What is the difference between a goal and a dream? For achieving your goal, you have to have a path and a plan, but for a dream, you simply need an image in your head and continue until you have conquered your dream. Goals are attainable, when you put your effort on them and dreams occur when you have reached enough of your goals. Think how differently you will act, if your goal is to win world championships next year or your dream is to win it someday. With the first one, you will find yourself training immediately, whereas in the latter you will find yourself smiling and continuing the dream. This doesn't mean, that your dream couldn't come true, but the level of urgency is different than with goals.

In order to achieve your goals, you need to have a path and a plan on how to achieve them. For goals you build up routines and for dreams you build up hope. Planning is more important than willpower. You just need to follow the routines. There will always be distractions and other challenges, but with a good plan, you will have room for these as well.

From ABC's to University

The best part with goals, is that they make you to work for them. You simply need to build a path for you, where you will break the path into smaller attainable and doable pieces. In martial arts, you can make a target of completing 10,000 repetitions with high intensity or make a path for development with setting up different skill levels for you.

My master, used to break levels with school grades. We would start to learn a new technique from the ABC's, meaning preschool. This was the outlining of the technique with enough details to understand how it should be performed. From there, we would do the movement with a continuous rhythm, which was called the elementary school level. This would continue up to University level and sometimes upto upper-upper-upper-upper University. The most important part, was to keep the rhythm constant, or else the technique was done at the ABC level. No matter how quickly it was performed. This helped us to understand which techniques we could pull out in a tournament and which not. You knew, that if you cannot perform at the University level, you cannot use it in a fight. Therefore, the goal-setting was very simple. Train as long as you are able to perform at the university level. And the path was clear too, with these simple and understandable steps from school grades. Check my previous post Does this work in real-life situation for another example, how my friend learned to skateboard like pros.

Sales approach

In sales, I have broken this idea into sales questions and steps. First, you need to master your field of business, meaning what your products and solutions can provide to your customer. If you don't have a clear picture on what you are selling, it is very difficult to help others to buy from you. The basics need to be clear in your head, or they won't help to continue in the sales process. You might be able to make sales still, but in the long run, you will not close deals as well as you should.

The next step is to understand how the customer is currently solving the situation, and where your product or service would provide a solution. Here, you need to build understanding on customer's business and get more in depth knowledge on what makes this customer unique from her company's perspective. On paper, many companies look the same, but they are all different. And this is the step, where you should understand why.

Then at the evaluation step, one goes into discussion whether the current solutions is providing wanted results or is there a room for improvement. Here your knowledge and expertise play a big role. You need to convince the buyer that you actually know how to improve her situation and that you will provide better results for her. You can attain this goal by using good questions which clarify your customer with understanding of the flaws of the current situation. Good questions bring doubt to her mind that there is a better solution than what she is currently using. You can also provide data to  back you up and to tell stories of successful companies with better approach than what she is currently using.

The last big step is to build a tailor-made solution for your customer. This doesn't mean that the actual solution is something new which nobody else has ever seen or used. This means you have paid attention to your customer's needs and when providing your solution, it feels like it was made just for her. The execution needs to feel like it was prepared for this case, since like I wrote before, each company is different.

The same goes in martial arts. You need to be able to modify your movements to your opponent. The basic form might look the same, but in reality, the techniques need to be altered to fit the situation and the opponent. How that is done, should be another blog post on its own.

Dreams are your vision

On top of goals, you need a vision. The vision sets the direction where your goals are at. Without a vision, it is hard to commit to goals. The difference is that, it is hard to build a path for a vision, the same way as it is for goals. Dreams can't be changed and modified easily. They need to be big enough, so that you have to develop yourself accordingly. My master used to tell me that it takes 7 years for each cell in your body to change, therefore whatever you do know, will affect you for 7 years. I don't know if that 7 years span is correct, but this made me for sure to think carefully, whether I wanted to improve my condition or do something that I would suffer for the next 7 years. With this in my head, I paid very close attention to everything that I did during the day, not just during the training. For instance, I stopped drinking alcohol, since that ruined my recovering after training. Drinking didn't ruin my training as per se, but it affected how my condition was building up and I wanted to build a better condition rather sooner than later. Small decision, but big influence. The vision was strong and made these kind of decisions easy to make.