Conquer your goals in 2022 and mindfully master your headspace by following these easy-to-implement steps.
“Wherever you go, go with all your heart.” – Confucius
Take a deep breath and instill this maxim in your core. The stress of this pandemic-filled few years has just compounded the chronic stress most people were already under. So to make 2022 something different — promising, exciting, successful — begin by changing the one thing you can control: the fabric of your mental landscape.
Conquer your goals – but first your mental landscape
Various philosophical and spiritual frameworks — stoicism, jainism, buddhism, gnosticism, and others — instruct us to ignore what is outside of our control, and focus fully on where our power lies. This is the whole of the fabric our minds.
Your mind isn’t just what you knowingly think, decide, and do. It’s all the deep, often unknown to you, activity happening behind-the-scenes. This is the purview of your subconscious, and this above all else predicates the majority of your mental activity.
This subconscious domain is comprised of your beliefs (many downloaded from society, environment, and family) and core values (again, many are inherited). These give rise to the background “noise” in your head that doesn’t often agree with the conscious “you.” The thoughts floating around when you’re not paying attention, the moods you feel without cause or reason, and the decisions you make in a split-second.
When you start paying attention to all of this, you can begin to declutter and slowly, methodically realign the “noise” to be harmonious — like a symphony of support. When the stoics and zen teachers say take charge of what’s inside you, this is what they mean. Go deep — to these levels of subconscious. Once the subconscious is on the same page as “you” (the person you identify with/ want to be), then you’ll enter states of power strong enough to influence the world around you.
Think about that again. By readjusting your focus onto the one area where your power actually resides now (in reorganizing the fabric of your internal landscape), you will grow your power in your life and the world.
Now if that sounds good, keep reading for the five shifts to make to mindfully master your headspace, conquer your goals in 2022, and become your most powerful self yet.
Five Shifts to Conquer your goals in 2022
Step #1 – Critically Inventory Your Internet Intake and Minimize These 3 Categories:
How you use the internet — what you read, watch, engage in, and what communities are influencing you — are going to shape your subconscious. Everything you take in are sets of sensory inputs designed, often intentionally, to hijack your emotional responses. They mesh together to form that ever-present internal landscape — either the noise or symphony in your head.
Unfortunately, the online world where we ‘live’ much of our lives is more conducive to cacophony and discord. Because platforms and websites derive their income from keeping you on longer, they are engineered to specifically induce specific feelings, and thereby not only affect subconscious but also dangerously alter your physiological biochemistry.
So there’s a lot at stake. It’s not just harmless internet surfing. Be skilled in your inventory. What sites / how are you spending your online time? Figure out which ones fall into these three buckets and reduce and eliminate:
(1) Junk info clickbait – designed to trigger a quick dopamine hit for supposed novelty/newness – usually very unsatisfying, little novelty is delivered.
(2) Anger/outrage scenarios – be wary of group think (even if it feels justified); will send cortisol flying off the charts putting you into an acute stress state. This is for stuff you can’t control (hello stoics) and will make you despair for humanity (not helpful).
(3) Envy inducers – stealth serotonin stealing – usually related to people you don’t know or never see. Why give them real-estate in your head? Impacts your confidence, self-worth, long-term wellbeing, and much of it is fabricated/ staged/ altered.
Be ruthless in your assessment. Identify your sources for the above and cut them out. They will marginalize you into powerlessness and invade your headspace like invisible puppet masters.
If you’re wondering how this helps you conquer your goals — you can’t focus on what you want to achieve, let alone take action steps to get there, if you’re in a haze of discord and noise. That’s why you prune out the unhelpful first.
Step #2 to Conquer Your Goals: Get Quiet — Marie Kondo mental clutter
Ever since Marie Kondo swept the world with her material minimalism how-to a few years ago, many of us became conscious of what we own, buy, and consume from a “stuff” standpoint. The growing climate crisis is an even greater impetus for conscientious buying and minimalism.
But we are nowhere near as conscientious with our mental clutter. We just let it float around in our heads all day, doing whatever it wants, without cleaning it up. It’s like taking a mental bath in dirt. The residue of the dirt/ clutter is going to stick to all your other mental activities.
This makes you slower, exhausted, ineffective.
Get observant, and be okay in quiet. Your head shouldn’t be a hamster wheel of thoughts.
Marie Kondo’s method for material clutter is simple — 1) Do you use it? 2) Does it bring you joy? We can replicate this with our mental clutter.
Anytime an unbidden, especially negative thought pops up, ask yourself those questions. If the answer isn’t yes, then make a point to throw it away.
Step #3 to Conquer Your Goals: Get Intentionally Specific
Check out our Five Step Goal Map here that will help you with all the levels of specificity and detail you need.
On a macro level, think about it like this — if you don’t know your destination, how do you know when you get there? We plug in physical locations into google maps every day. Why? So we know when to turn, what to pass, and what the destination is. Yet, we don’t practice this our goals. They’re just fluffy and fuzzy, and “I’ll know it when I see it,” ambiguous blobs.
It’s hard to achieve an ambiguous blob though, right? You need to know what your endgame is in order to know when you got there. What does “it” look like? Turn the “it” into the future you that’s achieving it. What do you look, feel, think like when you achieve it?
Go through a sensory exercise of yourself there, look around you, look inside you. Boom — now you really know what you want and what it feels like. This has a double boost affect by influencing your subconscious positively (the antithesis of all that low-value internet intake). Remember, this behind-the-scenes mind pays attention to everything. It’s paying attention to this sensory picture of you achieving your goal that you just created. Now it can support you.
Step #4 – Start Simple and Small (Rule of Three) or Risk Overwhelm and Stalemate
I recommend the Rule of Three:
Set goals for yourself for the next 3 months (a year can feel too expansive and you’ll imagine you have plenty of time, but 3 months is concrete).
This major step is going to free you to take action. This will get you out of the planning stage and into the creating momentum stage. It will also stop the overwhelm in its tracks so you’re not in self-induced checkmate.
Step #5 to Conquer Your Goals in 2022 – Concrete Action Wins the Day
The path to your goals is a day-by-day journey. Take action every single day. In a clean notebook, write down your 3 goals for the next 3 months. Use simple language; be positive and clear.
Now each day, take one small step to help you achieve each one. So our Rule of 3, just got a third.
3 goals for 3 months with 3 daily concrete action steps (one per goal).
Now these action steps will change as you make progress so the best (most fluid way) to do this is to review your goals each evening and jot down the 3 steps (again one per goal) you will take the next day.
(a) Each step should have a reasonable time commitment (short and simple is usually a winner, but depends on the goal and how it relates to your life). I recommend 15 minutes max at first especially if you’re building a new habit.
(b) Make sure you phrase your action step in a fun way: “I get to listen to my favorite playlist as I run for 15 minutes tomorrow.” This primes you with the helpful emotions and mindset.
(c) Check off, star, “good job” yourself for the day before in writing. It’s important to acknowledge mini victories. This will only take a minute. One sentence or less to celebrate yesterday, just like one sentence to plan for tomorrow.
That’s it — your 3 x 3 x 3 Rule Roadmap!
Your takeaways on keys to conquer your goals in 2022
#1 – Mindfully inventory your intakes and subconscious noise to master your mental landscape (a la all the great philosophies above)
Remember this is what you can actually control. Before you can focus on what’s going to come next, you must take stock of what’s flying into your head (especially from the internet) and floating around in your subconscious all day. Otherwise it’ll drain you, demoralize you, and defeat you with chaos before you can even get started.
#2 – Get clear and take daily concrete action
You need to get out of planning mode and into execution mode. To do that, you need absolute clarity. You need to paint the sensory picture. You also need to take daily action steps. Otherwise, it’s pretty easy to fool yourself into thinking you’re acting towards your goals, when you’re really just thinking (i.e. planning) them endlessly.
Conquer your goals by Creating momentum with practice
Remember, these are all easy-to-implement steps to conquer your goals in 2022 when you actually implement them.
The problem with a lot of us these days is that we are information collectors, but we don’t take action. We find something (perhaps this article) that inspires us and guides us on what to do, but we don’t follow through. Instead, we just keep collecting more information because it feeds the dopamine.
But this year, if you find something promising — don’t search for more — first, put it into action. Take the time to do your internet inventory. Write it down. If you try to hold it in your head, it’ll just add more clutter. Prune out what doesn’t work. Be clear about what you want. Write down your 3 x 3 x 3.
That’s your path to crushing it and succeeding! And while the effort is a must, you don’t have to think about the “how” — this is is your guide to that part. If you follow this, you’ll definitely realize your dreams instead of just dreaming them in the abstract.
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