[00:00] Every morning when I woke up in college, I had one goal. It was crystal clear. I could see it. I’ve seen others do it. And so I knew exactly what I was chasing every single day. It was to get onto the podium at the national championships. If you don’t have that kind of clarity in your life, then you’re not optimizing your time, your energy, or your money.

[00:23] Welcome to another episode of Successful. Minded man, real talk on harnessing your athletic drive for clarity, consistency, and focus in business and life. This is your host, Jim Harshaw, Jr. And today we’re talking about clarity. Why all success starts and ends with clarity and clarity. You know, I had that kind of clarity when I was competing.

[00:46] And so did you, right? If you competed in sports in high school and college, or maybe you like to do Spartan races or run 5Ks or marathons or whatever it might be in your life now, maybe you lift and you have certain goals you’re trying to hit with your bench press or your squat, like you get this, you get it when you have that kind of clarity.

[01:06] You can achieve amazing things. Like when I had that kind of clarity, I could do things that very few college aged humans anywhere would be willing to do, let alone be excited to do. You know, I’d wake up early, I would stay late, I would, you know, push myself through just absurd workouts. And these are outside of the regular just college wrestling workouts that we would do.

[01:30] You know, Said many times on this podcast, how at one point I lost 22 pounds in two and a half days to make weight. I was, uh, I should have been hospitalized probably, but, but I did it willingly on my own volition. My coaches really didn’t even know it. Cause you never tell your coach when you’re that much overweight as a wrestler.

[01:47] So you just don’t tell them, you know, cause they’ll like, they’ll be mad at you. And you’ll have to deal with that repercussion, let alone have it actually lose the weight. So, you know, didn’t even tell my coach, I’m just dealing with this and did it on my own. Where does that come from? Like, where does that kind of drive come from, that kind of ability to do hard things, where does it come from?

[02:07] It comes from clarity. It comes from clarity in your purpose, clarity in your mission, clarity in your goal. And if you don’t have that in your life, you are not bringing your best self to the world. For your career, you’re not making the kind of money that you could be making. You don’t have the business that you could have.

[02:27] You’re not optimizing your health and how you feel, right? Mentally and physically. You’re not bringing the best version of you to your marriage or to your relationship with your kids. That kind of clarity, when you have the kind of clarity that athletes have, it unlocks you. Think about Tom Brady. Think about LeBron James.

[02:47] They know exactly what the goal is, right? It’s to win the championship. There are also sub goals, of course, below that. You know, win the next game or rehab a certain injury or develop a certain skill or learn a new play or whatever it might be like, there’s these sub sub goals under that we call these micro goals that lead you to the larger, the bigger goal of winning the championship.

[03:10] We know that they have to have this goal. It is absolutely obvious to us. that they perform at an elite level because they are driven by something bigger, larger, a very clear goal. Now, the championship may not be like their purpose or like their mission in life. There may be something bigger yet, even than that.

[03:31] And if you hear people like Olympic gold medalist wrestler, Kyle Snyder, like his goal is much bigger. His goal is He’s a man of faith and he talks about God and he lost once at, you know, after winning an Olympic gold medal, the next Olympics, he lost. And his response was essentially like, listen, this isn’t everything for me.

[03:48] There’s something even bigger than this. And boy, that can really, really unlock you. And it, it unlocks him and actually frees him up to compete in a very open and free way. But we understand that athletes have a goal in that. Drives the work and the consistency and the discipline and the focus that you need.

[04:09] Quick interruption. If you like what you’re hearing here and you want to learn how you can implement this into your life, just go to jimharshawjr.com/apply to see how you can get a free one on one coaching session with me. That’s jimharshawjr.com/apply. Now back to the show. Now, listen, you and I were out in the real world, probably a little bit like me.

[04:31] If you’re listening to this podcast, maybe you’re married, maybe you’re not. I’m married with kids. And like, so there’s, there’s a lot of other things pulling in my life now. It’s not just this single minded focus that I had when I was wrestling. Now it’s. My marriage, my relationship with my kids, my health and well being, my relationship with God, my business.

[04:49] I mean, there’s so many things pulling at us, right? So you have to have goals and clarity in different areas. So we talked about sports like Tom Brady, LeBron James, myself, you, business. Jeff Bezos, like he started Amazon off with selling books, but he always had the intention of turning it into an online marketplace that sold everything.

[05:10] That clarity drove the actions that were necessary to achieve that. Henry Ford, he had the clarity of putting a car into every garage. When you have that clarity, you can do crazy hard things, things that are impossible. Like if you read the book, Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, he talks about Henry Ford in there and how they were trying to make, I may butcher this or I’m just paraphrasing the story, but how they were trying to make a single block, an eight cylinder engine out of a single block of steel.

[05:42] And they’re like, yeah, we can’t do it. It’s not possible. Heat expansion, everything. And he’s like, Nope, go ahead. We’re going to do it. We’re going to have it. You’re going to make it happen. Get back to work. And the engineers are like, they go back to work and finally they did it right. Like he had this clarity of vision.

[05:57] And it unlocks your potential. Navy SEALs. If you go back to listen to episode 342, I interviewed Robert O’Neill, the dude who shot and killed bin Laden. The dude who shot and killed Osama bin Laden, episode 342. If you haven’t listened to that one, you got to give that one a listen. This guy talks about their clarity of their mission.

[06:18] Their mission was so clear and their purpose so clear that they literally got into that helicopter knowing they weren’t coming back, believing fully in their hearts, we’re not coming back. We’re going to go kill bin Laden and we’re probably not going to make it out alive. Very clear vision, very clear mission, very clear purpose.

[06:41] Unlocked them to the point where they were willing to die, to fly a helicopter into a place that they were pretty certain they weren’t going to make it out alive. Think about that. Think about that clarity. Listen, you’re probably not going to go out on a suicide mission anytime soon, but imagine what potential you do have inside of you.

[07:02] I interviewed Kevin Basic, Dr. Kevin Basic, just episode 466, just recently here. Medal of Honor Institute, right? This guy has talked to Medal of Honor recipients. Medal of Honor, if you’re not familiar with it, it’s the highest military honor you can receive in the United States. And he talks about their clarity of purpose, their clarity of mission.

[07:24] And when you have that, it releases this power and this effectiveness that you can’t get anywhere else. There’s no time management hack that no, no supplement that you can take that will give you the kind of potential to unlock and unleash the kind of potential that clarity is going to give you. We understand this for Navy SEALs.

[07:47] We understand this for Medal of Honor recipients. We understand this for CEOs like Jeff Bezos or Henry Ford. We understand this for Tom Brady and LeBron James and myself. When I was competing, even you, when you were competing, like we understand this, but what about in your life now? Clarity is what will unlock you.

[08:07] All success starts with clarity. That’s 463, I know I’m rattling off a bunch of episodes here. Go to the action plan. If you already subscribed to my email list, you got the action plates waiting in your inbox, Monday mornings, you got it. So go to Jim Harshaw, jr. com slash action. But that’s why in episode 463, I talk about the Pathfinder vision, right?

[08:30] This is big. This is the big vision for your life. It takes work. It takes effort. We did this with my clients at the retreat. We hosted a retreat at this epic, epic ranch, Sean, thank you. You’re probably listening and all the Pathfinders who were there. My clients were there. Absolutely amazing experience, but we crafted their Pathfinder vision.

[08:51] This is unlocking people as we sit here, as I record this, as you’re, whatever you’re doing, driving to work, walking your dog on the treadmill, wherever you’re doing, whatever you’re doing right now, there are people who have been unlocked and unleashed because of the clarity that they have. And this worked in your life too, right?

[09:09] I’m going through a program right now. And so, by the way, I’m a coach. I have coaches in my life. And I’m going through a coaching program right now where part of it is actually setting your 30 year goals, 30 year goals. I’ve ever actually never actually written down. Okay. 30 years from now, when I am 78 years old, what are my goals?

[09:29] I wrote them down. That has unlocked me to an even higher level. There’s power in that clarity. It gives you direction. And now on the other end of that, okay. So we’re talking about, you know, Pathfinder vision, Big, large goals, high level goals for your life. 30 year goals. Jim at 78 years old. What’s my marriage like?

[09:47] What’s my relationship with my kids? Like relationship with God, my, my health and fitness, my business, my income, my wealth. I have clarity on all that now. Now on the other end. So we said 30, 20, 10, five, one, six months. Two month goals. So two month goals, like all the shorter ones, these are easy because I’m, I’m doing this all the time, right?

[10:05] I’m setting my two month goals. I have my tenure goal, of course, not of course, but I do, I have a tenure goal. But this two month goal, it’s getting down to like tactically. And now with my clients, we actually go, we set one month goals. Like every single month we’re setting a monthly goal and this feeds into the bigger goals, which feeds into the vision, right?

[10:22] This kind of this hierarchy, but that clarity gives you clarity day to day. Right now let’s go even more granular, right? Daily. One of the things that I do is I write down what I, what are three things I need to do to make today great. Now, if you’re watching this on YouTube, you can see I’m holding up my journal.

[10:40] It’s literally right beside me on my desk. And, uh, if you’re not watching on YouTube, you should be. Not because of my pretty face. It’s, uh, it’s nothing to look at in my cauliflower here, but I think you get more out of it. When you check it out on YouTube, so subscribe there. You can comment on YouTube of course, too, and I can, you and I can interact, like we can have a conversation over there.

[10:57] So, so check this out on YouTube and subscribe, like, comment, all that good stuff. That always helps boost the algorithm to, to show it to more people. But, but what you’re seeing here is my journal. You can see in the morning I write down three things I’m grateful for. I have this practice, right, this, this, this gratitude practice, and then I write down, one of the things I do is I write down three things that are gonna make today great.

[11:17] Talk about clarity. This brings me clarity. Today, what do I have to do today? Like one of the things is I got to record this podcast. I get to record this podcast episode. Subtle change in language, but it’s the truth, right? When you approach your life and your world with the get to versus got to mentality, it changes how you approach it.

[11:34] But for me, it’s getting locked in on this, recording the podcast, getting locked in on the course that I’m building. It’s going to be available to you by the way, soon. So keep an eye out for that. And then the third thing I have to do is when I’m done, I have to put all of my work away and be home with my heart.

[11:49] That would be fully present and fully home with my family when I’m done with my work today. And that’s my clarity. It brings me clarity every day. When you have clarity in your values, which is what we do in my coaching program. When you have clarity in your values, you have this compass. Imagine this.

[12:04] Imagine you had a decision making machine, okay? Every time you had to make a big decision, you had this machine and you could take this decision and just like, imagine it’s like a piece of paper, right? And you just feed it into the machine. And then on the other end comes your answer. It’s like, ah, okay, fantastic.

[12:22] And you feel really good about that answer. It might be hard, might be tough, but you still feel good about it. That’s what having clarity of your core values brings you. It helps you make the decisions from, and this is the analogy or the example I always use is. Should I eat that donut? The small decisions like, should I eat that donut?

[12:38] Well, you know, what are my core values? Tell me, or should I quit my job or do I go for that promotion or what should I do with my time next? What’s the next thing I should do? Should I go spend it with my kids or my family? Or should I go work out or should I, whatever it is, right? You’ll have clarity on that because you have this decision making machine.

[12:59] You have these core values outlined that, that are a compass for you. Now in business, you’ve heard of mission, vision, values, general operating principles, standard operating procedures, SOPs, right? GOPs, SOPs. These all bring clarity, clarity for you, clarity for your people, your team, your colleagues, in terms of how do I do my role well, who are we?

[13:26] What is our culture? It starts by defining your mission, vision, values. And for me, for our business. Our mission is to create a world class, customized Pathfinder experience. Pathfinders are our clients in Reveal Your Path that propels our clients to living a life that they once felt impossible. Our vision is this.

[13:47] We know that everyone we meet is someone who we can help. And as a result, we become the preeminent success coaching brand in America. That’s our mission. And that’s our vision. And our values are, I’m not going to go into the depth sort of behind this, but Care. Community. Equip and ownership. My team, they all know what that means.

[14:07] They all know the meaning behind each of those. There’s clarity there. We have a set of general operating principles, like one of them, for example, is remember where we’re going. And we use the Wayne Gretzky’s quote, skate to where the puck is going to be. We don’t want to do actions and implement things in the business and our coaching in our community and what we do that don’t take into account where we’re going.

[14:31] To be the best in America at what we do, serving tens of thousands of clients. We don’t want to do things now that won’t allow us to skate to where the puck is going to be. Okay. So that’s just one of our general operating principles, a standard operating procedure that might be, you know, and that might be, it is, we have tons of these and these are like, how do we publish a podcast episode?

[14:52] How do we go about writing our social media posts? And how do we do this, that, you know, there’s all kinds of, how do we set up a new client when they get on boarded? There’s an SOP for that. All of this is clarity when you have clarity in your team. If you’re in a leadership role, if your team has clarity, high level clarity in granular clarity, it unlocks them.

[15:13] It unlocks your team. And listen, if you don’t have all this stuff in place, don’t feel like you have to, okay, I got to get this done today. I’m busy. I got all these emails to return. No, no, no, no. Just start with one thing. Start very high level. Define your vision. Even if it’s not perfect, don’t worry about it being perfect.

[15:30] You know, remind people where you’re going. That kind of clarity will unlock the people around you. Now here’s the deal. Here’s what you don’t have to have clarity on. You don’t have to have clarity on how you’re going to get there. Listen, I don’t have full clarity on how we’re going to become the best success coaching brand in America.

[15:49] I don’t, I don’t know. Soon as I defined that as our vision, then it changed everything. It changed how I thought, it changed how my team started thinking. It unlocked some opportunities that I didn’t know were there already. They were kind of like sitting there and I saw them as obstacles or challenges.

[16:06] And I’m like, wait a second, that that’s actually an opportunity over there. But when you get that clarity of your purpose, the higher level, it unlocks the how. You don’t have to know how, right? This held me back for years. I’m an in the weeds guy. I’m a do it yourself er. Growing up, we never hired anybody to do anything.

[16:23] I don’t care if it was like fixing the car or building an addition on the house. It didn’t matter. Like, we did it. We did everything ourselves. And you know, I grew up, I’m a country boy, grew up on 10 acres of land, hunting, fishing. We had huge gardens, fed ourselves with corn and tomatoes and asparagus and pumpkins and green beans and strawberries and on and on and squash.

[16:48] And I can’t, I can go on and on what we had in our garden. And we, we harvested food from the woods as well, you know, hunting and fishing. And. You know, I’m an in the weeds guy. I can see how I can, I want to need, I want to see how I can get somewhere. But I want to realize that I don’t have to see all 100 steps of how I’m going to get from here to there.

[17:07] I only need to see step one, two, maybe step three. I might not even be able to see step three, but once I create the vision, I start walking down the path. You get two, three steps in. You go, Oh, now I can see step five from here back at step one or zero. I couldn’t see step five. But now that I’m here at step three, now I can see five and I think I see step 10 out there in the distance and there’s a couple of different ways I could go to a couple of different forks in the road, but you have to get clarity first on the larger vision and then you’ll start taking those steps.

[17:36] So don’t feel like you have to know how you’re going to get there. Set the vision, have the confidence, have the, I take that back. Don’t have the confidence, have the courage, have the courage to set that vision, to set it big, to make it scary. Now, here’s the deal. Don’t go this alone. Don’t go this alone. We talk about something called the environment of excellence in our coaching program.

[17:56] The environment of excellence is like, who are you surrounded by? When I was wrestling, I had coaches, man, and they kicked me in the ass if I needed a kick. They helped me course correct if that’s what I needed. They could see my blind spot. They called me out. If I need to call it out, Jim, you’re slacking, get it going, step it up.

[18:14] You need that person in your life, right? This is the environment of excellence. There’s that, you know, in our coaching program, we have, we have a community. We it’s an online community. Plus we, we do in person meetups, you know, annually at our retreat and the standard of people there. It’s, it’s just high.

[18:29] And when you get around them, your standard raises. And listen, there’s one guy out there at our retreat. His name’s Rich. Rich, I hope you’re listening. He was at the retreat and this guy, he’s already just being, he was in our program. It was by that, at that point, he was in our program for four and a half months and he had already hit two of his financial goals.

[18:47] Now he’s heading a set of, he kept having to raise the bar because he kept hitting these higher, higher level goals. And it’s like the standard for rich, very high. He’s one of the best golfers in America when he was a professional golfer. He was an amateur in college and professional and he, so the standard is very high for Rich in terms of financial, but the standard for Rich in terms of his relationships and his people and his family, Oh man, they’re even higher.

[19:14] I get chills talking about it. This is the kind of person I want to be around. How about you? What does that environment of excellence look like for you? Like Rich has a huge vision. His isn’t mine and mine’s not his, but man. Being in the same room as that guy raises your level of belief, raises your level of how you go about things.

[19:33] When I was at the Olympic Training Center training with world class athletes, it just raised my level of, shoot, how I freaking tie my shoes, you know, like how you warm up the food you put in your, in your mouth, like at the dining hall, like how you talk, how you walk, what do you do with your spare time?

[19:50] All of that is influenced by the, you can’t set Goals for everything, you know, how I warm up, I’m not going to, you can’t set goals for how I spend that, you know, 42 minutes in between, you know, after I get showered, after practice, have a meal, and then there’s 42 minutes before, like, I got this other thing that you can’t set a goal for that.

[20:12] But by being around those people, the level is like, Oh, I’m going to use that to go watch films. We have this online community on the school. com platform. I’m going to be building this a community, a community for you to have access to as well for free soon. So keep an ear out for that. I’m super excited to launch this.

[20:27] You can start getting pulled into and experience more and more of what my clients. But, um, just had a quote from one of our longtime Pathfinders that came in this morning. He actually sent me a DM and he said, his name’s John. I hope John’s listening here too. I’m mentioning a bunch of my guys here to actually clients here today.

[20:47] John said, I just logged into school after a few days of not being on. He said, Holy golden nuggets. This thing is working great value and connection. I love it. Like he’s connecting with other people. There’s good influence like social media only like all good influences. And we’re talking about goals and vision and action items and diet and nutrition and business stuff.

[21:11] I mean, on and on, like this is going on. This is. His environment of excellence. This is my environment of excellence. This could be your environment of excellence. And then there was a post in there the other day by Logan. Logan sees one of our coaches. He said, what are your goals for the week? And people were responding.

[21:25] Here’s my intention for the week. This is clarity, right? So this is all based upon the productive pause, a short period of focused reflection around specific questions that leads to clarity of action and peace of mind, right? A coach does this for you. A coach not only holds you accountable at executing, but also pulls you out of the busyness of life so that you can get clarity and then jump back in and execute.

[21:53] Executing doesn’t mean just checking emails, filling out TPS reports and, you know, doing your to do list while periodically checking ESPN. com or Twitter. No, the role of a coach is to pull you out, get clarity on the larger things you need to be working on, how to spend your time. What’s working, what’s not working.

[22:12] So you can re engage into life, the busyness of life with clarity, clarity of action, peace of mind. I hope you got some great nuggets out of this episode. If you want to grab the action plan, go to jimharshawjr.com/action and download that. Share this with a friend. You know, a friend who, who needs this, who wants this, who loves this stuff.

[22:33] Subscribe to us on YouTube, subscribe to us on whatever podcast platform you’re listening to this on. If you’re on YouTube, give us a, like, give us a comment and share it there as well. So thank you for listening, please. The, the biggest thank you you can give to me right now is by taking action on this.

[22:48] All right. Take action. Good luck.

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