I had just left Thomas Nelson at that point and launched into this entrepreneurial online world and so I just I reconnected with that and emotionally re-engaged with it.Īnd I think that’s a huge reason for why people lose momentum or lose energy after the first of the year when they set a resolution but they’ve not set a goal and they’ve not identified what’s at stake that’s critical.Rebecca never felt safe as a child. This is gonna set me up for success in my new career”. I’m not going to be able to help thousands of people who are eager to build a platform but have no idea where to start. If I don’t do this book, then I’m not gonna get the kind of speaking platform I want to get to go to the next level in my career. It’s not the right time.īut then I looked at the goal and thankfully I had written down what I call my key motivations, what was at stake, and I really realized, again I saw this when I set the goal, but I lost it in the messy middle but I went back to the beginning and I said, “Wait a second. I just, I thought I’ll just give the money back to the publisher. I hastily threw together the first draft of it and I was really unhappy with it and I didn’t want to turn it into the publisher I didn’t feel great about it and I almost gave up. I was busy with a lot of different things and the manuscript was due in November. So a few years ago when I was writing my book platform you noticed that a noisy world which you mentioned in the introduction I had a very busy fall season and I was speaking a lot, I was out instead of writing. So one of the things I encourage people to do in the course and in my coaching is to get absolutely clear on what’s at stake, what will you achieve if you accomplish the goal and what will be lost if you don’t accomplish the goal. You know maybe it’s important to their spouse or important to their boss or important to their investors or somebody else and so there’s an extrinsic we call it motivation, an external motivation but they’ve never come to grips with why it’s important internally. So writing it down is a huge leg up in terms of accomplishing your goals but a lot of people even if they get clear, they don’t unidentified lying motivations as to why that goal is important for them.
There’s something about writing a goal down that makes you get clearer on it so that you’re actually making good on the intention and getting clear on it. Gail Matthews at the Dominican University in California who did a research project and she was setting goal setting and so she had a control group of about 300 people that set written goals and compared that to a group that said they had goals but didn’t write them down.Īnd what she discovered was that you have a 42% greater probability of achieving your goals merely by the act of writing them down.
Many people say they have goals but they’ve never actually written them down. They live just outside Nashville, Tennessee. They have five daughters, three sons-in-law, and eight grandchildren. Michael has been married to his wife, Gail, for forty years. His work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Inc., Fast Company, Businessweek, Entrepreneur, and other publications.
Recently, Forbes magazine named him one of “Top 10 Online Marketing Experts to Follow” and one of the “Top 50 Social Media Influencers.įormerly chairman and CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, Michael is also a New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestselling author of several books, including Your Best Year Ever, Living Forward, and Platform. He has readers in more than two hundred countries. His blog,, is ranked by Google in the top one-half percent of all blogs with more than one million page views a month.
He is also an expert in the field of social media. 5000 list as one of America’s fastest growing companies. In 20, Michael Hyatt & Company was featured on the Inc. Michael and his team help overwhelmed high achievers win at work, succeed at life, and lead with confidence. Michael Hyatt is the founder and CEO of Michael Hyatt & Company, a leadership development firm specializing in transformative live events, workshops, and digital and physical planning tools.