Hello! Seiiti Arata. Millions of people struggle every day to achieve their goals, whatever these goals may be. These people dedicate time, energy and money to achieve a goal they have set for themselves.
But, unless you act strategically, this struggle for big life goals can become a source of frustration. You can lose a good part of your life trying to reach impossible goals and the time wasted will never be recovered.
What if I told you that there is an easier way to achieve these goals? What if I revealed a strategy that very successful people use to fulfill objective after objective?
This strategy exists and is called Modeling People.
Modeling People is deconstructing what a person has done to achieve a goal you want to achieve. By following this person’s steps, you can have the same results.
All the goals you have today in your life have already been achieved by someone somewhere. Someone has already lost ten kilos, has already gotten a new job, has already founded a company. Someone has learned the language you want, has written a book, has lost his fear of public speaking.
Because of this, a very practical and safe way for you to achieve your goals is to model what these people have done to achieve those goals. When I say modeling, I mean that you should use the person who reached the goal as a model.
For example, let’s say you are a computer programmer who wants to work at Google. Instead of preparing your resume and applying for a job at the company, a smarter strategy is to look for people who already work at Google to understand what they did to get the job there. What courses did they take? What skills have they demonstrated? What steps did they have to go through in the selection process?
What you have to do is a kind of reverse engineering. You see what that person has achieved and ask yourself: what did he do to achieve this? What steps did they take to get from where I am today to where they are?
Tony Robbins says that modeling the best people in the world is the main key to success. You need to have a mentality in which you think “if they can, I can too”.
Success leaves clues. Take advantage of the fact that people love talking about their own achievements to understand how they got there.
One of the challenges in the art of modeling people is to understand exactly how these successful people achieved what you want to achieve. How did they lose weight? How did they make so much money? How did they learn that skill?
The good news is that people love talking about their own achievements. Stop by a bookstore and see the amount of books that successful people write telling their story in detail.
Then look at the social networks and see how people love showing the struggle they had to face to achieve what they have today.
Even if your case is very specific and you don’t find any of this published, you can find a person who has already achieved what you want to achieve and simply ask them: “I really admire what you have achieved and I am struggling to achieve something like that. Could you tell me how you did it?”
The chances are great that this person will be happy to be recognized, to receive a compliment, and will be willing to tell their story. He will not act as a consultant and give you a step by step guide for your case, but he will tell you what he did to achieve the goal. Your job will be to adapt that to your reality.
The biggest mistake when modeling people is simply copying. You need to adapt the strategy to your context.
Modeling people means learning to do something by repeating someone’s behavior. This is the natural way in which we humans learn everything. That’s how we learn how to speak, to walk, to eat. Albert Bandura defined this concept in psychology already in the 1960s and since then it has been used to study how people learn how to do things.
But there is a problem with the whole story. The problem of simply wanting to copy everything the other person did, without adapting the strategy to its context, to your personal characteristics.
For example, let’s say that one of your goals is to start a company. You decide to open a restaurant in your neighborhood. Then you learn about the art of modeling successful stories and decide to copy the strategy that Ray Kroc used to transform McDonald’s into the largest chain of cafeterias in the world.
Will this work? Will you be able to apply in your diner today where you live the same strategy that was used by Ray Kroc in the United States of the 1950s?
Modeling is not simply copying. It is to understand what the person did to get there. In order to do this you need to understand the concept behind each step taken. You need to think about how that concept applied in that place, at that time, with those people.
If you don’t adapt the strategy, it is very likely that you will only reap frustration when trying to copy the impossible.
The right way to model people needs three steps: choosing the right person, asking for help and creating your strategy.
The art of modeling people the right way is based upon three pillars. The first one is to choose the right model. The second one is to ask for help. And the last one is to create your own strategy, adapting everything to your life context.
Choosing the right person is not simply finding someone who has already achieved what you want to achieve. Don’t try to copy the best people in the world. The ideal is to find a person who has achieved this goal starting from conditions more or less similar to the conditions you have today.
For example, if your goal is to be a successful entrepreneur, but you are not from a wealthy family, the ideal is to find a person who has managed to undertake something in the area you want to have your company and who comes from a situation similar to yours.
If you choose to model a businessman who came from a wealthy family and had all the family, educational and financial support to create his company, it is unlikely that the strategy he used will apply to you. Likewise, a strategy that was used in Europe after World War II is unlikely to apply to the creation of a company in America in the twenty-first century.
You also should not choose too many people to model. If you want to lose ten kilos, you can’t model someone who did this with a Paleolithic diet, another who did it with a vegan diet and another who did bariatric surgery. The strategies cannot be conflicting. The ideal is to have only one or two models for your goal and all of them with a similar strategy.
Ask for help to understand what a person has done to achieve the goal you want. Then adapt what you have learned to your reality.
The second step is to ask for help. This can be done directly, with you simply asking the person what they did to achieve what they achieved. Or it can be done indirectly, reading a book that the person has written, seeing what he has published on social networks or looking for interviews that he has given to the press, for example.
In some cases, this second step may involve hiring. If the person acts as a teacher, consultant or mentor, you can see if it is possible to hire them to teach you how to get where you are.
The last step is to take this strategy and adapt it to your reality. What steps has your model person taken that you can take with the conditions you have today? What steps do you need to take to reach the conditions she had? What worked in her place and time that needs to be adjusted to her place and time? What personal characteristics does that person have that you don’t have?
Modeling people is not simply blindly copying everything a person has done to achieve what they have achieved. You will not be elected the best football player in the world simply by copying what Lionel Messi did, because his conditions, time and personal skills are his alone. But you can become a better soccer player by understanding how he trains, how he plays, how he thinks. The goal is not to become the other person, but to be a better version of yourself.
Once you have a strategy adapted to your personal context, it is ideal to have all the steps you need to take written in a complete life plan.
This life plan must contain everything from your highest personal values to the next practical step you need to take to achieve the goal you have just modeled.
To start putting together this plan right now, I invite you to attend a special class in the Planning Your Life course on personal values. You can watch this special class simply by going to this link.