It All Starts With Goal Setting

This book excerpt is a story which continues across two chapters titled "Principles vs Goals' and "Breaking Through The Paradox of Goal Setting" of my award winning book "IN/ACTION: Rethinking the Path to Results", available to buy online where you buy books. You can read more about me?here?and more about the book?here.

A major indirect cause of our action bias lies in the way we set and pursue goals. Goal setting is an intrinsic part of human behavior and a necessary tool to drive progress. However, the goal-setting process for most of us inherently leads to incomplete goals. Our tendency to pursue our goals creates the compounding effect of chasing action while chasing out- comes based on flawed and incomplete goals. Sometimes, though, life teaches us to broaden our goals.

As a child of immigrant parents, Anu Sethi grew up with an ambitious life plan. She was always an A-plus student and was salutatorian in high school. She got accepted to all the colleges she applied to and finally chose Columbia Barnard College. She was a top performer at her first job with Morgan Stanley in New York City. A few years into her career, she completed her part-time MBA and switched to a job with Booz & Company, one of the top-tier global management consulting firms, in New York City. The goal was clear in Sethi’s mind: “In six years I’m going to make a partner or principal. Then I’ll get poached by a firm as their head of a function or strategy group. And that’s it; my career would be set.”

Why the specific route of management consulting? “The whole idea of management consulting is that you get to leap-frog your career forward. Instead of getting somewhere in ten years,” which for her would be a senior operating role in a company. “You might get there in six years.”

The 2008 recession disrupted her journey. Sethi was laid off from her job. Not wanting a large gap on her resume, she sprang into action and quickly found another job, which unfortunately got monotonous and boring. How did she solve that? “I knew that I wanted to do something else, but I didn’t know what. So, I decided to take a break.” During the 2008 crisis, a career break was imposed on her, and she rebounded with her next job only to find out it wasn’t fulfilling. She told me, “This time I took a break consciously to figure out what’s next.” That break lasted five years. During that time, she got married, had twins, and discovered meditation and spirituality. With time and a shifting set of life experiences, her goals evolved to be more holistic to include well-being and spiritual growth.

The younger Sethi was not an outlier in being laser focused on her career goals. Recent research from MorningConsult surveyed young Gen Z adults, the generation born between 1997–2012, and found that making money and being successful were two universally important life goals, more important than friends, family, or hobbies.

In my experience and observation, a paradox exists in the process of goal setting, in both personal lives and business. A well-written goal is clear and measurable. And yet the moment we put a measurement on it, we limit it. As soon as we set a goal of three times revenue growth in three years, we have limited the possibility to three times (and not ten times). We have also ignored the many other factors that go into a well-run business: employee and customer satisfaction, social responsibility, and so on. In personal life, we focus on professional goals, such as making a million dollars by age thirty. We tend not to include well-being, good health, and relationships. We take them for granted.

Most of our goals are narrow and rigid. This can lead to unexpected disappointments, both in personal life and business.?

.

.

.

One way to avoid the pitfalls of narrow and rigid goals is to broaden them upfront. If not, perhaps life will do it for you as was in the case of Sethi from the previous chapter. Returning to her story, we last saw her taking a voluntary break during which she built a family and found a spiritual practice. Five years into her break, she decided to get back into corporate life. In prepping her resume, she reached out to a mentor from Booz, her former employer. He made introductions that ultimately led to a senior director of corporate strategy and business development role for a marketing firm. She laughed as she told me, “That’s exactly where I wanted to land, after six years in consulting! The added five years gave me experiences and a spiritual perspective on life that most people get when they are in their sixties or when they retire.” She had chosen the management consulting route to leapfrog the conventional growth pattern in corporate careers. She narrowly focused her goals on professional success. After being knocked off her journey to her goals once, she embraced the power of pausing to figure out a broader and more holistic set of goals. And in doing so, even though she hadn’t intended to, she managed to leapfrog spiritual progress!?

If you enjoyed this excerpt, share it with your network! I love hearing from my readers, please drop a line if any of this resonates with you. You can also buy the book at?Amazon,?Barnes and Noble?or wherever you buy books online.