people. And yes, my old patterns and habits still come up daily, but I have some tools now to redirect myself into the direction that I want to go, and I can’t wait to see where I am in 365 days, so we’ll check in with each other.

Now, if you don’t mind sharing, please leave a comment about your vision and what rituals work for you. Smash that like button if you got some value from today, and please subscribe to my channel and hit the bell so you get all the new videos as they come out. Thanks for listening.