This week’s Pearl of Leadership Wisdom is on…….

Goal Setting

“The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.”

- Michelangelo

Our success is measured by the extent to which we reach our goals.

It’s easy to write a goal, but effective goal setting is a wee bit more involved.

Does our goal tell us what to do tomorrow? If it doesn’t we may never get started. So we need to develop smaller, sub-goals, e.g. 90 day goals.

Do we fully understand what’s in it for us – all the benefits gained and losses avoided by achievement of our goal? This drives our motivation. Write them all down, by hand.

Have we considered the barriers that may block us? Working out how to overcome them beforehand makes us much more psychologically robust when barriers appear.

Have we considered the critical actions we need to do to achieve our goal and make sure that every day we do enough of them and do them first?

We must track our progress using a measure.

Developing an affirmation is beneficial: a positive statement in the present tense that we can believe, for example, “I am a winner!” We say this to ourselves every morning. We feel stupid at first, but it passes.

Visualisation – last Tuesday night on the radio I heard the footballer Wayne Rooney say “the day before a match I ask the kit man what strip we’ll be wearing. Then I imagine scoring a goal wearing that strip, over and over, in my head”. That’s visualisation.

This is effective goal setting. And success is goal-directed action. So let’s give ourselves the best chance of success. Aim high!

Get a Goal Planning Sheet by emailing me: mark@weareppp.com

Next week…..High Payoff Activies

Achieving goals is all about identifying our High Payoff Activities – and doing them – all of them. Regardless of our comfort zone.