Goal Monitoring

My diet continues to be both successful and easy, so I am looking at ways in which I might be able to extend the principles to achieving other goals.

First one needs a target which can be measured easily, and which can move progressively to a final goal. The one I immediately thought of was the advertising income on this site. How suitable is that? It’s measurable and it will respond to the right sort of actions. It does however fluctuate madly from day to day so I would have to use some sort of average to measure it. That’s easy because Google Adwords continuously reports the average daily earnings during a month.

So the target is ok. I could use the daily average for January as my baseline and decide on a figure to aim for by the end of February. It would be easy then to plot a steadily rising line which I have to keep to as closely as possible.

How should I chose what the target should be for February? On the principle of maintaining flow, a target should be sufficient to challenge but not overwhelm. So I would need to decide what the minimum amount that would challenge me would be, and then what the maximum amount would be that would not overwhelm me. That would give me a range of possible targets. Where in that range should I set my actual target? According to my friend Michael Neil, the target should be set about one third of the way up the range.  So if my range is between $5 and $8 a day, my target should be set at $6. That sets a good challenge, but leaves room for me to surprise myself.

So that’s the target sorted. Now what is going to be the equivalent of the rules which I set myself progressively in the diet? The diet rules are No Seconds, No Snacking, No Sweets, Small Portions, Skip 1 Meal, Skip 2 Meals, and Skip 3 Meals. These are all about what not to do rather than about what to do. How on earth can I find an equivalent in terms of taking actions that will increase my Google Adwords income?

I think the simplest way is to phrase it negatively again. Each “rule” would be a 30 minute slot out of my day in which I am not allowed to anything other than work on the target directly. So if I am below the target I have to add another 30 minutes, and if I am above the target I can subtract 30 minutes.

Hmmm… will this work? Possibly. I’m not sure whether 30 minutes is the right amount of time. There’s only one way to find out - and that’s by trying. I’ve still got a week left of this month. So I’ll set it up first thing tomorrow morning, and see what I can achieve by the end of the month. It’s really just a dry run to see if the concept will work, and to shake out some of the rules before doing it for real in February.

Practise!

I was reading the latest issue of one of my favourite newsletters, Michael Neill’s, the other day and he quoted the following from the author W. Somerset Maugham “I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.” That quote struck me very forcibly because it reminded me that to achieve many of our goals some form of constant practice is involved. This could be learning a language or a musical instrument, getting fit, writing, or some other activity which entails consistent repetition of similar actions over a long period of time.

There is a story about the famous Polish concert pianist Artur Rubinstein. After one of his recitals, a society woman went up to him and said: “Mr. Rubinstein, I would give anything to be able to play like you.” To which Rubinstein replied simply “No, you wouldn’t.” The point of the story is that the woman would no doubt have been prepared to pay handsomely for someone to wave a magic wand so she could play like Rubinstein, but would she have been prepared to give the years and years of study and practice that had gone into his playing? No, of course not.

It helps to have natural talent, and I am sure that both Maugham and Rubinstein had plenty of that. But it is practice that turns talent into achievement. Even if you don’t have much talent, who is going to play the piano better? The person who has talent but never practises, or the person who has less talent but practises hard? Who is going to be the better writer - the person who sits around waiting for inspiration to come, or the person who, like Maugham, finds his inspiration by the act of writing? Who is going to be the better business person - the one who is full of brilliant ideas but keeps chopping and changing waiting for the “right project” or the “right moment”, or the one who takes one idea and works consistently at it?

Countdown

I have often written about the power of numbers to motivate. One way of building your business or increasing your liquid assets is to set yourself the goal of making £10,000. Then see how fast you can do it. Once you have achieved the goal, see if you can achieve the next £10,000 even faster. After you’ve achieved ten of these goals in turn, you can then move to seeing how quickly you can make the next £100,000!

One little known fact is that it is more motivating to count down rather than to count up. If you were going to set goals for yourself in the way I have outlined above, always think in terms of how much you’ve still got to go. Don’t say “I’ve made £6,000” instead say “I’ve got £4,000 to go”. This focuses your mind on the end result.

You can use the same principle in all sorts of different ways. If you are aiming to lose weight, don’t say “I’ve lost 5 lbs”, instead say “I’ve only got 2 lbs to lose to my target weight.” Counting down in this way will encourage you to keep going right up to time you reach the target, rather than be content with just losing a few pounds.

Countdown scoring

I want to elaborate a bit on the last couple of articles I have written about how to motivate yourself through figures. The most obvious figure you can use is money. Monetary goals can be extremely effective because they have the great advantage of being objectively measurable. Other objectively measurable goals include weight, speed and strength.

However there are many goals which it is not possible to express in monetary terms. How can we deal with these? The answer is to think in terms of percentage completion. To do this you need to define exactly what 100 per cent completion of your goal would be. If your goal is to get a project up and running then what would your definition of “up and running” be? The essential thing is that you must be able to recognise it when you see it.

If you are dealing with a fairly simple personal or work goal you can just estimate off the top of your head what percentage completion you have reached. So if your aim is to get a new website up and running, you might say that it is 80% complete. But if you read my article a couple of weeks ago, you will remember that I said it is much more effective to count down than to count up. So don’t say “My website project is 80% complete”, instead say “My website project has still got 20% to go”. That will focus you right back onto the completion of the project. Monitor your project daily and record it visually. This helps to bring your whole brain into focus behind the project.

May all your dreams come true!

The Real Reality Check

People tend to have very mixed attitudes towards money. But I would like to suggest one use of money which very few people think of, and that is as a reality check. How can you tell if your business is providing what people want and being run in an effective way? Answer: look at whether it’s making money. How can you tell if you have a personal life- style based on fantasy or on reality? Answer: by looking at how much you are saving. In both these cases the objective and measurable nature of money cuts through the self-deception we can so easily bring to our life and our work.

“But I’m not interested in money!” I hear some people saying. Sure, you’re not - and why is your business so badly and inefficiently run? - is it because you’re not interested in that either? Why is your expenditure so out of control? - because you’re not interested in money, or because you’re not interested in self-discipline?

Keeping a close eye on your personal and business finances can really tighten up your effectiveness. Why not try the exercise I gave in last week’s newsletter? See how long it takes you to make or save £10,000, and then try to make the next £10,000 more quickly - and the one after that, and the one after that. (You can add or subtract 0’s to that figure according to your own circumstances.) Even more effective is to have a buddy who is in approximately the same business situation as you are and make a race of it. You will be amazed how much that sharpens up your business senses!

Find the Key Action!

What do the following things have in common?

Example One: Like many people, my wife and I have various old friends to whom we send out Christmas cards every year with a note saying “We really must get together this year.” Needless to say we usually don’t. And then one year we get tired of sending out the same old vague note, and instead we pick up the phone and propose a specific date. Once we’ve done that we know that we are really going to see each other at last.

Example Two: For years I had been thinking about setting up my own full-time business, but I never really got moving on it until I took the step of giving three months notice to my employers. After that I was fully committed and my preparations started moving forward really fast.

Example Three: For many years my wife and I had been meaning to see the famous ballet dancer Sylvie Guillem in action. We’d been talking about it for years, but one day we booked tickets to go and see her dance at Covent Garden. We went a couple of weeks ago, and she was great!

Example Four: When I was considering running a series of “New Time Management” seminars, I knew for sure that they were really going to happen only when I booked the hall for the first three months worth of dates.

In each of these four examples, which range from major life changes to the fairly trivial, there was one action which committed me. Once I had taken that one action, it was almost certain that the goal was going to happen. If you look at the actions - setting a date, giving notice, buying tickets, booking the hall - you can see that in each case I was doing something which, if not completely irrevocable, would have taken me some effort, expense and/or embarrassment to go back on.

If you are having a lack of progress on a particular goal, think what key action would really commit you to that goal. Until you’ve taken that action, your goal is just a pipe-dream. Once you’ve taken it you will find that things start moving. Your mind will be fully engaged. Look for the action which is going to make the difference.

Clear Goals or Goals that bring clarity?

One thing we are constantly being told is that we should have clear goals. I entirely agree with this, but I do wonder how many people’s goals actually bring any additional clarity to their work. I’m sure you have had the experience of setting a goal and then finding that, far from bringing a new sense of clarity, it just becomes one more thing that gets swallowed up in all the other things you have to do.

The reason I have been wondering about this is because I have become aware that goals are often seen solely in terms of defining things we are going to do. Isn’t that what goals are supposed to do? Yes, but it’s only half the story. To bring real clarity to our work, a goal also needs to define what we are not going to do as a result of selecting that goal. A goal represents a choice: “Among all the things that I could do, this is what I actually am going to do.” Our goals in other words should define the limits of what we are going to do.

The best way to get a feel for this is to compare it to going into a restaurant and ordering from the menu. Frequently these days menus contain so many choices that it can take quite some time to decide what to order: everything sounds so delicious. Eventually we make our choice and give the waiter our order. We are in effect saying: “I’m going to have the steak, and I’m not going to have the veal, the fish, the lamb, etc. etc.” Saying yes to one meal is the equivalent of saying no to all the other possible meals, however much we think we might enjoy them.

As in a restaurant, so in life – whenever we say “yes” to one thing we are saying “no” to a whole variety of alternative courses of action. At least that’s what it should be like. But for some reason in life when we say “yes” to one thing, we forget about saying “no” to all the other things. The result is that our goals fail to achieve the main point of a goal – to establish the limits of our field of action. Our goals should not just be statements of what we are going to do; they should be statements of what we are going to confine ourselves to doing.

Many of you may have read Betty Edwards excellent book “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain”. In it she describes how to draw the space round an object rather than the object itself. This is a way of helping us to see the object as it really is rather than allowing our preconceptions about it to dictate the way we draw it. It’s the same with our goals – we need to draw the space round our goals so that we can see clearly what that goal commits us to not doing.

Exercise:

Take one of your existing goals and try to define it exclusively in terms of what you are not going to do. So if your goal is to learn some French for your next holiday, you might write: “I am not going to do anything between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. Mondays to Fridays except learn French, I am not going to allow myself to be distracted by trying to learn any other subject until after my holiday, I am not going to speak anything but French to my friend Dominique, I am not going to check my email during the time I am learning French, I am not going to read anything except French in the evening after 6 p.m., and so on…”

Getting to Your Goals: Step Four

Have you ever launched out into a major new project and after a few weeks lost interest or motivation?

If so, it may well be that you forgot about Step 4.

Step 4 is monitoring your progress. It’s the dynamic equivalent of Step 2 (Knowing Where You Are). You don’t just need to know where you are when you begin to move towards your goal, you need to know where you are every step of the way.

To use the analogy of reading a map, you find where you want to be on the map, make sure you know where you are, and then move towards the destination, keeping track of your progress on the map. If you don’t keep track of your progress, you are likely to find yourself wandering around in circles.

Most people don’t monitor their progress anything like enough. I mentioned in my article on Step 2 my amazement that some people try to run their business off the half-year balance sheet. To run a successful business, you need to be able to put your fingers on up-to-date key figures all the time. It’s only by keeping track of the figures that you can identify when and where problems or opportunities are beginning to arise.

Whenever you start on a new goal, identify the key things that need to be tracked and decide how you are going to track them. Most of these key things will be numerical. How many hits on my website were there today? How much money have we raised for the Church Tower appeal so far? How many bookings have there been for the seminar? How many press- ups did I do this morning? What percentage has my investment portfolio risen by this year?

These figures mean little by themselves. But they mean a lot when they are shown in the context of the preceding figures, and even more when they are expressed in terms of the target.

Another secret of good monitoring is to present the tracking visually. Graphs make excellent visual tracking devices. So does colouring in squares for simpler projects. The essential thing is to be able to see immediately what your progress is all the time. Putting a chart on the wall and filling it in every day is a great motivator.

Exercise

Try out the motivating power of monitoring your progress for yourself. Select one of your projects which you have been making little progress on so far. Then think to yourself what you could monitor about it. Try and put this in numerical terms and work out how you can express it visually. Put up a chart on your wall or somewhere else you can see it all the time. And make sure you fill it in every day without fail!

The Way I Want It?

It can be surprising how little control we have over our lives. We like to think we are in control of ourselves, but in fact when we look at how our lives are we realise that for all the control we have over them it might just as well be another person living in our bodies.

In fact loads of professionals – teachers, doctors, therapists, counsellors, coaches and so on – depend for their professional success precisely on the fact that it’s often easier to control someone else than it is to control oneself.

I’m not talking here about the things which are genuinely out of our control or mainly so, but the things which are fully in our control – in theory.

Have a look in the mirror and yourself a few questions:

Is my body the way I want it to be? (I’m talking here about what you have made of the body you have been given)

Is my weight the way I want it to be?

Are my clothes the way I want them to be?

Is my fitness the way I want it to be?

Then look around your surroundings and ask yourself:

Is my house the way I want it to be?

Is my office the way I want it to be?

All these things are more or less directly under most people’s control. If they are not the way we want them to be then it’s because we are not acting as the person who is controlling our bodies and our environment. There’s someone else in there doing it for us – and not making a very good job of it either!

Time to reclaim control. Choose one aspect of your life to start off with – make it something small - perhaps your desk or your bookcase. Ask yourself “Is this the way I want it to be?” Don’t put up with it not being the way you want it to be any longer. Work on it until it is exactly the way you want it. You are in charge – why are you allowing it to be any other way than the way you want it?

Once you’ve made that the way you want it to be, choose something else and keep on like this until you have made everything that you have direct control over the way you want it.

That could be quite a journey!

Getting to Your Goals: Step Three

So now you know where you are going; you know where you are - what do you do next? The answer is easy: you start moving in the direction of where you want to go.

In many ways this is the easiest step of all. It’s usually obvious what you can do to move in the direction of where you want to be. Notice I said “start moving”. You don’t have to have the entire route mapped out. It may help if you have a clear idea of the route, but it’s not essential. What is essential is to get moving. And then keep moving!

Notice that it is very important to move in the right direction. People often talk about doing things in order to advance their goals, but then start moving in the wrong direction or get stuck in a dead-end. Just to give one example out of many, we are often told that the way to expand our business is by networking. So we may go all out to attend lots of networking events. But if we do not keep clearly in mind that the purpose of the networking is to expand our business, we may just find ourselves attending lots of events without achieving anything very much. Remember the aim is not “networking” – the aim is to expand our business. That means we must be clear what we want to get out of the networking and make sure we get it. If we don’t have our final destination clearly in mind, we may find ourselves wasting a lot of time on unfocussed activities.

We always need to be asking the difficult questions like: “How exactly is this going to move me towards my goal?”; “What would move me towards my goal?”

Once we’ve started moving there will of course be plenty of obstacles and setbacks, but provided that we have the goal clearly in front of us, we can simply deal with them one at a time. We will almost always find that we have the resources to deal with them provided that we keep two things clearly in our minds: where we want to be and where we currently are.

The exciting thing about moving towards a goal is that we will find opportunities opening up before us. When we focus on something, it is amazing how we find ourselves finding paths which we hadn’t even imagined existed in order to get there. That’s one of the reasons why detailed planning is not one of the necessary steps in order to get moving on a goal. I’m not saying that detailed plans may not be essential at various stages. In my first example of building a bridge between the mainland and the Isle of Wight, you would obviously be going to need very detailed plans and specifications. But the project’s originator will have started moving on the project long before the detailed plans are drawn up.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time talking about this third step because it’s surprising how many people forget the simple truth that to get something done you need to do it. Time and time again I have had clients who have got stuck on a project simply because they have stopped taking action on it. The secret is to start taking action again – not in a haphazard or aimless way, but by deliberately taking the next step in the right direction.

Getting to Your Goals: Step Two

Getting to Your Goals: Step Two

In the previous posting on this subject, I said that initially all you need to know about your goal is enough to recognise it when you get there. What happens next?

The second step towards getting to your goal is to know where you are. This is a step which we often overlook. If you imagine that you are trying to map read your way from Point A to Point B, if you don’t know exactly where you are on the map you are lost. Without knowing where you are relative to Point B, you can’t find your way to it.

So with any goal, a realistic appraisal of the situation as it is at the moment is essential. This must not only include the physical facts about the situation but also your feelings about it. Not admitting your fears or other emotions about the goal, may lead to your trying to take a path which is not right for you. This means you goal will ultimately founder because your unacknowledged resistance will lead you to sabotage your own efforts. There is more about this in the article “Guilty Goals” on my website. If you didn’t follow the link I gave to it in this week’s special announcement, then I suggest you do so now (click here). It tells you how to remove your feelings of ambivalence about a goal.

Of course you need the physical facts about your current situation as well. For instance if you goal is to get out of debt, then you need to reckon up just exactly how much debt you are in, what the interest rates you are paying are, and how much of your earnings are going as debt payments. Without this vital information your efforts to get out of debt will always be pie-in-the-sky.

Another very important fact which you need to take account of is your own history in dealing with similar projects. You would be surprised how many people try endlessly to start up new projects of the same type at which they have consistently failed in the past.

And remember: you don’t just need to know where you are when you start the project. You need to know where you are throughout the project. Monitoring progress is absolutely essential. It used to amaze me when business owners told me that they only knew how their businesses were doing when they got the half-yearly balance sheet from their accountants. How can one possibly run a business like that? Yet I came across it so often that I stopped being amazed!

Ok, so now you have taken the first step and defined your goal enough to recognise it when you get it. You have taken the second step and identified exactly where you are in relation to the goal. In the next post I will deal with what the third step is that you need to get moving on your project.

Getting to Your Goals: Step One

In my last post I talked about how to sharpen up vague goals. But just how much do we need to know about a goal in order to achieve it? Do you need a detailed picture of the goal plus a detailed route map before you can get moving?

You may well need a detailed picture of the goal at some stage and you may need a detailed plan too, but you do not need them in order to get going. Imagine for example that you had an enormous goal like building a bridge between the English mainland and the Isle of Wight. To get the bridge built you are obviously going to need detailed specification and plans. But you won’t have these at the beginning of the process. In fact when you first decide on the project you will probably have little more in your head than “A bridge between the mainland and the Isle of Wight”. There are a huge number of stages to go through before you get to the detailed specifications. You need to research it, get political support, and do a thousand and one other things before you get to the stage of a detailed plan. At each of these stages the whole situation may change dramatically.

To get moving on a goal the essential thing to know is that you can recognise it when you get there. A bridge is a fairly recognisable thing, so you should be able to recognise it when you have built it! It doesn’t matter what type of bridge it is or exactly which points of the mainland and the Isle of Wight it joins together, it’s still going to be a bridge. You might even end up with a tunnel instead of a bridge and still feel that you have achieved your aim.

Most of us are not likely to be in charge of projects of this size from first conception to execution. But if a detailed plan is not needed initially for a huge project like a bridge, then it’s not needed for our comparatively tiny projects either. All we need to know about our goal at first is enough to be able to recognise it when we get there. It may help our motivation to visualise the goal in detail, but don’t confuse the details with the goal itself!

Guilty Goals

Do you really want your goals to come true?

My second book How to Make Your Dreams Come True seemed to be a book that people either loved or hated. It never sold particularly well, although many people thought it was brilliant. In the end I came to the conclusion that one of the main problems was the title. It didn’t have the immediate “yes, I need that” factor of Get Everything Done and Still Have Time to Play.

In fact the more I thought about it the more I realised that people would be very ambivalent about the idea of making their dreams come true. Dreams are funny things. I think we are always haunted by the fairy stories we heard as children in which people are given three wishes which always end in disaster. “Be careful of what you wish for – you might get it”.

Some dreams are nightmares, and some dreams we suspect would be nightmares if they came true. It may be great to have dreams of being rich and famous and surrounded by lovers, but what’s your spouse or partner going to think about it if it starts to turn into reality – or your friends – or your parents? In fact do you really want the responsibility of being rich and attractive all the time? Look at the mess so many “celebrities” get themselves into.

So what can we do about our “guilty” dreams? If we try to turn them into goals, they are just going to become “guilty” goals. If we are guilty about them then we will be half hearted. Yet they probably contain some very important truths about the things that we value so it would be a shame to just sit on them for ever and feel that we had wasted our lives.

One exercise I’ve always found valuable in this sort of situation is to examine the negative feelings we have about a goal. It’s a good idea first of all to examine why we want the goal in the first place. So let’s have a look at a fairly common goal: “I want to start my own business”. First list all the reasons why you want to do this. Then list all the reasons why you don’t want to do it. The two lists might come out something like this:

I want to have my own business because:

I hate working for a boss

I want to be able to set my own working hours

I’ve got some great ideas for products

I want to make more money

It’ll give me a greater sense of achievement

Etc etc

I don’t want to have my own business because:

It’ll involve a lot of work

I won’t have the security of a regular salary

My family won’t like it

It’ll take a long time to get going

I might lose all my money

Etc etc.

The secret now is to turn all these statements into positives. The question to ask yourself is “That’s what I don’t want. What do I want?”

In the first list all the statements are already positive except for the first one “I hate working for a boss.” So you don’t want to work for a boss. What do you want? “I want to work for myself”. You now have a positive statement in place of the negative one.

 I hate working for a boss I want to work for myself

The second list is full of negatives. Try the same technique on them. Take the first item on the list “It’ll involve a lot of work”. So you don’t want it to involve a lot of work. What do you want? You may have to think a bit before coming up with the right answer for you. It might be “I want my work to be challenging and rewarding” or “I want to have a good balance between work and play” or whatever is important to you.

It’ll involve a lot of work I want to have a good balance between work and play

Be careful though if your answer is another negative, e.g. “I don’t want to do any work at all”. In that case you need to ask the question again: So I don’t want to do any work at all, what do I want? Your answer might be “I want to sail round the world” or “I want to lie in bed all day”. Either way, you have discovered something important about yourself!

Once you’ve completed the exercise, you will now have one list of positive things which you want about this goal. Looking at these you can begin to see how you could create a goal which you could be one hundred per cent committed to rather than guilty about.

Vague Goals

A question I am often asked is how to set a goal when one is not really quite sure what one wants. As an example, someone may know that they want to get out of the work they are in at present, but have very little idea what they can do instead. A goal of “Get out of present job” isn’t really going to be very effective. “Find new career” may be a good starting point but is far too vague to help one to take effective action in the present (which is what all goals are about).

The problem most people have in this situation is that they have too much choice. There are thousands of different new careers out there and they can’t pin what they want down any more closely.

The important thing to realise here is that there is no one right job for them. There are probably loads of possible answers, which would satisfy them. The key here is to identify the things which must be in the final result if it is to be satisfactory. You don’t need to know everything about the final result, but what you do need to know is what is going to make it a satisfactory result rather than an unsatisfactory one.

So start asking yourself some questions about the new job. A good place to start is by writing down all the things you don’t want it to be, e.g.

I don’t want it to be in the city; I don’t want a long commute; I don’t want to have my boss on my back all the time; I don’t want to earn so little I can’t pay the bills, etc.

Then turn them round into positives: “I want to work in the country; I want to live close to the work; I want to be in control of my own work; I want to earn at least £x a year”

This can give you quite a detailed description of what is important to you about the job. You can then test out what is essential by asking yourself questions like “If everything else was right about the job, but the pay was the same as I’m getting now, would I be happy?”

You may have to go back and forth a few times, but this will give you the essentials of what you are looking for.

It’s really important to ask yourself these types of questions whatever you goal is. For instance if your goal is to write a book, is it important to you whether the book is a best-selling book or don’t you mind if only your friends and family ever read it? Obviously your answer to this question is going to make a lot of difference to the type of book you write and the action you are going to take in the present to start achieving your aim.

Remember that the whole point of goals is how they affect your actions in the present!