Ok before I start getting complaints, the headline is only really there to get your attention. Following on from my recent posts on goals and goal seeking, I promised that I would delve further in to the how, the actual nuts and bolts of building a list of goals that will motivate you to reach them.
Before I start on that subject, I would like to talk a little about business.
“What has that got to do with it?” you ask. Well, most people that I tell this story to find it useful in setting goals, so I’ll tell it anyway and you can skip right by it if you are bored.
Anyone who has studied business or worked in sales and marketing will have heard of the gap analysis. Do a quick search on one of my favourite sites, Wikipedia, and you get the following definition:
“The Gap analysis is a business assessment tool enabling a company to compare its actual performance with its potential performance. This provides the company with insight to areas which have room for improvement. The process involves determining, documenting and approving the variance between business requirements and current capabilities.”
What does that mean? Well companies use a gap analysis to determine their business strategy. It’s a three stage approach and it works like this:
1. Look at the current business performance, sales, profit, people, skills, anything that you can measure that gives you a feel for how the business is doing.
2. Decide where you want the business to be in 2, 5 or 10 years’ time. What does that look like in terms of the performance criteria you measured in step 1? So you might say sales of X, profit of Y, increase personnel by 20%, develop a software development team etc etc. These are effectively your goals. By quantifying them it makes it easier to measure success, remembering that:
Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality. (George Santayana)
3. Decide how you are going to get from point A (current situation) to point B (your goals), developing a strategy, which is essentially a set of small, achievable steps that, combined, will help the company succeed.
I wonder if you can see how this approach can help you achieve your goals?
So let’s have a look at how the gap analysis works for people.
First of all I would turn the gap analysis around, because I think that it is much more likely to be a successful activity if you don’t begin by focusing on all of the things that you don’t like about where you are. I’d then add in a little time to get yourself in the right frame of mind, and then off you go.
1. Clear your mind. The perfect time to do this would be smack in the middle of one of Maslow’s Peak Experiences. Climb a hill, watch the sun set, play with your children, anything that takes away the bothers and the negativity of the day, find an optomistic state to play in.
2. Think about when have you been happiest? Think about the peak experiences in your life. What is the recurring theme? Family? Travel? Business success? Maybe a combination of those and more.
3. Fantasise! You might want to imagine what it would look like if you were happy all of the time. In this fantasy, where are you? Who is with you? What are you doing? When the image is vivid and you are really enjoying the fantasy, feeling yourself there, take a photo of it with your mind, for future use. Then write it down!! That fantasy of your super life is your set of goals, and everything that you do from this moment on will be designed to get you there.
4. Return to Earth. Preferably without a bump, take a look at what you wrote down with fresh eyes, and think about where you are right now. Write that down on another piece of paper. But don’t stay depressed because now comes the fun bit. Leave those pieces of paper for a while, maybe a few days, maybe a few weeks. That image of you will be in your conscious thought and you may refine it, question it over time. You may think objectively about where you really are and start thinking about how you will reach your goals.
5. Plan! When you are feeling happy, sit down with those two pieces of paper, and start to think about how you join where to are to where you want to be. Just write down whatever comes to mind, pay little attention to reality at this point. What you may end up with is ideas and steps to attaining that goal. Keep working until you have broken those steps down in to small chunks, none of which seem too daunting on their own. Only now should you elminate those steps that defy the basic laws of the universe, and replace them with more practical ones. Now decide what order you need to do them in, and, most importantly, how you will know when you’ve achieved them?
So there you have it. By this point you have made a huge step towards your goals - you now have a plan to reach them! Ok so it may not be perfect, and you will learn how to do this better over time, but imagine how different it would feel to have a plan of how to be happy, when compared to someone who leaves it to chance?
Next time I will talk about the practicalities of achieving those little steps every day. Thanks primarily to Brian Tracy for this rant, with a little bit of Richard Bandler and Jamie Smart thrown in with four years’ MBA….
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