CREATING POWERFUL GOALS

“A goal properly set is halfway reached”- Abraham Lincoln

“You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream” - CS Lewis

“If you don't know where you are going, you will probably end up somewhere else” - Lawrence J. Peter

Hello all,

Recently I was leading a mentoring program for Females in IT&T (www.fitt.org.au) and some of the conversation came to setting goals.

As a coach with My Performance Coach, I often find that people are reluctant to set Powerful, Inspiring Goals prior to coming to coaching. Sometimes they have set goals and have had mixed success. Some people don’t even think they are unnecessary!

Do you seem to have an ongoing list of goals that you achieve some of and not others?

Think about all those well intentioned new year resolution you’ve set. How often did you go hard and achieve them? The odd one or two? Well you are not alone! Research shows about 20% of new year resolutions get achieved!

Goals are about taking RESPONSIBILITY for your life and your outcomes! Goals give you a sense of purpose, a direction and should be your inspiration. Goals help you establish what you will do, be and have in this world!! Without goals you are just aimlessly walking through life (like you are sleepwalking), hoping, that somehow, someway, you’ll get something that you want and if you don’t, well at least you can blame (them) out there somewhere!

Even though evidence suggests that Goal Setting is a significant part of achieving great success, most people really are not clear on how to effectively set goals to bring their ultimate future into reality.

Goals need to be realistic yet inspiring. They need to be powerfully motivating and come from a place of true toward motivation! Setting goals ensures you know exactly what you want to achieve! This creates the destination.

If you think of a goal as a destination on a map and if we assume you know exactly where you are today, then the route will become clear. The map also helps us see the different routes and if we get diverted or come across unanticipated obstacles we can see how to get back on track to get to our destination. We are also able to effectively measure our success towards our destination and continually motivate ourselves forward.

Setting inspiring goals from a place of strong motivation, enables you to get into the powerful habit of setting and achieving goals. When you start to achieve goals regularly your self-confidence soars!

There are a number of goal setting techniques which I will outline below.
However, any skill or techniques are only useful insofar as you have your head absolutely in the game.

I am often amazed at how many people (including myself on the odd occasion :) delude ourselves into believing we are good to go and just go blindly forward – sleepwalking! When it comes to inspirational, life changing or world changing goals, you need a whole other level of mindset!

Mandella didn’t become President of South Africa by having small uninspiring goals!

Phelps didn’t become an Olympic legend, with a goal of just 10 laps this morning!

Nothing can stop the with the right mental attitude from achieving goal; nothing on earth can help with the wrong mental attitude -Thomas Jefferson

As a coach and NLP practitioner, I spend a lot of my time studying success. I do so to assist myself and my clients emulate the best mindsets, skills and behaviours to achieve great success. So far, I haven’t come across anyone who has achieved phenomenal success, that didn’t have big inspirational goals. Some may say they didn’t articulate them, but they definitely were absolutely crystal clear on their goals in their mind and actions. You CANNOT achieve great success on luck alone!

Creating Powerful and Inspiring Goals

The first thing you need to know is what inspires you and what are you passionate about?

I find many people who come to coaching, have no idea to begin with. Many people don’t understand their value systems and are not feeling particularly inspired in life. Hint, if you have lots of “woulda, shoulda, coulda’s’ in your thinking, then that’s not it!!! Some people feel as though nothing in particular is inspirational. If you fall into this category I strongly recommend you consider a coach to assist you to move forward as this thinking is a strong resistance strategy to moving forward. I have watched people in this space time and time again, get disheartened, depressed or plain give up on things and just exist through life!

NO matter how much you think you want to achieve your goals your mindset will sabotage you if your motivation is not fully aligned with your vision!

STEP 1: Create a Long Term Vision. Think of a specific date 5 -30 years from now. What is it that you want to achieve? What will you be doing? Who will you be doing it with? How will you be doing it? Create a big picture vision in your head. It is often useful for whole of brain acceptance and thinking to create a vision and story board. This enables immediate recognition of your vision.

STEP 2: Create specific Goals. Now create goals that will help you achieve this vision. It is often more useful to start with the big hairy audacious goals (BHAGs) and work backwards! If you have done this well, you should have goals from now til your vision. Sometimes the medium goals are not clear to start off with. DON’T WORRY about that!! All will become clear. Just get clear on the big end goals and exactly how you are going to make a start!

STEP 3: Regular Review and Assessment. Being crystal clear in your focus is about 90% of the achievement of the goal. Take your eye off the ball and loads of nasty things can get in your way. Just ask Donald Trump! The key to achieving ALL goals is the regularly review where you are at!
And I don’t mean a quick checklist in your head. I mean a full and thorough analysis of your successes, how you got them, when you got them, what helped you. And thoroughly analysing your failures (which is only learning forward if used correctly) – what did you do, how did it go wrong (cause-effect), what caused it to go wrong, what significantly can you learn and apply.
Review your strategy and goals regularly, taking in your learning forward failures and see how quickly you start to tick off those goals!

Goal Setting Tips

• Ensure each goal is stated in the positive: Express your goals positively – To become a well known and admired successful business owner by 2018.

• Think BE, DO, HAVE: When thinking of goals think about what do you want to be (position, state of mind etc), Do (actions and behaviours) and HAVE (stuff you want)

• Only set goals that you have 100% power over: (see previous blog) I.e. how what you do (mindset, actions, behaviours) will get you what you want. Setting goals where you have to rely on others or random events to occur is not helpful to you and enables you to easily blame external factors for lack of achievement!

• Be Specific: Set a specific goal, with specific time frames. This is not as easy as it sounds. It needs to be rich in detail leaving you in no doubt about exactly what it is you are trying to achieve. Time fames can be amended later if necessary. I can’t tell you the number of times people write non-specific goals but convince themselves otherwise.

DO NOT fall into the too hard trap, so I will just make it fuzzy. If you set fuzzy goals, you will get fuzzy outcomes – end of story!! If you have a very specific goal, you will know exactly how, when, where and what you are going to be doing to achieve it. Remember, Olympians don’t have fuzzy goals like “come in first place! Or win GOLD” - They set very, very specific outcomes and know exactly what performance requirements will enable them to achieve their BHAG’s!

• Chunk it down: Make sure you chunk down your goals to bite size pieces. Create lots of milestones to celebrate on your way to fabulous success!

• Prioritise: Do have several goals with the same time frames and priorities. This will just get you into procrastination mode and you may feel overwhelmed!

• Write your goals down: If your goals ain’t written, they ain’t likely to get achieved (or the big ones in any event). People have reluctance to write them down and display them proudly because they already DO NOT believe it is possible!! If that’s the case, forget all I have said and go back to bed!

• Be realistic, but INSPIRATIONAL: It is vitally important to set goals that you THINK you can achieve. Note my language. What you think you can achieve! If you think you can’t achieve, I will lay money on the bet that you WON’T achieve it. Seen it all toooooo many times! So set inspirational, yet realistic goals to you. They should not be easily attainable, and you should have to put in a good level of effort and change to achieve the goals (otherwise they aren’t going to motivate you properly). Too hard and you’ll give up at the first couple of hurdles, too easy and you just achieve mundane little tasks! Remember great things don’t happen with minimal effort!

• Identify your BARRIERS now: Figure out what is going to stand in your way of achievement. BIG CLUE – Your thinking and behaviour will account for 95% of the barriers – fear, procrastination, etc. Also identify external barriers. KNOW how you will overcome them, otherwise, they will be effective in keeping you from your dreams! If you are not willing to overcome obstacles and barriers through hard work & persistence, again, I suggest you stay in bed and forget your goals!

Until next time, Remember - Life is not about finding yourself...Life is about creating yourself!

TIME EFFECTIVE OR DEFECTIVE – PART TWO

Please read part One of this blog first and then complete the Time Effective Template Exercise, to gain the most benefit from this blog entry.

So how did you go with completing the template? To get the most out of the exercise you need to do it for at least 7 days, ideally 14 days! If you did the exercise for at least a week then you should have some very interesting data to say the least!

The first step is to analyse your data in terms of themes. Break down into themes and number of hours you spent on each theme. Make sure the themes are distinct (e.g. team meetings, project meetings, writing reports, HR admin, email etc...) This will give you some great analysis in itself!

Now ask yourself the following from your questions. Be very honest with yourself as it is only you, that you will be fooling ;) -

What are you spending your most of your time, energy and effort on?

Are those tasks absolutely critical to overall achievement of the big picture goals? I.e. The big picture goal may be to grow the business by 20% this financial year – are all the tasks you focused on delivery you that outcome or are they time distracters and wasters?

How important REALLY are the tasks you rated as important, relevant or critical? Be ruthless here! If it didn’t get done what is the absolute worst thing that happens?) If you are convinced that all these tasks are important, then the next question is do they really need to be done by you?

If you have rated the majority of tasks on your list as important talk it through with someone who will play devils advocate for you. We so often kid ourselves about our reality. Getting an external reality check is vital – especially when YOU think you are RIGHT and not fooling yourself!! You may be filling your life with little tasks that you convince yourself are important, to avoid something more significant! Be honest with yourself here, because the only person you are kidding is yourself!

Or are you spending your time on low importance, cumbersome tasks? If so, ask yourself why? What exactly are the benefits of you doing this? ALL behaviour has benefits, even the negative ones like procrastination! Are the tasks even actually worth doing in the first place? We so often waste time on idiotic tasks – like reading a 150 page report that is exceptionally interesting but actually has no application to the achievement of my goal. These things are the greatest time wasters. Facebook and other social media can be put into this bucket. Yes, I know there is a whole industry on how to make money via social media – but are you really making money? If you are making money on social media tasks then one assumes you would have classed it as critical not low importance!!!!


You may have caught onto a theme here. Your thinking and your perception is what is causing you to be time defective! As mentioned in my last blog in literally took me years to get real and work out that time effectiveness is a state of mind, a mind discipline exercise not a process or step by step how to!!!

In his book “7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, Stephen Covey has a great model to help you work through what to focus on as important.

Covey states we each have a wide range of concerns in our lives – everything from our family, health, careers, work problems, national and economic problems etc. This make up your Circle of Concern. The things that concern us make up our Circle of Concern. Clearly everyone’s circle of concern will be unique to them!

There are things within our Circle of Concern, that we have no power over, real or otherwise. The things we do have power over become a smaller Circle of Influence. Control falls into three categories – “direct control (problems involving our own behaviour); indirect control (problems involving other people's behaviour); or no control (problems we can do nothing about, such as our past, or situational realities)”.
To become more effective, the trick is to focus your energy, time and effort to ONLY focus on those things that sit in your Circle of Influence. I.e. the things that we can do something about! Things that you can do and be. As you focus on your Circle of Influence you create more positive, enlarging, and magnifying energy, causing it to increase”.

Basically the model reminds us that any problem is ultimately within, not with-out or external to us! Therefore, we can empower ourselves and create and control our reality. By empowering yourself from the inside-out you permit yourself to be different, and thereby affect positive change in what's out there! For example, I can be more resourceful, I can be more diligent, I can be a better delegator. You then back it up with skills and action and you change your reality!

We can break down things within your control or Covey’s Circle of Influence, to three main areas of focus.

Effective Attitude/Mindset – E.g. Managing your thoughts around fear, motivation or lack thereof, procrastination, perceived importance of tasks, perceived control over the environment, perceived pressure (time or otherwise), seeking perfection when good enough is good enough!

Effective Managing Tasks – Manage your Meetings, Interruptions and Diaries/Schedules

Effective Skills/Behaviours - Setting Goals and Priorities, Delegation, Communication, Discipline

In the next few blogs I discuss how to be more effective in some of these areas within your control.

If you do these exercises and are still having issues with time management, you have a deeper meta program operating that is self sabatoge.  The best way I know to deal with that is through a qualified NLP/CBT Coach.

Good Luck