How do you stay focused on your goals?

Grant Leboff: I’m interested to understand how people stay focused on their goals. What I mean by that is, in business terms you have a goal for the business, you may have other goals for health, for your personal life with your family, your friends, or other things. Can it be a case of, well I know what all the goals are, and I can draw out nine maps, but actually how can anyone focus on nine maps at once? They are all legitimate goals and they can all be in different areas of my life at the same time, so how does one maintain some sort of focus? How many goals are too many goals? When does it get silly? They may will be valid but how do you manage that?

Brian Mayne: Start with one map, that covers all of your life. I normally do this in the Christmas period just before the New Year starts, around about December 28th / 29th that sort of time. I’ve had Christmas, New Year hasn’t quite come yet, I’m going to take a couple of days out before I get back into work and I am going to create a goal map. I’m just thinking about all of the different areas of my life. I’m going to think about my work, my health and fitness, I’m going to think about family, I’m going to think about my own personal development and things that I want to do as an adventure and I’m going to capture all of those things on one map and from there on, I’m going to choose a life area like health and fitness. I’m going to create a map just on that one area and then, perhaps a month later, I’m going to choose another area like finances, and I’m going to create a map just about that. I’m then going to choose another area, maybe a work project, I’m going to create a map just about that.

You can have a lot of maps. I have about six maps on the go at the moment but all of them feedback into the one map, and in that way you can have a lot of maps and that’s fine, because each map is just taking you down into more detail. Each map is stimulating a new level of brain cell connection for all of your goals. Some of them are just simple actions that need to be taken, but you’re getting down into the detail.

For instance, I did a map in 2006 about being a global speaker. The first action in that was to write a new book and that warranted its own map and it took me three years to write the book. As I got towards the completion of the book, I did another map which was about the PR of the book, and then I did another map about distribution of the book. I didn’t go into a lot of detail because the mapping process helps you to get clear, but it all wants to be pointing back in. Where people get themselves into trouble is where they have two goals and they are not joined, and they want to do this and it’s taking them that way in their life, and they want to do this and it’s taking them that way and it’s pulling themselves apart.

Grant Leboff: In terms of the ritual of going over those goals and looking at those goals, if you’ve got, in your case, six maps on the go at one time, are you looking at all six every day? How does that work?

Brian Mayne:  My health and fitness map doesn’t change. It’s taking some exercise, taking the supplements, and balancing my diet, and those things don’t change. I look at it every so often so that I’m still keeping the brain cell connection commanding my self-conscious. The one I will look every day is my working goal map and I’ve got a working goal map about relocating my office to Copenhagen where I am moving to later this year, and there’s a lot of activity involved in that. That type of goal I need to update constantly, and so that goal map always sits next to my ‘to do’ list because if you extend out the detail of your goal map, it automatically becomes a task list. So I am adding new tasks all the time, I’m crossing off actions that I have taken, and the map’s alive. I need to look at that regularly, whereas another map around health and fitness, that’s not going to change much, so I look at that only occasionally

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