Do you often find yourself setting up goals for yourself and your career and never really having them work out for you? Why do goals often don’t work? And what should we do to actually set achievable goals? Here in this video, let me share with you some powerful insights in this video about setting up goals and making them for you and not against you.
Now traditional leadership theory says you have to have a goal. If you don’t have a goal, any road can get you there, you’re not gonna achieve it. Now there lies a problem. There lies a problem when it comes to you and when it comes to what you achieve. First and foremost, the way that goal setting and goals are often done in a corporate business context is often very demotivational. So let me kind of give you some aspects of it. If you achieve a goal in business, particularly in the professions in the law or accounting consultancy, what do you get given? You get given a bigger goal! (Cheers!) That’s often quite demotivational. That can often lead to game playing. You’ve hit your goal nine months into the year, so you don’t try harder to achieve anymore, ’cause you just know you’re gonna get a higher target, so what’s the motivation for doing that? The next thing is, if you have a goal, there’s no guarantee you’re gonna hit it. We often put having the goals there as the panacea. We’ve got a goal, we’re gonna do it. No. Unless you’ve got the actions behind it, or what I’m gonna come and talk about, the personal systems behind it, you’re not going to achieve that. And very often we’re given too big a goal. Soon as you’re asked to eat the elephant in one sitting, it can become overwhelming. And actually, if we’re a busy person, giving us a goal may actually demotivate us. So what is the solution here? Well, I love the work of James Clear in his book “Atomic Habits”. And in it, he talks about, yeah, goals are all really well and we rose to the level of our goal. So I’m not saying don’t have a goal, but actually, we fall to the level of our personal systems. So what do I mean by a personal system? A personal system is a routine, the underlying habit that underpins us to achieve high performance every day. So what are some of those habits? Well, first of all, there are four foundational habits that you’ve always gotta prioritize. How to get enough high quality sleep. How to make sure you’re eating the right stuff that’s gonna fuel your body, and make you feel good in the right way. Thirdly, it is about making sure you do exercise. Our bodies weren’t made for sitting all day. And then fourthly, it is about putting in recharge time. We’re not machines. We can’t go 100% all day. We’ve gotta plan around our energy levels. And also making sure we’ve got time to feed the soul, and for clarity. So actually when it comes to goal setting, I’m not saying don’t do goal setting. What I’m saying is do it in a way that works for you. But make sure you prioritize, building those underpinning personal systems in order to make sure you have the actions to achieve those goals.
