Michael Hyatt

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.

Michael and his team help overwhelmed high achievers win at work, succeed at life, and lead with confidence. In 2017 and 2018, Michael Hyatt & Company was featured on the Inc. 5000 list as one of America’s fastest growing companies.

He is also an expert in the field of social media. His blog, MichaelHyatt.com, is ranked by Google in the top one-half percent of all blogs with more than one million page views a month. He has readers in more than two hundred countries. Recently, Forbes magazine named him one of “Top 10 Online Marketing Experts to Follow” and one of the “Top 50 Social Media Influencers.

Formerly 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. His work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Inc., Fast Company, Businessweek, Entrepreneur, and other publications.

Michael has been married to his wife, Gail, for forty years. They have five daughters, three sons-in-law, and eight grandchildren. They live just outside Nashville, Tennessee.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on  Michael’s success

Proper goal setting

Result if you follow the steps in Michael’s session

Make goals that don’t inspire you more personal by reviewing your Key Motivations and what’s at stake

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

Many people say they have goals but they’ve never actually written them down.

There is a researcher Dr. 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.

And what she discovered was that you have a 42% greater probability of achieving your goals merely by the act of writing them down.

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. 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.

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 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.

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. I was busy with a lot of different things and the manuscript was due in November.

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 just, I thought I’ll just give the money back to the publisher. I’m not gonna do this book. It’s not the right time.

But 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. 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. 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. This is gonna set me up for success in my new career”.

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.

And 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.