North Star Thinking: Master your mindset and live a life you love
Will Polston is a business strategist and performance coach who works with ambitious people, transforming their lives by empowering them to master their mindset, productivity, and efficiency. Using a combination of techniques across multiple disciplines, Will provides people with an insight into their behaviour and proven strategies that can transform their lives.
North Star Thinking looks to transform the way you approach work and life. Its innovative approach equips you with a comprehensive set of tools and methodologies, enabling you to reshape your thought processes and behaviours. By mastering your mindset and enhancing productivity, you’ll be empowered to craft your own guiding North Star for ultimate success.
Here is an excerpt from North Star Thinking: Master your mindset and live a life you love by Will Polston.
Goals. As you read this word, what is the first thing you think of? Striving for and achieving any goal on your North Star trajectory is about changing one thing – the way you feel – for the better.
I want to tell you about my ultimate success formula. If you apply this while working towards your goals, it will give you the best chance of success:
- Identify your goal and gain absolute clarity on it by knowing the reasons why you want it.
- Take intelligent action towards achieving it.
- Identify the results you are getting by regularly comparing where you started, where you are now and where you want to be.
- Tweak and refine the approach to advance continually.
- Hold yourself actively accountable by celebrating small wins and big wins when you achieve your goal. Let people know your goals so they can help to hold you accountable.
SMARTPP principle
When you’re setting goals, I recommend you use the SMARTPP principle. It is in fact the way to structure your goals on your North Star trajectory.
You may well have heard of SMART – specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-framed – goals already. I have added a couple of Ps: present tense and positively phrased.
Let’s look at each point in turn:
- Specific. What exactly do you want to achieve? The more specific your description, the greater the chance you’ll get exactly that. For example, write, ‘I am making £10,000 a month’ rather than ‘I want to make more money’.
- Measurable. Make your goal measurable by identifying clearly and specifically whether you have achieved or not. For example, write, ‘I am weighing 78kg’ rather than ‘I have lost weight’.
- Achievable. Is your goal humanly possible? Do you believe it is possible within the timeframe you set?
- Relevant. Is the goal relevant for you? Is it aligned with your North Star and your values? Does it get you closer to your current priorities?
- Time-framed. Deadlines make most people switch to action, so install them and work to them. Keep the timeframe realistic; that way you can maintain high morale.
- Present tense. If you prefix your goal with ‘I am’, then you embody achieving that goal as part of your identity, and your identity is the strongest form of belief. Expressing an action in the present tense makes it something you are already doing.
- Positively phrased. Don’t picture a pink elephant – you’re now thinking of it aren’t you, despite me telling you not to?! Language is a powerful tool. Our minds don’t process negatives such as ‘don’t’, ‘won’t’, ‘can’t’ etc. Stick with positive phraseology when you’re describing your goal: ‘I am no longer driving my Ford Focus’ has lots of options it creates in the brain – from getting a bus or walking to having a motorbike or driving a lorry, and so on.
None of which are what is desired in this instance. However, ‘I am owning and driving a one-year-old black Tesla Model S Performance’ is very much positively phrased.
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