The first step for success is creating a real vision. Since we’re talking about creating success in one year, it’s important that we don’t pile the pressure on ourselves to achieve too much in too short a space of time.

To create a real vision of where you need to be 12 months from now, write down what success looks like for you. Where do you need to be to look back at the previous year and say, ‘This was a successful year’? What does that actually look like? What's your vision of where you want to be a year from now? Write it down.

As you do this, make sure you’re not piling on the pressure. I know some people say pressure is a privilege and all of that. That's absolutely fine during the journey because pressure is a privilege. But I'm telling you right now, there's a lot that you can achieve in 12 months, but there's a lot more you can achieve in five and 10 years. So be more realistic, okay? Be realistic about where you want to be 12 months from now.

Let me share with you what goes on inside my mind when I set a goal. I guarantee when I follow this plan for success across a year, I don't shoot beyond the stars, right? I need to know that where I'm going to be is going to be a really great place in a year's time.

I need to know:

- what it actually looks like,

- where the financials need to be, and

- where I need to be personally, mentally, and physically.

I think through these things to gauge how realistic it is for me to be in this position a year from now. Creating that vision is the beginning of this process.

So think about yourself right now. You're reading this post, and you're thinking, ‘Okay, that's great.’

Now it’s time to move beyond thinking and start doing.

You know how quickly a year goes, right? It will just fly by, and if I'm honest, sometimes I wonder where the years actually go.

So it's really important to take time out to look at where you want to be 12 months from now and understand the journey that you're about to go on.

If you're going to guarantee success in a year, what does success actually look like? I want you to believe in it. I want you to know that it's real. It's not just something that you want to tell your friends about and then in the next 2 or 3 weeks you look up and you’re already miles behind that curve.

You need to think about this upward trajectory throughout the year, so that when you see yourself in 6 months, you know you are on track. One of the things about having a vision is that's the bit that excites you. That's the bit that makes you feel,

Right, I feel that that's achievable. I know that that can be absolutely nailed. And by the end of this year here if I'm in that position I'm going to feel really happy.

So really get clear about what it is that you want to be, where you want to be, how you want to look and feel, what your financials are, whatever.

That’s the first step to achieving success, to reaching this goal: create a clear vision of it.

Step two is to have a real mindset. Why I say a real mindset is that we are bombarded day in and day out by negativity, poison, and bullshit distractions.

You've got to have a real mindset around this, and what I mean by real is the fact that you don't give yourself a hard time if you get caught up in the bullshit that goes on around you. Yes, protect your mind. Yes, understand that those things are going to get in the way of you reaching your goals.

But what helps you to build a real mindset is your personal development, right? This is about you taking responsibility and absolutely developing resilience.

You're going to have challenges over the next 12 months. What do you think those challenges are going to be? I want you to write those things down because as far as I'm concerned, you're going to learn from the last 12 months to propel you forward in the next 12 months.

What I don't want you to do is to say, ‘It's going to be all sunshine, roses, and flowers.’ It's not.

We're in an economy that requires resilience and responsibility.

Resilience is knowing that you're going to go through some pressure. You're going to suck it up, swallow it up, embrace it. And you're going to learn from it to move forward. Responsibility means owning everything.

Your mindset has to be bulletproof and those two areas are the areas that become choices. You can choose to blame or you can choose to take responsibility.

You can choose to ignore your past challenges. Or you can choose to look at how badly you dealt with some things and how well you dealt with others. You can look back and go, ‘Right. Okay, what I did there worked for me. What I did there didn't work for me. That doesn't serve me. That does serve me.’

This realistic mindset is about how you protect that mind of yours. It starts the moment you wake up in the morning.

What do you do when you wake up every single day? If you reach for your phone, does that give you energy? If you reach for your phone, do you go scrolling, listening to the news, getting caught up in negativity? Does it actually stop you from building your day?

This mindset that we're talking about is about creating useful habits and developing your mind to achieve more. So you've got to learn take responsibility and build that resilience.

For me, a real mindset is understanding that you've got all this stuff going on around you, but you can cut through to take responsibility and be resilient.

So learn from the past and look at the challenges ahead. What are you going to do when those things come your way? How are you going to be prepared?

There's a guy called Sir Clive Woodward who has an approach to coaching called the T-CUP: think correctly under pressure. When his team won the Rugby World Cup, they planned the most challenging moments in the matches so when those challenges arrived, they knew straight away how to react, how to set that play and move forward.

You've got the benefit of hindsight, but foresight is so much more useful. Use that foresight to build your mindset. Your mindset is the key to achieving success over the course of the year. Foresight will give you energy to move forward.

The third step is to focus on the one thing that will lead to your success. How distracting is this world right now? For fuck’s sake, how many hours do we lose a day to mindless scrolling? How many hours do we trade up when we think, ‘Oh my God, I haven't got time?’

I’ve lost count of how many clients I’ve coached who have said to me, "I didn't have time to do the work." Not anymore. Now I tell new clients right at the start of working together if you come out with that bullshit, I'm going to ask what's your screen time? How much time are you spending scrolling rather than doing?

So focus is key. Now, I appreciate I'm not expecting you to sit there and have eight hours of focus on a certain thing that you need to do every day, but at least an hour, right? There's going to be something that you can do every day that's going to help you to reach your goal.

Whether your goal is related to fitness or business, you'll know there's something that will help you if you stay focused.

One of my clients has improved his business no end in the last 12 months with me. He understood 12 months ago that his main focus had to be on conversation with his clients. He had to dedicate time every single day to have meaningful conversations.

At the beginning of those 12 months, he set himself a financial goal. That financial goal has been exceeded, and that one thing – having meaningful conversations – has really made the difference for him.

He’s set aside five hours every week to give value and have great conversations. In those conversations, he literally changes the world for his clients, changes their perspective, educates them. He’s dedicated himself to that, and it’s paid off – literally. Why? Because conversations are the secret to converting to sales.

When we first started working together, we looked back at his previous year and he identified that he wasn't consistently giving value and having great conversations. Instead, he was getting caught up in bullshit distractions, getting moved away from the thing that was going to be the very thing that helped him to create his journey forward.

You can see what focusing on one thing for 12 months did for him – that’s why focus is step three. What you need to understand is that your focus has to be managed. It has to be prioritised. It has to be diarised.

You know how easy it is to fall away from the things that we need to do. You know that scrolling through menu options at a restaurant or looking at all these funny TikTok videos isn’t going to help you to reach your goals.

I'm absolutely not saying you can't do these things – there's nothing wrong with having some downtime. But if your goals are that important and this vision of where you want to be in a year is really important to you, there's going to be one main thing that's going to drive you towards it.

That's why I'm saying real real focus is knowing what's that one thing that I can't give up – like the guy that I just described to you. For me this year my main focus was creating video content because I knew where I wanted to get to. I knew what I needed to do and I knew what my one thing was going to be to get there and I have done so much more on video in the last 12 months.

Doing that has brought on more followers. It's brought on more clients. It's brought on more opportunities for me to speak at more events.

What you need to take from this is that we're all in a position where we want to achieve things. Otherwise, you would not be reading this post. So stay focused. Stay on track. Know what it is and commit to working on that key thing every single day, week, month, year.

So step four is to get real support. You know people who have been on the journey and got to the place where you want to go. People who inspire you. These are the people you need to reach out to, the ones who are achieving the goals that you want to achieve. They’ll be really honest with you, and they're the people that are going to hold you accountable.

If you're an achiever, you absolutely want to move forward and you know exactly where you want to go. Identify the person who has inspired or influenced you and go hire that person. Get that support.

If you think you're just going to do this on your own, you're nuts, right?

Here's an example that will help you understand that. Nine years ago I hired a strength and conditioning coach called Steve. I’d seen him in a car park – I was 17 Stone and I was like man I really love what you do I think it's great and blah blah blah.

He was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I said to him, I'm going to reach out to you. I'm going to come and do some of this work with you – and I did, I reached out on Facebook.

He told me years later, “I thought you were taking the piss. I didn't think you were going to actually reach out.” But I did because I looked at Steve, he was about four or five years older than me and he looked incredible. He looks after himself, his mind, his body.

I looked at him and thought about that particular goal of mine, that I wanted to be in that position. You know I don't want to feel like I can't even walk up the stairs without using my inhaler, or I can't walk to the park with my kids because it can't be asked, right?

I absolutely knew at that moment that I needed someone who had been there to help me to get there. I needed someone that inspired me. You've got to seek out people, probably outside of your network, and get support from real people who are achieving real success in your field. So right now, write their names down, go and find them and if you reach out to five of them. I guarantee one of them will be there for you, okay?

And don't want it for free – that's my final little point on that. Pay for it and you'll value it a lot more, believe me.

Step five is the one that separates the dreamers from the doers – it's called real structure and consistency.

You know loads of people will read this post and when they get to this point they’ll be thinking:

"Yeah, I'm going to go out and do this. This is going to happen. I'm going to stay focused. I know my vision. I'm ready to go. Yeah, this is going to be me this year."

And two weeks down the road they've forgotten all about it. Why? Because they didn't plan to meet their commitments.

You’ve got to commit to your commitments. Your word is your bond. If you say you're going to do something, freaking well do it, and make sure it's absolutely in your calendar.

My phone tells me when I'm doing the things that I need to do. I know my one thing, the thing that I need to be doing to move consistently towards the results that I want to achieve. That thing is in my diary and my phone tells me when to do it.

Of course there are loads of other things that we need to do, but there's normally one thing that will help you to create that momentum. Diarise it and commit to it.

This final step is that you have to get the structure and the consistency right. To return to the example of my client who’s absolutely smashed it out of the park, where others have absolutely smashed their businesses into the ground, he got this part right.

He just said, “I'm going to be in conversation. I'm going to be in five times more conversations next year than I was in the previous year.” He committed to it and he did it – consistently.

Being in those conversations was easy to manage. He put time aside in his diary every single day to have those conversations. When he had to miss a day, he made up the time later because he knew, just like I was on my fitness journey, where he wanted to go, where he wanted to end up. He knew why he needed to do it. And then he laid out these simple steps that I'm sharing with you now.

This is not about having a 10-hour coaching session and me giving you loads of guides to take away for you not to fill out, right? I'm giving you the ease of clarity.

I’m showing you how to make these things simple so they stick. Most self-employed people work 20 hours a day, if you're employed maybe less, right? I'm asking you to dedicate one hour to that consistent thing that you need to do so that the structure is in there.

So if I go back to my fitness journey for the last nine years, my ability to do more grew over time. For example, what it first started with was one session a week for three months, then it went to two sessions a week, then three sessions a week ,and now I train four four or five times a week on average. Why? Because I know that consistency is key and sustainable for me to achieve my goals for how I want to look, feel, and become.

You need to find your one thing and be consistent.

Follow these five steps to achieve success:

- Create a real, achievable vision for where you want to be

- Develop the mindset that will get you there

- Identify to the one thing you need to focus on

- Get real support from someone who’s been on that journey

- Create the structure and consistency to keep you moving forward.

- Without the vision, mindset, focus, support, and structure, you're just building this goal and dream on sand. Get these five pieces in place, and you’ll build your success on firm foundations.

This year is yours. You're going to make this happen if you just stick to these five things. Keep me posted. Head over to my YouTube channel and use the comments box under the video version of this post to add comments, ask questions, and share your progress.

I'll be there for you, believe me, I will. While you’re there, make sure you subscribe to my channel, make sure you hit the notification bell. We’ll build this community together. We're going to help support each other to reach our goals, and we're all on this journey. Good luck guys and I'll see you on the other side.