Knowing What You Want

Words: 1,061 Reading time: 3 minutes 32 seconds

Kelly was like a lot of teenagers; poised on the threshold of her future, she couldn’t decide. With so many opportunities open to her, how was she to know which one was the right one? Some of her teachers advised her to seek out more information. It didn’t help her. It multiplied her options without suggesting what her direction might be. Where was she to go from here?

You might expect me to recommend using a coach at this point, but where Kelly was concerned, I hesitated. When it comes to goal-setting most coaches conduct a mental version of the three-card trick. And their sleight of hand starts with the very first words out of their mouths – decide on your goal.

They have used that “D” word - decide. Kelly could now wait with baited breathe for all to be revealed. Alas, she would wait in vain. Nothing more is ever said about deciding. That particular stumbling block is deftly avoided as they move on to explaining how the decision should be worded to best effect; securing necessary resources; identifying obstacles; systemizing effort and … whoa!

The Starting Point
Let’s go back. Tell us about the start. How do we decide? What is it that tells us when we know what we want? Isn’t this is the key to the whole exercise?

If what we decide is decided very well, then the rest is merely mechanism for the most part. If we can decide powerfully, then the force will be with us…to coin a phrase.

When we are asked to name what we want, given a few minutes, most of us can come up with a list. Some of the items will be banal, some wild, some wonderful, some small and personal, some immense and municipal. If given more time we could even extend the list. But, out of all the things listed, how do we decide?

The Should-y Life
Part of the difficulty we face may be because, if we think about it, we rarely ask for what we want. Instead we live a life based on “should” and the “should” is bequeathed to us by others – I should exercise more, I should get a qualification, I should own a bigger house, I should get a better job, I should work fewer hours.

Getting from our shoulds to our authentic wants can be a problem. Recognizing that to be happy, we must live the life that we truly want to live, and that we are the only one who can truly determine what is right, doesn’t really help. How do we know what that is?

Even with an extensive list we may still not know what we want. Perhaps we don’t know all the options and what implications each might hold. Selecting just one want may exclude the possibility of fulfilling some other want, since they could be mutually exclusive.

Like buses, our wants often come in fleets. A person having just a single want is rare. Such a person may not exist at all. So, if we end up with conflicting wants – as seems likely – the question of how we know which one to pick stays with us.

What About Values?
One hypothesis is that values have great strength in determining human goal direction. Through our values we perceive important truths about life. These ideals are then reinforced by our emotions and feelings, and those sentiments create a vital passion that we hope to realize in our lives.

Some great human values include things like tolerance, openness, respect for the individual, and teamwork, which derive in part from some of the higher spiritual values like love, beauty, and truth. At certain points, the human and spiritual values come together in concepts such as selflessness, self-givingness, and gratitude

S.H.Schwartz carried out some extensive research and extracted six “universal” moral values, trustworthiness; respect; responsibility; fairness; caring; and citizenship.

However, I am not convinced that this helps people like Kelly a great deal.

A number of our wants may serve the same value – so how do we choose between them?

And any one of our wants may serve one or more of our values – so how does that help us know what we really want?

And should our wants cause some universal values to compete, how are we to rank them?

Hedonism
Steve Pavlina, often a source of inspiration, advises, “Treat goal-setting as a way to enhance your present reality, not as a way to control the future. Stay in the present and consider how this goal can improve the quality of your life right now. Not a year from now. Not five years from now. Not even tomorrow. Right now this very minute. Does it give you hope? Does it inspire you? Does it promise solutions to some current problems?”

As seductive as this might sound at first glance, all Steve has done is shift the timeframe. The questions raised earlier about mutually exclusive wants, conflicting wants and competing wants still remain.

Confession Time
Kelly is a person much like the rest of us. Most of us don’t know what we want. We only know what we don’t want, so we spend all our time moving away. And not knowing which path best fits our appetites, abilities, skills and personality doesn’t matter, because away is in any direction from the point of departure.

Once we are in motion, regardless of the drive, our perspectives will change. Whatever we start out wanting, or not wanting, may appear more or less attractive depending on where our journey has taken us.

Not knowing is OK. Pushing yourself to decide more quickly, more rationally, more firmly will result in beating yourself up to no good purpose.

In our task- and success-driven world, much is written about what people need to do and think, but very little about how they ought to be. To be truly fulfilled Kelly first needs to understand herself. Only when she does will she be able to follow Georgia Anne Geyer advice which is, “Follow what you love. Don’t deign to ask what “they” are looking for out there. Ask what you have inside. Follow not your interests, which change, but what you are and what you love…”

And even when you are sure you know what you want, you will still have no idea of what to cook for dinner.

Being SMART - S is for...

Words: 1,000 Reading time: 3 minutes 20 seconds

The SMART acronym is past its sell-by date and highly ineffective, but still heavily in use by unthinking project managers, unimaginative trainers and uninspiring coaches.

Acronyms and abbreviations are supposed to add colour and texture to the written and spoken word and to life in general. Their purpose is to assist in memory retention and learning.

They lose all of that whenever they become trite, confusing or uncertain. SMART has managed all three.

Those that are still trotting out this tired old carthorse claim that the goal, task or project must meet these criteria to be effective. But just what are the criteria?

There is zero agreement on what SMART is supposed to stand for. That’s why it’s such a useless tool. Just take the ‘S’ of SMART. A very quick search on the internet yields us the following alternatives for use in formulating our objectives:

Self-controlled; self-managed; self-owned; sensible; significant; simple; specific; strategic; stretching; straightforward; succinct; synergistic; systematic

This list is by no means exhaustive, but how helpful are even these few candidates as possible progenitors of ‘S’?

Self-controlled and self-managed are very close in meaning. Neither adds very much to the process of formulating the goal. If the path to the objective is not in our control, then it’s likely to be someone else’s objective rather than ours. It’s the same with self-owned. As possible roots for our ‘S’ they are little better than tautological.

Sensible? Some of the most awesome and inspiring goals were and are anything but sensible: climbing Everest; deep-sea exploration; curing AIDS; world peace.

Significant or strategic might seem acceptable after that last list, but many goals we set ourselves are neither of these in the great scheme of things. Will every single one of our goals be really significant or strategic – even to us? They may well be worthy, useful and desirable; but hugely significant and / or strategically imperative? I think not.

To be effective our goal must be simple or straightforward. Really? So a goal that is not simple or straightforward is not effective? Well, that’s it for mankind, isn’t it?

Actually, no. Many of the goals we set ourselves are complex, yet we follow them and achieve them despite the doomsayers of SMART. The Large Hadron Collider was built under the Swiss countryside. I have no idea what it does, how it does it or why anyone who does know might want to, but that highly complex objective was achieved.

Specific is a favourite candidate for the ‘S’. The case is that the goal needs to be concrete, detailed, precise, explicit, focused and action-oriented with a well-defined result.

Lovely, but I can think of many huge goals, all achieved, that had none of those characteristics. Churchill’s stated objective in 1940 was to win the war. It was as vague as that. He had no idea exactly how that could be done, when it would be achieved, or what form the victory might take. The rest is history.

When John Kennedy committed the USA to putting a man on the moon and bringing him safely back again there were neither vehicles to do it, nor the guidance systems to get them there. Less than 10 years later I watched it all on TV and cheered with relief.

So much for being specific.

Stretching goals are those that promote some form of discernable personal growth. Yet there are serious, important goals that do not necessarily deliver on that front at all.

Getting our frail and ageing parent into a good social care environment might occupy all our efforts for a considerable period, although it is unlikely that we will feel we are better people at the end of it. Often, we will feel worse because of lingering guilt. Nevertheless it is clearly identifiable as a goal.

Succinct: if we are going to tick all those boxes – being concrete, detailed, precise, explicit, focused and action-oriented with a well-defined result – is succinct even possible?

If it is, then is it necessary? Sometimes a longer, fuller description paints a more colourful, seductive picture making it easier for us to visualize the outcome, to commit ourselves to its pursuit and helps us keep the whole project vibrant and alive.

If all our goals had to be synergistic (2+2=5) then there would far fewer goals. Of course, single-point goals will usually have spin-offs, but those are by-products or unintended consequences. Imposing genuine intended synergy as the prerequisite of good goal-setting sounds like severely over-egging all puddings. Nice if we can do it, but hardly necessary.

Finally, finally, systematic: I suspect this one came with one foot in the project manager’s camp. Again, it’s not an absolute, indispensable requirement for our common or garden goals. Someone like Benjamin Franklin was highly systematic and got great results. But goals are often reached despite the system used to search for them, rather than because of it.

The biggest problem with penicillin was producing enough of it. Florey and another researcher travelled from Britain to the U.S. to talk to chemical manufacturers. Corn (maize) was tried as the nutrient base and it yielded almost 500 times as much as it had before. That helped, but more vigorous and productive strains of the mould were also needed, and one of the best came from a rotting cantaloupe in the market at Peoria, Illinois.

Systematic (the maize) helped, but serendipity (the cantaloupe) was also necessary.

Serendipity helps more often than SMART protagonists care to admit. The amazing story of post-it notes are another case in point.

There are other, possibly undiscovered, ‘S’s:

How about saleable – so that we can get others on board?

How about seaworthy – so we know that the goal will float?

How about sanguineous – so that we’re always full-bloodied about our objectives?

With so many stars to steer our ship by, how on earth is the ‘S’ from SMART going to help us?

SMART and its ‘S’ are touted as necessary and sufficient for all goals. Clearly, they are not.

Don't Get SMART

Words: 662 Reading time: 2 minutes 12 seconds

Read anything on setting goals these days and, sooner or later, you’ll be told that all goals need to be “SMART”. If not, then there is no hope for you. The goal is not well set and you have little chance of achieving it.

Here, at random, are some of those promoting that view:

‘Setting goals…means creating a written plan that includes reasonable and measurable long-term and short-term objectives. It means setting SMART goals.’ Annette Richmond

‘The SMART acronym is used to describe what experts consider to be "good" goal statements’ Rodger Constandse

‘A key determinant of an individual's success or failure in meeting a goal can be summed up with one small word (or, more accurately, acronym): S.M.A.R.T.’ Christina Morfeld

Baloney!

A big problem with being SMART is finding any agreement on what the acronym stands for. Here are a handful of alternatives for each letter:

S - specific, significant, stretching, systematic, synergistic, simple, self-owned

M - measurable, meaningful, motivational, methodical, memorable, maintainable

A - agreed upon, attainable, achievable, acceptable, action-oriented, ambitious

R - realistic, relevant, reasonable, rewarding, results-oriented, resonating, responsible, reliable, remarkable

T - time-based, timely, tangible, trackable, thoughtful

If my maths is correct that gives 5 x 5 x 5 x 5 x 5 = 3,125 possible combinations. Good luck!

I will look at each of these pompous precepts in a series of later blogs, but for now, let’s look at one example where SMART – whatever its constituent parts – offers no help at all. Indeed, it’ll probably get in the way.

Nic Rixon tells the story of a restaurant owner who was shot twice in the course of a robbery. As he enters A&E the restaurateur can see in the eyes of the staff that they don’t think he will make it. He is asked, over and over again by the medical team, if he is allergic to anything. But he can’t speak due to the trauma. As they wheel him into the Operating Theatre they ask him one last time and he gathers all his strength and yells, “Bullets!!!”

At that point everyone looks round and immediately everything speeds up. In that moment everyone’s belief changed from “he’s gonna die” to “we have a fighter”. The man survived.

Now that man had a goal. His whole existence turned on that one outcome. He did not have to get SMART about it – the goal was too important for that. He had neither the time, nor the inclination to work it all out, write it all down, set milestones and measure progress. Had he done so, he would probably be dead.

None of that was necessary. And, outside of sheer physical and surgical limitations, there was no doubt about the desired outcome.

For me that says a lot about goals, whether we have any hope of achieving them and what that may take.

When nothing else matters in the world other than your goal, then SMART is irrelevant. SMART is unnecessary. SMART may even delay you and make the goal less likely, rather than more likely.

The secret of reaching your goal is picking one that really matters that much to you.

More time would be better spent on finding a goal that, for you, is an all-consuming passion, instead of figuring out how to make some second-rate, minor league, lesser goal come about by using a version of being SMART.

The people who come to mind as being both memorable and remarkable do so because they devoted their life and their spirit towards achieving what we now regard as exceptional. And often, they are only inspirational looking back. At the time they did not plan and did not expect to arrive where they did. They were not SMART.

Some examples include Albert Schweitzer and Mother Theresa, the Beatles and Beethoven, Alexander the Great and Boudicca, Galileo and Leonardo da Vinci, Dante and Darwin.

It's the weight of our feelings that lets us know how important something is. We just have to be smart enough to recognize them.

Migrating Your Business

Faced with the plans, goals, targets and objectives necessary to migrate our business, from where it is to where we want it to be, it is easy to become overwhelmed. Indeed, it is so easy to become overwhelmed that some people actually end up doing nothing at all, paralysed by those daunting challenges.

Of course, such people are not totally inactive, far from it. They give the appearance of being the busiest people in the office as they collect mounds of data and reams of analysis about all the challenges they face.

However, there is no outcome, for they never reach a conclusion. All that activity is merely a smokescreen, a security blanket, a substitute for the action they should be taking, but never get round to.

When faced with overwhelm one remedy is to take a lesson from the animal kingdom. Since autumn is approaching the goose sense used during their annual migrations is a lesson as powerful as horse sense.

When you see a flock of geese heading south for the winter, you will notice they fly in a characteristic "V" formation. That way, as each bird flaps its wings, it creates uplift for the bird immediately following. The "V" formation adds at least 71 percent greater flying range, for the flock as a whole, than if each bird flew alone.

Who else do you know that is heading in the same general direction as you? What opportunities exist to draw on their experience and leadership? How can you and your firm use their “slipstream” to help ease the hard work sometimes needed in order to make any headway? Would you really like at least 71 percent greater flying range?

However, do not expect such assistance to be entirely altruistic.

When the lead goose gets tired you can expect it to rotate back into the following flock while another goose flies point. Depending on circumstances, resources and the skills required sometimes that goose will be you. That’s because it makes sense to take turns doing demanding jobs.

You will also hear the geese behind honking to encourage those up front. Note that the honking is there for encouragement, not criticism. When you honk from behind – figuratively speaking – what is your intent? And is that intention realised?

Finally, when a goose gets sick or is wounded by gunshot, and falls out of the formation, two other geese fall out with the injured bird and follow it down to lend help and protection. They stay with the fallen goose until it is able to fly again, or until it dies; and only then do they launch out on their own, or with another formation to catch up with their own group.

How many businesses have the corporate sense to offer mutual support in the face of economic ills, market malaise and the continual sniping from Government and financial institutions? And is yours one of them?

Perhaps the humble goose is not quite so silly after all.

Why Me?

Once upon a distant time in the here and now a seeker journeyed through the furthest regions of the earth to find a teacher rumoured to know the secrets to happiness, success, and well-being. When the seeker arrived at the teacher's mountain-top retreat, he eagerly awaited his audience with the reclusive teacher. Finally, his moment came.

"Why have you come?" the teacher asked.

The seeker proceeded to list problem after problem he was facing in his life. After listening patiently, the teacher sighed.

"I am afraid I cannot help you with your problems."

"Why not?" asked the puzzled and disappointed seeker.

"Because the gods have decreed that we all carry fifty-one problems with us at all times. Even if I could help you solve the problems you tell me of, they would only be replaced with fifty-one more."

The teacher paused to allow the full significance of the idea to sink in.

"I may, however," the teacher continued, "be able to help you with your 52nd problem."

"What's that?" asked the seeker.

"Your 52nd problem," replied the teacher, "Is that you think you should not have the first 51 problems."

The 52nd problem is not confined to our fabled seeker. I think most people in business would welcome fewer problems. Many would go further and wish there were no problems. Wouldn’t that be beautiful?

Probably not: man is a solution seeking animal and when problems become too few, or of insufficient size, then he (or she) will manufacture some challenge to fill the vacuum. If not, then the market will do it for him. If your sector was problem-free and life truly was a cushy number, then other firms would push their way in seeking this Sylvania for themselves. The problems would multiply and the natural balance would be restored.

Problems are essentially opportunities in disguise. How well you cope with them will determine how well you do in business and in life. Problems are not something from which we should flee. Rather they are things we should embrace.

A leader faced with an almighty challenge is afforded reward and recognition when that challenge is eventually overcome. A leader handed an easy life reaps no honour; success is expected. For him there is only the yawning chasm represented by muffing an easy shot and failing to capture what everyone else saw as a gift.

It is an entirely different proposition to have a sufficiency of problems, yet be tempted into making even more for yourself. This is particularly attractive when the problems you do have are chronic and familiar. In such circumstances either the problem fades into the background and is hardly noticed, or there is seen to be little kudos in dealing it. If collecting cash has always taken 90 days at your firm there may be little enthusiasm for reducing it to 30 days. There may even be some opposition to disturbing the status quo and ‘upsetting’ certain clients.

Whatever you circumstances where problems are concerned – too few, enough, or too many – the basic approach is the same: rather than engaging in the self-pity of “Why me?” pick the one problem whose solution, or easement, would have the biggest impact on your business. When that one is solved, or temporarily stalled, work on the problem with the next biggest impact. Have no more than six problems, ranked in order of impact, on your list at any one time.

This is not a new idea. It was first put into practice by Charles Schwab, President of Bethlehem Steel in the 1900’s. The idea is simple, but don’t let that deceive you. There are still plenty of opportunities for distractions. The real achievement is in recognising the potential diversions and resolutely refusing to get sidetracked.