Crayon, Papyrus, Pen to Paper: Write Down Goals to Achieve
I’m going to tell my cubicle mate it is not okay to speak loudly on her cell phone seven times a day about what Karen did last night at the party. I’m going to get a raise from my stingy boss ‘cause I run this place anyway. I’m going to dig deep and help Bob from marketing edit those book-length monthly reports.
What do you want to achieve in 2019? Have you been plotting and planning to make significant changes to improve your career? Have any of those goals actually happened? If not, you might be doing too much thinking and not enough inking!
It turns out that one key to achieving goals is to put pen to paper or fingertips to keys, and the more specific you get the better. “Vividly describing your goals in written form is strongly associated with goal success”, according to a recent Forbes article, “and people who very vividly describe or picture their goals are anywhere from 1.2 to 1.4 times more likely to successfully accomplish their goals.”
So what’s the big deal? Why does writing down goals make them easier to achieve?
Forbes reports that the reason is two-fold. First, writing things down commits the idea to external storage making the goal (idea) easier to access. But there is also a scientific reason for written goal success. It’s called encoding.
Forbes suggests that writing down goals encodes the information in our brain. “This is a “biological process by which the things we perceive travel to our brain’s hippocampus where they’re analyzed. From there, decisions are made about what gets stored in our long-term memory and, in turn, what gets discarded.”
So how does one go about it? Grab a crayon and scribble a few ideas? Well, it’s almost that easy according to Matt Mayberry, a Maximum Performance Strategist (and former NFL linebacker for the Chicago Bears). In the Entrepreneur article, ‘The Power of Writing Down Your Goals’ Mayberry writes that turning ideas into commitments is an easy three-step process.
1. Set a timer for three minutes and write down every goal you can think of.
2. Look at the list and choose a “game-changer goal”.
3. “Write down 20 to 50 things you need to do to achieve that major goal of yours.”
Ta-dah, you have an action plan! And, actions are the success measure for every goal.
For some, the three-step method will be the magic elixir, but most managers need a bit more guidance to turn goals into career gold. Some of you set lofty goals last year only to let them linger in your mind like puffy cotton-candy clouds eventually eaten up by more pressing priorities. This year can be different! Turn those goals into actions with the webinar- Goal Getting – 9 Proven Strategies to Set Goals and Actually Achieve Them.