TRANSCRIPT:

MY 8-F FRAMEWORK

What's up guys? Welcome to another edition of ManTalk, if you're joining us for the first time exactly what it sounds like, can get it, but you can get it too. So we're just here talking about real relevant and gritty topics that a lot of times get set to the side, whether it's business fear or other obstacles. So we're continuing our series 30 virtues that build a man. If you do not have this book, you got to go to the website, pick up a copy right now that's www.beresolute.org/thirty. I've had this for a few months now. It has been so instrumental in bringing up a ton of conversations that have really helped sharpen me. So today I'm your host Tyler VanEps. We're joined by our founder, Vince Miller. How you doing?

I'm doing pretty good. You ready to dive in? I am.

Yeah, that's a huge goals.

We're talking about goals as a terrible, terrible, nice intro

search. I uh, I looked up over the past couple of decades, the top new year's resolution. That's one of the things that pops in my head when I think about goals. I feel like that's a time of the year. Everyone does goals. Can you name at least three of the top five to 10 goals that people usually say it right?

I'm going to eat better. I'm going to work out more and I don't know. I'm going to curse it. My family list. No more sex in the top 10. At least in the last decade. That's been more. Yeah. Okay. I'm putting it on my eyes. Smoking was one of them. Quit smoking, quit drinking and read more books or some of the other usual lasker. So which one of those falls? We won't go there right now. I've got new goals to set, man. I'm going to quit smoking. Quit drinking at the same time. Exactly. Right. Cool. So awesome. I'm excited for this one.

Uh, we've been able to spend some time together and you've given me a lot of insights into how you do goal setting. I think it's great. I think it's at the top of almost everyone's list, whether it's family goals, whether it's work goals, you know, everyone's sitting down with managers, bosses, employees on a consistent basis, goals, goals, goals is everything. Um, so the question I want to ask you is you meet with Matt on a regular basis. So this week you're probably going to sit down with at least 10 men. Of those 10 men, how many of them could clearly and quickly

liberals team, most of them came in, which is unfortunate. No, I'd probably say, let me take that back. One out of 10 can clearly stand one out of 10, one out of 10 and clearly say we've got some, some goals. Now we, many of these guys have goals in their business or their goal setting your goals set for them, but when it comes to the spiritual life, most of them don't have spiritual goals, which is unfortunate. Now I do meet a guy every once in a while who was ultra disciplined and a spiritual life. He'll have some goals that he sets, but very rarely, unfortunately, I wish guys did it more. But if for some reason we're adverse to setting goals, I don't know why.

Well, can you answer know why are we anything gets mad and women alike or do you think it is a, there is a thing for guys about adversity to setting goals.

Well, okay. So I don't think that men are necessarily adverse to setting goals. I think if we were really, really honest with ourselves, we're lazy. We let life happen to us more than we happened to live. Right? And setting a goal means that you're going to be held accountable and you've got to accomplish something and it probably means someone's going to check in with you. Right? So we are adverse to that. We would much rather just do life on our own without ever setting a goal. And, and what's really bizarre about it is we actually do have goals in our place of business every day. I mean, there are probably guys that right now I could say I have this goal in my business, but when it comes to our spiritual life, there's no one there to hold us accountable. So we never set a goal and that goal could be as simple as I'm going to read the Bible more regularly, but very few guys do that for some reason.

Laziness. Laziness. So that's another, the reason that guys won't set goals. What are some of the reasons that guys don't achieve their goals?

I think one of the reasons that guys don't achieve their goals as they never go public with their goals. Like, uh, you know, I do know, and you know, this, I do set goals every year at the beginning of the year. So when it new years rolls around, I set resolutions. I've got a couple of new ones. I'm gonna throw in there on your list. At least one that'll be on there twice, but A. Yeah, exactly. Read more books. Exactly. That's exactly right. My, my, uh, I really do think that, that what we do is we have kind of these private goals that we want to set and we never really go public with them because we haven't gotten gone public with them. We can never be held accountable to them because I think honestly we're scared of accountability. And I know that's not the topic of the day, but I think accountability is so related to goal setting that we can't avoid it.

So that's where I stand. So accountability is a huge reason. I as a huge factor. I see that a lot in my own life. I think, like you said, being able to verbalize those goals, whether it's with a spouse, with family, being with another Christian brother and is a huge, huge component of it. Um, one of the things you hear a lot about smart goals, all this kind of stuff, if you were to apply, one of the things I've done in my own life is that if a goal is not simple and it's not significant, I'm not going to touch it. Like it's got to have a, some level of simplicity to it and it's got to be something significant. What does basic framework that you take towards setting goals? Yeah.

So, okay, when I'm setting some goal, I want to make sure that, you know, I don't want to go through the smart acronym right now, but I think the two things on the smart acronym that I always get hung up on and I think a lot of guys do measurable and attainable. So I'm the kind of guy probably like you that'll set out this goal of saying I'm going to read through the Bible this year, great goal, but maybe we should start with the book of five Lehman, right? Has One chapter. Let's just get through the book of final email.

Exactly. Doesn't even have chapter number because it just versus right. But maybe we should start a daycare. Look in the Bible by Lincoln's pretty good dude. I mean it's got an incredible story around it and maybe we just read that book, that one chapter, that entire book of the Bible every day for 30 days. That would be a remarkable goal and we will start to love the Bible and not love the discipline of reading because sometimes I think that we set these goals that caused us to fall in love with the wrong thing and I'm not saying it is wrong to fall in love with reading. I love reading, but maybe it's more about comprehension that completion. Right. And so I think that's one thing. I also think that we have these big hairy audacious goals that we want to accomplish and by the way, we've got to, we need small markers of successful hummed away.

Like, yeah, you know, I want to read through the Bible every year for the next hundred years of my life. I get that. That would make me. I'd be very rich for that, but maybe we should make it a little bit more attainable over time and, and not be so big and hairy with our goals. Like remember this going to be a lifetime of growth and so let's just do it a little bit of the time that those are some things I think that would be really important around goal setting. And those are reasons that I think men fail is they try to over accomplished that try to do too much. They reach beyond their limits and they don't reach for the right things. You know, reading for comprehension is a much more valuable goal I think. Then reaching for completion. Yeah,

so some of those smaller bite size attainable goals, goals that in a lot of ways their purpose might even be building momentum towards some of the bigger goals that you've set in your life. I recognize that a lot. If I can jump into a task list or some goals that I set and I start to knock those things off the list, I'll send them in this momentum. That really gets me going towards some of the bigger goals that I have accomplished. And you. You mentioned the big hairy, audacious goal, stretch goal, purple cow, whatever you want to call it. What do you think? First of all, I want to ask what one of those is for your lives. I'm going to put you on the spot, some of the guys out there, but what's the purpose of setting some of those goals? Some of those big hairy out there, stretch goals, um, and then be able to really

take that and send it to our guys. Say, Hey, here's one of mine, here's, I'm pursuing it. Well, you know, I, years ago the way I started setting spiritual goals every year was I would start at the beginning of the year and there's a couple of places I think we can start over here. You can start in January, you can start in September. You can pick one of those times because they're natural calendar kind of movements for most of us and you can pick one of those seasons and you can start to name off at least one the three goals that you want to accomplish. And that's how I started. Years ago, years ago, I had a, uh, a goal of spending three days alone with God every year. And I did that for many years. And over the years this has blossomed really into a framework that I've developed around how I set my own spiritual goals.

So I call it the eight f framework. I love it. Okay. So at 8:00 AM, eight f. okay. So here it is, you're my ads. I have it on my phone. If you guys want a copy of it, I'd be happy to send it to everybody. But it's faith, family, friends, fitness, food, fun, finances and future. Those are my eight tips and I'm looking at my phone right now. Just like a good pastor man. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll start with the app the right or is everything you know. And the reason why I did this, this because I really, I built them all around the man that I wanted to be. I decided that I didn't really want to have anything to do with work at all. You'll notice there's nothing about working there except maybe a little bit on future finances, but it's not about work.

It's about who I want to be in Christ. And so I built this eight f framework and under each one of these bullets you've seen it, right? Yeah. There's smart goals under each. So here's one under faith, for example, one of our faith is reading focused reading regularly from the life of David. So that's who I'm reading through this year. So this is my eight f framework for an entire year. I got one bullet point and what I do is each month I'm trying to check off that I've done some of these things. So it's reading regularly from the life of David or in family underneath family. I have a goal around my spouse and here's my goal around my spouse.

It doesn't say have more sex on it. It says, it says, it says find active ways to be caring and communication enrollments. Oh man, makes sense. Write it down. Write it down. I'll just send you a copy. In fact, all the guys, I'll give him a copy of it. They want to do that. We're going to provide this as a resource that you guys can go download later on. We'll get them later. Great. So fine. Active ways to be carrying in my communication and more romantic with my wife. Like I'm. I'm working on it. That's something that I've struggled with and so that's a goal that I said this year and I hope at the end of each month I can kind of come back to that and check it off and when I don't, it's a check for me to kind of get busy on some of those things that remind me of it.

So anyway, I have each one of these goals kind of labeled out around these five or these eight apps. So faith, family, friends, fitness, food fund, finances, and future. And it's just simple for me. I can go to my phone if I even forget what one of the SR, which I do for you at once in a while. I can go back to it and I can kind of check them off my phone. I can say like I accomplished something that's mine and I got to tell you, this framework has helped me to set really good spiritual goals and I can share it with you just like we'll share it with everybody else and it helps me to have markers of success and I feel like I'm moving in a direction. I'm not just floating around with my spiritual life or my character. I kind of know what I'm trying to accomplish and it's made me. It's helped me to apply, I'd say hard driving at Ledek business principles to my everyday store to alive and just good principles that come from God's word. Why not set some goals, man?

Well, I love that it's not work focused. Not totally task driven, but like you said, it really is focused on the man you want to be. It's very, you know, talk about 30 virtues that build a man. It's the virtue based. It's character based about the guy that you want to be, and I think that's such a huge thing that a lot of times we get ahead and we see all the things that we want to accomplish, the places we want to be, the things that we want to do, but it really is about becoming the man that God wants you to be in love. Then I think that even ties into our scripture when we're talking about Nehemiah. Really, you have this time in history where we're, God's people have been in captivity for a long time, he's burdened with the heart of God, and God's put this, this impression, this vision, this thing on his heart, has nothing to do with his work. I mean he's cut bearer to the king and his last line of defense for the king, but really he's burdened by the man that he feels God's called him to be. What do you see in the life of Nehemiah that helps push you towards some of the goals that God's put on your heart?

Yeah. What I love about this text is exactly everything you mentioned, but it's also the pressure that king Artaxerxes puts on Nehemiah. He's like, he wants him back, so he's like, get it done, get it. He's like, you get this done and then come home and he makes this agreement with them to build. Yes. Build a wall and you are king. Artaxerxes gives all these resources, but he can't just kind of float around there and Kinda dream it. Dream it to happen. You know, it's not this just an a theoretical idea. He's got to actually do it, get it done and gets it done, and it's

a big goal to walk into the emperor Persian empire. Know Jerusalem, Judea, Israel used to be one of the competitors in the region. It's a foreign kingdom. It's viewed as an enemy. I mean the colonies on this guy to say, hey, how do you rebuild an empire that once you find you, it's incredible.

Yeah, and the fact that God gave them all the resources and all the endorsement and all the power and everything that you needed to accomplish it is amazing, but I love that Nehemiah set goals around it and I think it's a beautiful, beautiful picture of how we can rigorously live the spiritual life and I wish more men live spiritually like them. Know, like I mean, just think of what we could accomplish in our day if we set up goals as you did, you just set it out to get it done and he set his mind to it. You said it's task to it says behavior. He said his prayers to it. You've accumulated all the resources and said, well, let's get it done. You know, and I think God wants men to get things done in their life, not to accomplish something by their own means, right? It's for the purpose of knowing him, but we can do this together, right? We can set goals and we can use disciplines to guide us along the path so that we could better know him. That's what we use is to know him.

I think that's the challenge for all the guy and I'll ask the challenge I'm walking away with today is I want to take that eight out framework, aren't really dive in to what know, Holy Spirit. Show me the goals that you have for me today, tomorrow, this month, so we want to make that resource available to all the guys out there. So if you go to be resolute.org/eight, the number eight path, so be resolute.org/eighth app. We want to give that as an opportunity for guys to step up, get off the bench, get in the game, start making some God-sized God's field goal. Sorry guys, thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time on ManTalk