I talk a lot about goal setting and goal getting, and one of the best tools I’ve learned recently is called MTO – which stands for minimum, target, and outrageous.
Here’s an example: I have a goal to get to my ideal weight. One of the actions I know will help me achieve and maintain that goal is exercise. Here’s where MTO comes in:
M – Minimum activity.
If you were ready to go to bed and had not yet reached your goal, what is the minimum level of activity you are willing to commit to, no matter what? For the ideal weight goal, mine is 5 minutes. So I’m willing to absolutely commit to a minimum of 5 minutes of exercise daily – simple right?
Now 5 minutes may not seem like much, and it’s really not in the grand scheme of things. But it’s HUGE in terms of goal getting. Why? Because it allows me to have a success for the day, instead of feeling like a failure.
Instead of going a day without exercising, I do the minimal actions, and momentum gets started with that one little push. Often, I start exercising for 5 minutes and end up doing a little bit more, sometimes a lot more. But had the goal been 20 minutes, and I was tired, I probably wouldn’t have done anything. See the power in this?
T – Target activity.
This is the target, or ideal level of activity to achieve your goal. For instance, my daily target level is 20 minutes of cardio, or 30 minutes of basketball.
O – Outrageous activity.
This is the level of activity that would simply be outrageous and get me to my goal lightning-quick. My outrageous amount is an hour of exercise a day.
Now let’s look at my weekly MTO goals…
M – 2 days a week, T – 4 days a week, O – 6 days a week
I am so much more inspired to do my exercises now because I set achievable goals and gave myself permission to succeed on 3 different levels a day, and 3 different levels each week, instead of the all-or-nothing approach without flexibility (and setting myself up for failure).
Tell me if this rings a bell…In the past, I would work out like crazy for a week or two, looking for results. When I failed to see results, I’d stop working out because I didn’t want to keep feeling like a failure.
Then several months later, when I got tired of being overweight again, I’d do the same thing! It was a vicious cycle I created, and it wasn’t helping me at all.
Now, with the MTO concept, I’m on the right path. It’s so much easier to stay inspired to ACT everyday. And the more I succeed, the more I want to continue to succeed, so it’s now a positive cycle.
Apply this concept to all of your goals, and watch your results soar. In direct sales for instance, you can set daily and weekly MTO’s around phone calls, handing your business card out, etc – any ACTIVITY. (Make sure it’s an activity and not a result that you don’t control…I wrote about that one before…)
