blog to discovery

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Having developed your goals its important to review them at a later date, particularly after any major changes in your life, to ensure they are still relevant; you don’t want to be working towards something you no longer want. Plus it is a useful reminder to ensure you are making progress.

I only developed a first draft of my goals in August 2008, but since then I’ve given birth to my first child so my life has changed significantly. Although I wrote my draft knowing I was pregnant, I had no idea what it was going to be like being a mother, so after four months I now feel ready to review my goals. Plus I’ve now had almost half of my maternity leave and would like to spend some of the remaining time to progress  my goals.

My first draft vision

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

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.

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.

Our choice of words, our choice of language, is vital for achieving brilliance

How to be brilliant

I am continuing to work through How to Be Brilliant and have just finished the section on positive action. Michael Heppell explains the difference between positive action and positive thinking. It has confirmed that it is good for me to be going through this exercise of identifying my goals, but it is the actions I take towards achieving them which will make the difference.

I really do believe that positive action, more than positive thinking, is the number one cornerstone to making a huge difference to the way that we live our lives. Let me tell you the difference. Positive thinking is great; yes, I’m a fan of it, but it doesn’t work all of the time. (Negative thinking – now that works 100 per cent of the time).

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:

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 faily convincing with half of them being As, which means

These answers suggest you feel that the locus of control is outside of you, amd that whatver you try will probably not suceed. 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, acievable steps, build up some reference experiences od successful goal attainment.