Category Archives: My goals

I have been working on my goals for a long time but seemed to stall at identifying what my top level vision was. Looking back on my notes it appears that I’ve had the content nearly there for a long time, but the thing that seemed to be stopping me was how to actually write my vision.

I have decided to use the format suggested by Jim Collins for organisation’s vision in his book Built to Last, which I remembered from the dissertation for my management diploma a few years ago.

The concept

According to Jim Collins a good vision consists of two components:

• Core ideology – what we stand for and why we exist
• Envisioned future – what we aspire to become, to achieve, to create

The core ideology includes two parts purpose and values, that remain constant. The purpose is the organisation’s reason for being; it is what motivates the employees beyond making money. The values are a set of guiding principles the organisation follows.

The envisioned future also includes two parts a 10 – 30 year audacious goal and a description of what it will be like when the organisation achieves the goal.

Having decided the next step in my goal development is to develop a personal mission statement I have been doing some research. Just about everything I’ve read suggests there are many benefits to developing a mission statement, but the key ones are greater self knowledge and improved decision making, so obviously the more effort I put into developing the mission statement the greater results I will see.

During my research I have identified several blog posts that appear to be useful and that I am intending to revisit to help me complete this stage of my goal identification exercise.

I have also seen many recommendations for 7 habits of highly effective people so I will move this up my list of books to reread, as well as How to make your dreams come true .

Despite a significant amount of resistance I finally completed the next stage of the goal setting tutorial, the brainstorming exercise.  The aim is to draw out the subconscious thoughts that show what you are really passionate about and therefore help identify the goals that will fill you with desire.  The idea is to brainstorm things that will improve your life in four areas; personal development, career and economic, adventure and contribution.  Then by reviewing each idea to assign the timescale by which you want to complete it, it is possible to select one goal in each area that you want to achieve with the shortest timescale.

I completed the brainstorm, but didn’t find it as thought provoking as the as the one I did as a mind map after completing the past, future and present review.  In fact, I think the main reason I procrastinated with this exercise is because I knew it wasn’t what I needed to do next.  I want a framework to define what I’m working towards in my life, a structure that helps me select my goals.

As I mentioned in the August Wheel of Life post, I have made progress on identifying my goals by completing the first exercise of the Goal Setting College tutorial. The exercise asks you to look back five years and score your life, score your present life and score your life five years in the future if you continue as present. This exercise highlighted some interesting features of my life; here are some of my thoughts.

Declining scores

The most obvious line on the chart is for Health and fitness but that wasn’t a surprise to me and explains why I chose to start working on this area at the beginning of August. However, it was a surprise just how much the lines decreases.

The next line is Human relationships which again isn’t too much of a surprise as it is something I’ve mentioned as part of the Wheel of Life posts. What is a bit of shock is my comment for the future “Not good at organising to meet so relationships decrease”. I can easily see this being the case in the future, but I find it scary that I may lose my close friends because I’m not good at organising to meet them (however I have to admit that Facebook is a great tool to keep in contact with friends).

While looking for a book to take on a business trip, I noticed I had previously bought another book on goals, How to Be Brilliant by Michael Heppell and as I’d never read it I packed it.

The first key message is to aim to achieve a balanced life and not concentrate on one aspect at the detriment of another. Michael Heppell suggests using a Wheel of Life as a measure of balance, but as a measure to show progress in your development.

I have previously done a similar exercise as part of a management diploma course. I asked people to score my skills against the company’s core competencies at the start and end of the course. I found it a useful visual tool to highlight weaker areas and to show where I had developed during the course.

My current wheel of life is:

It is fairly clear that I need to work on relationships, contributions and vision. However the good thing is that I had already subconsciously selected these as attention areas; but it is good to have my thoughts confirmed.

After writing my earlier post I decided to take action straight away and looked at possible books to help me. I choose Work Life: Achieve Your Goals which arrived at the weekend.

So far I have read the introduction and completed the questionnaire to assess my skills. The questions were multiple choice and asked things like What type of internal dialogues do you have? What is your attitude to the future? How do you maintain your work / life balance?

My answers were fairly convincing with half of them being As, which means

These answers suggest you feel that the locus of control is outside of you, and that whatever you try will probably not succeed. Whatever you would like to happen in the future, it is likely to remain a daydream unless you take action. To change things, follow the steps in the book and do the exercises (don’t just read them). Starting with small, achievable steps, build up some reference experiences of successful goal attainment.

So it looks like I was right to be examining this area of my life.