1 Powerful Strategy To Achieve All Your Goals

Unlock the secret to achieving your goals through small, sustainable changes with me, Linton Bergsen, on the Self-Realized, Shatter Your Limits Podcast. Ever wondered how you can transform your life without the stress of drastic overhauls? This episode holds the answer. 
By focusing on incremental adjustments, I reveal how a mere 1% change can lead to remarkable improvements in productivity and personal well-being. Using relatable examples like making dietary tweaks or altering relationship dynamics, I demonstrate how subtle shifts can bring about dramatic, long-lasting results without the risk of burnout.
I'll discuss strategies for setting realistic goals and staying present, even amid today’s digital distractions. As you dive deeper, discover the powerful impact of self-awareness and mindfulness on managing anxiety and fostering personal growth. 
Learn how to cultivate inner peace and maintain clarity in your life by consciously choosing to make small steps toward your objectives. Whether you're looking to enhance your relationships or find calm in the chaos, this episode offers insightful strategies to guide you on a journey to a more balanced and fulfilling existence.

https://www.selfrealized.com

Chapters

• 0:01 Introduction to the Self-Realized Podcast
• 6:29 Achieving Goals Through Incremental Changes
• 18:48 Achieving Peace Through Small Steps

Transcript

Linton Bergsen: 0:01

Welcome to the Self-Realized Podcast with Linton Bergsen, where you will shatter your limits. I am not much into the self-help industry as much as I'm into the self-realized individual, which is you, what matters most to you, how you get there and the obstacles that may be in your way. If you would like to be part of this podcast and part of that discussion, I welcome you here with an open heart, open mind and open arms. So, without further ado, let's get on with the podcast. I am extremely grateful to you today for joining me on episode number 84.

Linton Bergsen: 0:51

One powerful strategy to achieve all your goals. If you can harness this one strategy, it can save you a lot of time, a lot of energy and help your productivity. Sometimes you and I may make things more difficult than they actually are, put more pressure on ourselves than we actually need to, and that shouldn't be the objective of life. We should be able to enjoy what we're doing on any journey that we embark upon. If life is a chore, then it becomes a burden. If it becomes a burden, we burn out, and when we burn out, we become ineffective. My suggestion is to keep things simple and to keep them in a common sense perspective, so you can keep moving forward with energy and vitality towards the goals that you have set out to accomplish for yourself. One thing that you can master and understand in a very deep and profound way when you are looking at goals. There is one powerful strategy that you can begin to add into your productivity and your goal setting it only takes a small change to make a big difference in the outcome of what you're doing and trying to accomplish in your life. Do not burden yourself with thinking that you have to make all of these changes all at once and burden yourself with overload before you've even got started. Don't do that. Think on this and own it in the very cell-structure of your body and also in your mind. Simple, small changes make profound and big success. Simple, small changes make profound and big success. Think on that for a moment. If you begin working towards something and you decide that you're going to make a small change incrementally towards that goal, it becomes more palatable to you. Your mind can wrap itself around a small, incremental change easier than it can a large, catastrophic change. It goes into overload. It goes into that place of where do I start to begin to do this? And then you back out before you started. Let me give an example of that.

Linton Bergsen: 3:12

Let's say that you decide to change your diet and you want to improve your eating habits and lose some weight. You wouldn't immediately start from day one by cutting out everything that you enjoy to eat. You wouldn't make that catastrophic change. Some people do. They say from day one, I'm going to start cutting out all bread. I'm going to start cutting out all carbs, I'm only going to eat lean protein. I'm starting that from today. It's unrealistic. Goals have to be realistic. It's unrealistic, goals have to be realistic.

Linton Bergsen: 3:49

The way to start that effectively, to begin to manifest it as a reality, is to make a small change, a simple, small change that your mind and your body can accept as an incremental change in your habits. Your habits cannot be changed immediately in one big chunk. So what you might want to do is , when you start, for example, on the diet of eating less carbs if that's what you want to do, you may have a piece of toast in the morning. Well, you may not have that piece of toast, or you may only have half a piece of toast and you begin doing that on a regular basis. It's a small change to a bigger goal of trying, if you want to, to lose weight and cut out carbs. It is a small change, but it is also a psychological change where most of everything that we do in life occurs. If you can begin to cut out a slice of bread or half a slice of bread in the morning and you can begin to see some benefits, or at least feel psychologically beneficial, from the discipline that you've executed in making the change. It's not just the physical change of not eating the carbs, it's a psychological effect it has on you also, because a lot of what we do is psychological. It's the mind. It's overcoming the resistance the mind will put up to any type of physical change.

Linton Bergsen: 5:14

Sometimes we don't look at the changes we need to make in our life as a physical experience. First, you have to actually do something to have a change in your life, whether it is changing your diet or whether it is changing a relationship. There's a physical component to that and let me explain what I mean by that. If you want to change your diet and not eat as many carbs, then you physically don't go to the fridge or wherever it is that you may keep your carbs to get them. You stop. You don't go in that direction. For that moment you don't extend your hand when you know that's what you're reaching for and you physically decide let me reach for something else. We don't always think of it that way, but you have a mind, body, experience that you can utilize always to maximize the results you want. You stop reaching for what you used to reach for and you reach for something else. That is an incremental change. That is a small incremental difference, but what you're doing at the same time is training your mind to control your body and the actions it takes.

Linton Bergsen: 6:29

If you're trying to change a relationship, as I mentioned a moment ago, you may decide to physically not call that person. You have to physically not pick up the phone to call that person. So you're having an incremental change, small but effective, because if you don't pick up the phone to call the person, you're not going to connect with them. Therefore, by not reaching for the phone physically and calling them, you'll be in connection with them less and you can begin to change the relationship by not being in communication with an individual that you don't want to as much. It all comes down to awareness, the self-awareness of your physical actions, your mental ability to control your actions and doing it in small, incremental ways to start out with both examples I've given you in today's episode don't require much. It's just a small physical and mental change in you not to do actions and to stop the action with your mind the minute it becomes a thought that you want to execute.

Linton Bergsen: 7:40

Granted, we have an emotional content here as well. Sometimes there is an emotional connection to the foods that we're eating comfort food. There's emotional connection to the people that we may be trying to get away from. So now, again, we have to get into that emotional place within ourselves and make some small incremental changes within our emotional state. Not big changes, small incremental changes. And you do it little by little, one by one. For example, again, you may stop yourself reaching for the phone. That is a physical change that you are going to begin to make. But you have to make that physical change and that mental change not to do it. When you don't reach for the phone and call that person, there's going to be an emotional withdrawal. So you may not call that person for a day or an hour or two, where you would normally call them right away, but you may call them in the next day or the next two days. So, again, it's incremental. You are slowly but surely withdrawing emotionally because you are training your mind and your body to work in concert, incrementally, towards everything that you want to accomplish, and you understand that as you do it in a little way, in a small way, it eventually becomes a sustainable, longer, permanent change in your life.

Linton Bergsen: 9:15

Goals aren't difficult to set, but they are difficult to start, first of all, and then to keep. The strategy, the one powerful strategy to achieve all your goals that I'm giving you today is simply this in a nutshell you can make a 1% change to begin to get 99% of what you want done if done regularly and consistently. You look at 1% change over, let's say, 90 days, that is, three months consistently applied, you're well on your way to achieving 100% by small, incremental changes, sustained, if you did something small every day to accomplishing what it is you want. Now let's say it can take longer than that, because you may need to sustain that 1% change over a couple of days, three days, four days, maybe longer than that, to get the results that you're really looking for, because you're starting out small and building big. However, if you're able to measure it, then you can track it. So, as you begin to measure and track your goals by incremental, small changes, the one powerful strategy that you're going to have to achieve all your goals is measuring each incremental change and how you are sustaining those changes physically, as I've mentioned, emotionally and mentally and how those changes are affecting your life. You want to keep track of what you're doing because if you don't keep track of it, you can't measure it.

Linton Bergsen: 11:03

What I don't want you to do is fall into a trap that a lot of people I've worked with over the decades I've been working with people is beating yourself up about what it is that you are not accomplishing or not doing, because you know what that does. It gets into this place of anxiety, which is a great problem in today's society, this anxiety that we all have which leads to depression, anxious about how things are going to work out, anxious about finances, anxious about our relationships. This anxiety that we constantly feel is because we don't always know in life what the outcomes will be. We can never know what the outcomes can be in life, but we can, with one powerful strategy to achieve your goals, which is incrementally, begin to take charge in our life of what we can to affect the outcomes that we want from our life.

Linton Bergsen: 12:09

You will begin to find that as you go into this world and you begin to have an anxious feeling, but you begin to incrementally, slowly, slowly control what you can about how you feel about the situation. A lot of it is not having a sense of direction. When you feel anxious, you don't know how you're going to cope with what it is that's going on in your life. But just first of all, take a breath. That is an incremental change that can help your life. You practice that ongoing.

Linton Bergsen: 12:48

I mentioned it in different episodes. It's a small, incremental change. It's a powerful strategy that you could set out as a simple goal towards breathing more deeply, remaining calm much more often, enabling you to deal with situations in a much calmer way. There's a strategy there. There's a strategy towards you setting a goal which I would suggest that you do, which a lot of people overlook about how do I become calmer, how do I work with my anxiety, and you begin to make a goal for yourself about how you're going to manage anxiety, what it is that you're going to research and find out about it, about the different sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems that we have in our body and how they operate, which, again, I mentioned in different episodes. So it is a goal which, again, is a very important goal because it can be incrementally implemented for you to begin to work with.

Linton Bergsen: 13:52

As an example that I am currently using with remaining calm and dealing with anxiety in a more positive way, just begin to be aware of how you are breathing and make that one percent change on an ongoing basis, slowly but as you begin to become self-aware of your breathing, which again can be a small, powerful strategy that you are implementing to achieve your goal to become calmer. Just become aware of your breathing. That's a small shift in your consciousness and the way you're thinking. But if you begin to do that on an ongoing basis, it's the first step to a much bigger and profound state of being, because as you become aware of your breathing and what you are doing and how it's affecting you, you then take another small step and you begin to take deeper breaths, slow down your breath and watch your thoughts.

Linton Bergsen: 14:58

A lot of anxiety is mental, it's the what if.. so, when you begin to control the what if.. you can then begin to control the anxiety, you can then begin to control the fear. But if you take each one of those as an individual step, starting out, as I mentioned, with the breath, just becoming aware of how you're breathing. That is a very small step to a much bigger goal that will bring big results. So this 1% let's just take that as a 1% of what it is that you're trying to accomplish in becoming less anxious is going to enable you, through a little discipline and awareness, to access and activate different areas of yourself in mind, thought, body and spirit. Just by looking at your breath and your breathing. That will be automatically triggered by just looking at that, following your breath, being self-aware of what it is that you are thinking and when you have that thought, how it changes your breath, and then the anxiety that follows from those two things my thought and my breath. You can do that, anybody can do that, but you have to be willing and again, disciplined to mentally, psychologically, to want to become that self-aware. That's a very small change, a 1% change what I think, how I breathe, which will lead you to bigger things. It's giving you a slight edge that most people don't contemplate or think about, how you can break things down in a small way for bigger results, because you will find that when you begin to make small incremental changes and use that as a powerful strategy, it creates a domino effect as to everything that cascades after that.

Linton Bergsen: 16:57

You really don't have to begin to do that much after that 1% shift if you stick with it, because it does allow other things to begin to happen in your life almost on automatic pilot. That's what most people don't realize. That's the beauty of this one powerful strategy to achieve all your goals. Another example would be let's say you wrote down one or two things that are really important to you in your life to accomplish that would make the biggest difference. That's just one or two things, right, and you begin to focus on those and use this one powerful strategy incrementally to begin to bring them about in your life. You will find that when you begin to work and execute goals on those one or two things that you've got on your list there, they will automatically lead to other things. And that's how things unfold, because life is an unfoldment, but it begins with a very small step. If you want to climb Mount Everest, you begin with the first step and as you begin to climb the mountain, the vista changes the further up you go, but you take breaks. You take one step at a time. It leads to other things. View life this way. If you decide to make incremental changes, slowly but deliberately and monitor them, you begin to affect your life in a more manageable way stress-wise as well, because it's not overwhelming, and if you reduce your stress, you reduce your anxiety.

Linton Bergsen: 18:48

It's all about working with things in a realistic capacity within yourself as to what you can actually manage within your own personality and who you are, which is part of your personal development. So you understand who you are and what you can deal with and what you can cope with on an ongoing basis. Anxiety is a lot about what if. It's fear-based. And the thing to understand and really get a hold of is that if you can really begin, just slowly begin to work with your mind and your breath and your thoughts, you will find anxiety as you begin to monitor slowly what it is you're thinking and how you're acting. As I mentioned earlier with reaching for the phone, because the people you associate with can make you anxious. Social media can make you anxious. Don't turn on the television. A lot of people get a lot of information now from social media, tiktok, Youtube, whatever it is you're involved in.

Linton Bergsen: 20:03

Just don't reach for that mouse or lift the lid of that laptop. You are consciously aware of your physical movements, your mental capacity that's activating those movements. Again as an example, l et's say you decide one day that you are looking at your computer, your laptop if that's what you use and instead of mentally which is almost an addictive habit opening the lid of the laptop or turning on the computer, you just don't. You just don't reach out. You keep your arms in and you place them on your lap. You haven't made a physical move outward yet. And then you just for a moment, close your eyes, take a breath, slow down your thoughts and just be at peace with yourself. Let everything go, don't worry about anything. Just for 30 seconds. It's going to be there when you have come out of this little respite that you've taken for yourself. 30 seconds, a minute isn't going to change your life as to what's going to be there when you open your eyes and come back to the world. Just give yourself that time. Just practice this for a moment. Just don't open that laptop, don't reach for that phone, don't turn on that computer, don't make that phone call.

Linton Bergsen: 21:36

A lot of your anxiety, your unhappiness, your depression is all the outside noise that you are allowing to enter into you, because inside of you, as a self-realized, spiritually aware being, is an oasis of peace. It is ruffled and disturbed by constant outward noise, nonsense, provocation, opinion, a lot of things that you take on and absorb. It is messing you up. It is creating you to be unhappy. What I'm offering you is an opportunity and you know this intuitively, I'm sure to step away from the norm, step away from what other people are doing. I know social media is important. I know that we interact a lot now through technology. Of course we do. But when technology is running you and creating anxiety and stress within you, and how many likes or likes you don't get, or who said what, or what video did what, or what your friends are saying, you are now constantly on that hamster wheel of not allowing yourself to have peace.

Linton Bergsen: 22:50

Take 1% of your day, take one moment for 30 seconds or a minute. Begin to do it regularly. Use the one powerful strategy to achieve your goal of being more calm, and I suggest that's a goal that you set for yourself and make it a priority. Just take that incremental, small stop of just not reaching out. Breathe, stop for a moment and then go about your social media. Doesn't take much. 30 seconds to a minute.

Linton Bergsen: 23:25

You might find that 30 seconds to a minute, how you feel about yourself and not reaching out immediately makes you want to do two minutes, three minutes and then you'll have the domino effect of how that makes you feel as a self-realized individual, and the spiritual component of that is why you feel peaceful for no reason at all, and why does this anxiety that you used to have begin to dissipate and disappear? You don't need a logical reason for that. You just need to know what works, which is just a little bit of self-discipline. Don't reach out before you've reached in. Do it, start it. It's an incremental beginning to a major change in your life.

Linton Bergsen: 24:15

Use that one powerful strategy to begin a goal of calmness, removing anxiety, which is very, very important. It's very big in today's world and once you find out that you remove the anxiety and you remove a large amount of your stress, using the one powerful strategy of start small and then go big, you'll begin to find that the results that you get and the revelations that you have come from a place that you couldn't imagine before, because where it's coming from is a place of centered understanding about what is best for you and how you're going to go about it. You know, and I know, that when you make calm, thoughtful decisions, as stress-free as possible, and you are able to work with them intelligently, with a common-sense perspective, you have in life a more balanced outlook, a more balanced perspective, and your health and your well-being improve. A self-realized individual which you are works on that awareness of peace, calm and centeredness as their primary goal. I strongly suggest that you begin to use the one powerful strategy to achieve all your goals, which is basically just do something small. Don't bite off more than you can chew. Go small to go big. If you do that, you'll find that your life is much more manageable in so many different ways that you will wonder why you didn't do it earlier or what it was you were thinking by doing anything else.

Linton Bergsen: 26:07

I sincerely appreciate you listening to the podcast. Please subscribe so you do not miss any upcoming episodes. Whatever platform you're on, please leave a rating and review. I would greatly appreciate it. Any additional information on me, Linton Bergsen and my five-star reviewed book Purposeful Vision is available at selfrealized. com which is all one word. You can also leave any comments or suggestions on the website. I look forward to connecting with you very soon and take good care of yourself.