Your Goals Are Keeping You Stuck!

All businesses set goals – financial goals, productivity goals, expansion goals, sales goals. Most people set individual goals – weight loss, income increases, new and/or better “things”. And, as we approach every New Year many of us also set New Year’s resolutions.

Here’s the problem with this…most people don’t have a clue what the purpose of a goal truly is. It’s not, as many think, to obtain anything. Yet most businesses and individuals continue to set goals under the spell of this misguided understanding. And while having more may be desirable it is not the same thing as growing and becoming wildly more effective and productive. In actuality, most goal setting activities keep businesses and individuals stuck in versions of an existing status quo that only incrementally improves and that is instrumental in preventing them from truly achieving anything of note.

The true purpose of a goal is to grow not to get!

When examined honestly most of the goals we set today – whether business or personal – are set within a context of already knowing how to accomplish them. They are set with a strong reference to past achievements or progress and, often times, are set in response to other’s urging – shareholder’s expectation for returns on their investment or cultural criteria for success or attractiveness being great examples of this. While we may get what we wanted, goals set in this manner ensure that, at best, we achieve only incremental improvement over what we had before. Indeed, using our past or someone else's opinions as a primary reference for defining our goals creates a future that is not only tied to that past, it's also tied to other's opinions of what our success should be.

Here's the deal...if you already know how you’re going to achieve your goal there is no growth involved. At best all you’re doing is using and exercising a known set of competencies. There are no new skills or knowledge being developed; there are no new competencies or capacities being discovered or expanded. The unknown is where learning and growth occurs. The unknown is where awe and beauty and exhilaration lives. The bad news is that the unknown is uncomfortable and potentially scary, and it’s only outside of the comfort zone that growth is possible. Goals should make you feel uncomfortable! They will if they involve growth and expansion and not knowing. Goals set in this manner will be a clean break from what was and, done well, you, the goal setter, will have no clue about how to achieve this kind of goal. Significantly, this last point flies in the face of the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Time Bound) model many use for goal setting activities.

?Setting attainable and realistic SMART goals is the way most people and organizations go about it and this SMART methodology keeps us stuck in ways that ensures life and work become mundane and rote – this is anything but smart.

?When we look at the causes of employee disengagement in the workplace (upwards of 87% according to latest Gallup surveys) lack of meaningful work ranks near the top. Human beings want to grow! Life seeks full expression not yawns! We want to excel, we want to contribute in ways that allow us to feel unique and valued. We want the ways we spend our life’s energy to be meaningful. We want to have our breath taken away by a challenge that captures our imagination! Ultimately, we all want to feel exhilarated at the prospect of living inside our own skins. Well designed goals make this possible – goals that are designed to foster growth as opposed to goals that are designed with acquisition and predictable, incremental improvement as the primary motivator. You want the types of goals that challenge you and that design you and your organization to be more than you ever thought possible as you enter into the process of striving to manifest them.

Growal?

Goals specifically designed for growth are what I call a Growal?. They are formulated from different questions than are typically used to set goals designed for acquisition and predictable success. Instead of questions like “What do I or my shareholders want?” or “What would be a reasonable and attainable stretch objective?” being the starting point, we begin with questions such as “What would I absolutely love?”; “What problem needs to be solved that would best utilize who I am (or we are)?”; “How do I (or we) need to be different in order to be fully alive?”; “How do I want the world to be in 1,000 years and how do I need to be today, next year, and the years after in order to have that happen?”

We don’t know how to achieve the answers to these questions because we’ve never traversed this territory and because there is often no single “right” answer. Knowing the answer to “how will I (or will we) achieve our goal?" is a sure sign that your goal isn’t a Growal?. We grow as we attempt to come to grips with the implications of these questions. We find that parts of ourselves that have been underutilized or have been invisible begin to emerge and become relevant. Opportunities that we've never considered become visible and, because we’re now traversing unexplored territory while at the same time acquiring new skills and knowledge we will become uncomfortable. This discomfort is always a good (and usually unwelcome) sign that we’re moving into areas we’ve never been before. Make no mistake, you will fail in the process of learning to manifest your Growal?! However, keeping the Growal? in focus ensures that you’ll fail forward and will grow in the process. And, you just might end up acquiring something you thought impossible!

What a great way to live!

Find out more about Growals?and download a free copy of my ebook Tapping Into The Soul of Business: Key To Employee Engagement at www.blainebartlett.com