What's Wrong with Goal Setting?

Well, you’ve been to the workshop and have created your WIG – Wildly Important Goals, or BHAGS – Big Hairy Audacious Goals or whatever other label the goal setting seminar has given them. You are pumped! You are on fire and ready to start a chain reaction of goals which includes some kind of visual reminder – a Vision board, a whiteboard, or a chart of sorts, it includes techniques for landing upon those incredibly important goals and a rationale – Your big “Why”.

You are now a convert, so you come home preaching your gospel of goal-setting to your spouse or anyone who will stop long enough to listen. You start: “You see, goals are like magnets.” Using a horseshoe magnet and some paper clips as your object lesson, you show them, excitedly that Goals need to have two basic elements to work as the magnet that draws you into your preferred future: “They need be large. The large magnet exerts its own attraction on those paper clips, but (make sure you emphasise this through the wise use of the pregnant pause) they also have to be near enough for the magnet to work.  That’s why long term goals rarely achieve the adrenalin-pumping energy that it requires to achieve them. Now watch as I bring the magnet closer to the paper clips. Bingo! The paperclips have no chance. They are brought into the gravitational force of the magnet and you achieve your goals! It’s that simple!”

Is it that simple?

Now, your vision-board is hung on the wall, and your goals are sorted in priority, in time sequence (short-term goals and long-term goals) and in the areas where those goals matter. You have physical goals – the sculptured abs, money goals – the million dollars in the bank, etc. etc.

The problem with all of the above is not that it’s wrong, it just isn’t enough!

We don’t need another Goal Setting seminar. We need a Goal Getting seminar. We need to realise that just “putting it out there for the universe” is little more than wishing for a better future.

Your life will not attract what you hang out to the universe to see. You won’t necessarily attract what you want, but you will definitely attract more of who you are.  People, circumstances, opportunities will appear when you are ready to receive them. This explains why many people who win the lottery end up dead broke within two years. Their character, skills and personality haven’t caught up with their windfall.

The other problem with Goal setting is that it is future focused, and while you’ve heard (maybe in the same seminar) that the subconscious can be fooled into thinking that you have already achieved those important goals, the fact is: In the present moment, you haven’t. So you can go on in your little fairy land, fooling your subconscious, but it won’t hasten your achievement of the things in the front of your diary or on your vision board.

Goals aren’t there to mark out some distant (or short-term) future. They exist to get you so excited that you change your behaviours now! According to Richard Robbins “goals don’t tell us where to arrive tomorrow, they tell us what to do today.”

When you work backwards from your goal to the present day, the question emerges: “What do I have to do today in order to be in that place tomorrow?” When goals change your priorities, your habits, your behaviours, then they become useful.

We have now changed our workshops to incorporate “life-hacks” to help you change habits and behaviours. That’s the realistic way, once you have been inspired by a large goal, to go out and get it!

Mario Cortés heads BizNet Australia Pty Ltd and runs workshops for Corporate Clients who want to create more efficiency and effectiveness in their work lives through innovative techniques.
Contact him on: [email protected] or telephone: +61 473523824
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