Article: Setting Goals and achieving them.

Organizations have many processes for setting goals:  ‘Set deadlines’, ‘Having a company strategy’, ‘Connect individual goals to the company’s growth strategy’, ‘Objective and Key Results’, ‘SMART goals’, ‘Business goals’, Program Increment Objectives, ‘Sprint goals’ and more.  Often those goals are not reached the way CEOs, VPs, Directors and Managers have hoped for.  

Therefore, let’s talk about goal setting.  I know that this topic is one of those where your eyes glaze over and you tell me “I have already learned this before.” or “We as an organization know how to do that.”.  However, I believe that most of us set goals but often do not reach them completely or in a timely manner or at all.  At least not those organizations I have worked for so far.  

The first part of the article I am going to describe goal setting fundamentals that apply to individuals as well as organizations. I use ‘ourselves’, ‘our’, ‘us’ and ‘we’ meaning both people and organizations.

I will focus on company goals setting during the next article 

What is the point of having goals?

The point of having goals is to evolve into a better version of ourselves.  The way to do that is to constantly be asking “How can we grow and stretch?” and  goals are the best way for us to do so. 

Before we formulate goals we have dreams of something that we want to achieve or become: “I am dreaming about sailing the Inside Passage from Seattle to Ketchikan'', or “We would like to become the largest bookstore in the world”.  When we first think about our dream, it may seem something that is unachievable, something way beyond our current abilities.  

The process of dreaming and thinking about it and setting goals will bring up a lot of thoughts that are preventing us from believing that we can reach the dream.  We have to work on those thought obstacles and remove them that are blocking us from reaching for our dreams.

Two Reasons for Setting Goals

1. We need to remove any blockages in our belief that we cannot reach the goal.  We need to believe that we can achieve anything.
2. We need to recognize that goals will give our brain direction.  That is very important since our brain likes to focus on something. Providing it with a goal so that we can reach something we want provides it with structure and supervision.

Process of setting goals

1- Place of Abundance

The first thing that we need to think about is do we even dream? Do we even allow ourselves to want? Do we think about the future? Do we plan on what we want to create? 

Many companies and individuals have done nothing of the sort.  They are so busy putting out fires and reacting to everything that is going on that they don’t have a plan of what they want to create.  They haven’t allowed themselves to dream.   

Most of us have only allowed ourselves to want from a place of scarcity, so every time we want something, it’s because we feel the lack of it.  We feel like we don’t have it.  When we start dreaming about it, it actually causes us pain, because dreaming is just reminding us that we don’t have it. It gives us a feeling of negativity and scarcity and the lack that we are having.  Often resulting in people and organizations to stop dreaming because we do not want to think about what we want versus what we have.  

We really need to do is come from a place of abundance.  

2- List of 20 Wants

One of the best ways to get to that place of wanting from abundance is to make a list of 20 things that we want. 

ACTION: Ready set go: Create your list, take 10 minutes and see what comes up.

I am sure you made a list of 20 things that you want and none of those is something you already have.   If so, redo the list and make sure that every other thing on that list has to be something that you really want but already have.  Most of us do not spend time wanting what we already have.  

Example: “We really want to have an eCom Web Page for customers to order and we do have that.  We want to deliver the order within 72 hours and we do.  We want that at least 10% of sales are coming in through eCom and we have those sales.  We want eCom to grow and it is growing.“ 

We do not think of wanting from a place of abundance.  We think of wanting something that we don’t have.  This is different than just being grateful for those things.  It is a different energy! 

We need to practice wanting what we already have.  

We can trick our minds a bit:

“We really want to have an eCom Web Page in the US and we do. We deliver to our customers within 72 hours and we do. And we really want to have eCom as well in Mexico.” Now, starting eCom in Mexico is something we have not done yet.  We add it in there with the things that we want and that we already have.   Then, on the other side of that, we could say, “We really want eCom in Canada and now we have it.”  This was something that we wanted for a long time and now we have it.  We made a small sandwich, the bread parts are things that we really want and already have, and in the middle we put the filling, something that we really want but do not have yet.  

Example: We really want to have an US eCom Web Page for customers to order and we do have that.  We want to deliver the order within 72 hours and we do.  We want that at least 10% of sales are coming in through eCom and we have those sales.  We want eCom to grow and it is growing.   We really want to have eCom in Mexico.  We really want eCom in Canada and now we have it.

Now, we are wanting from a place of abundance!

ACTION: Go on and do this for your 20 things

3- Get Specific

The next step is to get specific.  We talk about goals in the first person and in the present tense: “We are going to launch eCom Mexico in 2024 and we are going to have a TV commercial in Las estrellas (50% of Mexicans watch that channel), and we will air the commercial for 10 days, we are going to have specials for people signing up, etc.

The more specific we can get, the better.  Talk about timeframes, talk about dates, talk about amounts.  The only thing that we do not include at this stage is the how, because our brain will want to block us by trying to figure out the how by asking, “How are you going to do this? ” At this point, we do not need to know how.  We are  just going to think about the what and the when, and the amount.  

It is important that we stretch ourselves here and that we think bigger than we are actually ready to believe.  

4- Write it Down

We must write our goals and it details down using paper and pen.  Writing it down helps the brain to internalize all of it.  The brain is not only thinking about it, it is using muscle coordination to take the pen and its brain power to formulate the ‘sandwich’ with all its details.  Doing so assists the brain to reflect on the goal by writing it and one more time by reading what we just put on paper and we can look at it.  This is powerful! 

Warning.  As soon as we allow ourselves to want from a place of abundance, and we have written down our 20 wants, and have picked one of those and have written down that goal and made it very specific, fear, doubt and sometimes shame will come up.

5- Negative Emotions

Negative emotions have to come up.  If not, it probably means that we are not pushing ourselves beyond our current comfort zone.

Why are we feeling negative emotions?  

Our brain likes to maintain a status quo.  Evolution made it this way and it has served us humans well in the past when we had to survive.  The brain became very efficient and likes to consume the least amount of energy possible and therefore our brain likes to use default patterns and habits it has learned in the past.  Now, we are challenging the brain with our goal to learn something new.  Learning something new takes energy, lots of it and it does not like that.  As soon as we start introducing new things and stretching our brain and asking it to go outside of its comfort zone, negative emotions come up to hold us back.  The brain does not want you to work on your goal; it knows that this will take energy but it likes to maintain its low power consumption mode .

However, it is important to have negative emotions:

1. Emotions validate that the goal is a stretch goal, a goal worth the effort in pursuing.  
2. We will learn how to process through that negative emotion.
3. We will learn how to pay attention to our own mind as we go through goal setting. 

6- Negative Thinking

As we set our goal and we start noticing our negative emotion that will trigger negative thinking and we might sound like this, “I don’t know.  I’m not sure.  I’m confused.  Maybe this isn’t the right thing.  Maybe I should wait a while.  Maybe I should change my mind.”  Those thoughts will block us from pursuing our dreams.  

‘I don’t know’ is one of the biggest dream stealers.

 “I just don’t know.  I don’t know how.  I don’t know if this is what I want.  I don’t know if I could ever do this.” Those thoughts will appear combined with negative emotions. It helps to write them down on a sheet of paper and to look at them.  We  know that they are supposed to be here. We know that we need to be aware of them. We know that we need to get them out of our mind to move forward.  Writing them down is the best method to do so.

7- Go into the future and make it real

Go to the place where your dream and goal is already accomplished.  Now, look at the negative thoughts we just wrote down and address them from a place of the goal being completed, like that quote, “If you knew you couldn’t fail, what would you do?” Think about that.  If we go to the place where it is already done, we will be able to meet our mind from a place of knowing.  Then “I just don’t know how to do it.  I just don’t know if this is the right decision” has no more power over us.

8- Write your action plan. The How. 

We write our action plan looking from the future back to today. If negative thoughts come up and block us, we stop, go back and address those thoughts. We look at them and know that they are just thoughts.  We know that they are part of our brain in an effort to protect us.  It is an illogical process . We acknowledge it and go right past it.  

Once we have arrived in our mind in the future where that goal is already accomplished, then we do the action plan backwards. We walk back the path in our mind.  This provides us with more clarity and wisdom than doing it the other way.  The more detail we can give yourself about your action plan for your goal, the better.

Remember our Example: “We really want to have eCom in Mexico:  We are going to launch eCom Mexico in 2024 and we are going to have a TV commercial in Las estrellas (50% of Mexicans watch that channel) before the launch, and we will air the commercial for 10 days, we are going to have specials for people signing up during the first 30 days, etc.“

We already know how to do eCom in the US and in Canada. We already know a lot of things on how to do them. Now, we only have a few other hows to answer: language, regulations, culture, etc.  We can dig into those.   We can figure those out.  Break everything down into workable chunks. This is what we want to accomplish in a year, in a month, in a week. 

Then start executing your plan.

Go all in and learn along the way. We will learn while we are doing it. We will discover that the original ‘how’ does not work as expected. We will learn to discover new ‘hows’ along the way. We will fail and we will learn and that is the beauty of it. We will learn while doing it. Repetition and failing is learning and we never know by doing it how many ‘Strategic By-Products’ we will create along the way. 

We are putting ourselves out there. We are going to have things happen that wouldn’t happen otherwise.  We are going to meet people we wouldn’t have met.  We are going to have experiences we wouldn’t have. 

Achieving or not reaching the goal 

In that process we will become a more clear, in touch, evolved version of ourselves, whether we achieve our goal or not, because we go through the process of facing ourselves by pushing ourselves outside of our comfort zone. Meaning we will continue to set goals and stretch becoming a better version of what we are right now every single time.

How to do this process in an Organization

My next article will address how organizations can use this process to create their goals and reach them.