Setting Goals in Uncertain Times

I learn from the past.

I live in the now.

I dream of a positive future

because that is where I choose to spend the rest of my life.

Do I or Don’t I set goals?

How can I set goals in such unprecedented times?

What’s the point when you don’t know what’s going to happen?

I was talking to a friend about this recently and he immediately said, ‘It’s the best time to set goals, there are always opportunities in uncertain times.’

Let’s expand on that. Uncertain times offer opportunities to do things differently and do new things. Of course, there are threats and we need to be measured and balanced in our approach to making the most of new opportunities.

In certain times there are pathways already mapped out that we are used to. We tend to stick to what we know, even if we want something different! We are much more likely to fear change and resist change. When things around us change, when things around us are uncertain, we are forced to view things differently.

This is the time for us to rethink where we’d like to be and spot opportunities to bring about the future we want.  2020 has given us unprecedented challenges and unprecedented opportunities for us to reflect on the way we want to live our lives. It’s also a time for us to bring to the fore our enterprising mindset: to see, create, develop, and make the most of opportunities.

Vision without action is merely a dream.

Action without vision just passes the time.

Vision with action can change the world.
Joel A. Baker

The best way to predict our future is to create it. 

I can hear some of you responding to that by saying, ‘…but we don’t have any control over the external factors that have changed our world over the last few months.’ However, we do have control over our response to external situations. We aren’t pebbles on a beach that are controlled by the waves and have no control over where they end up. We can decide. We can decide our attitude in any given circumstance, and we can decide our direction going forward.

When we set off on a journey the satnav can only guide us if we put in a destination. We can only take ourselves somewhere if we know where we’re aiming. If we don’t have a destination in mind, we stay where we are. Time moves on and things change so staying where we are is not an option. We are either moving forward or drifting backwards. Setting goals help us to maintain forward momentum in all areas of life, relationships, health and wellbeing, learning, career, business, sporting and social life and so on. 

For me there are two sorts of goals:

A.   Development Goals: goals that help us (and our organisations) to grow and take us forward to realise the vision of the future we choose. These often mean changing something we’re doing or building on something we’re doing to take it to the next level.

e.g. get a new job, start a business, grow a business, write a book, decide on ways to improve fitness, develop ways to improve wellbeing,  

B.   Maintenance Goals: goals that help us maintain ourselves and our organisations.

e.g. maintain quality of work, maintain operational systems, stick to a budget, maintain fitness and flexibility, maintain a healthy diet.

An example that we can all relate to is improving and maintaining our health and wellbeing. We may have a development goal about improving our health and decide a number of changes we want to make until they become positive habits. For example, we know that drinking two litres of water a day is a foundation to maintain our health. When deciding how to improve our health this may be one thing that we focus on. Once we have developed these positive habits to improve our health, it then becomes a maintenance goal, to maintain our health.

Setting Goals in 2020 

How better to respond to our times by thinking about how we really want our lives to be? We can take ourselves beyond limiting reality, being stuck where we are, doing what we know. We can reflect on what we really want to achieve, how we want to be, how we want to thrive, and how we want to contribute to our family, our organisation, our community and beyond.

What are your Dreams? What is your Vision?

What do you want to BE, DO, HAVE?

Setting goals is all about deciding what you really want, writing it down very clearly and using your imagination and positive thinking to enable you to see, hear and feel yourself realising your dreams and goals. As Martin Luther King and Muhammad Ali put it, ‘Create your own future history’.

Systematically:

-       setting goals;

-       writing them down;

-       taking deliberate action every day to achieve them;

-       believing in yourself and seeing yourself achieving them;

helps you to attract the right opportunities and attract the right people to realise your chosen vision.

One thing that’s really important in setting goals is to focus on what you want to be, have, do; not what you don’t want! All too often we’re clear about what we don’t want but can be a bit hazy about what we do want.

Create a vision of your future history

‘No one has ever achieved anything from the smallest

to the greatest unless the dream was dreamed first.’

Laura Ingalls Wilder

Here are a couple of my favourite quotes sum up the importance of creating our vision, being clear about our goals, being brave and having confidence and belief in what we can achieve.

‘Most people live and die with their music still un-played.

They never dare to try’

‘Give yourself something to work toward - constantly.’

Mary Kay Ash

‘There are people who put their dreams in a little box and say,

‘Yes, I've got dreams, of course I've got dreams.’

Then they put the box away and bring it out once in awhile to look in it,

and yep, they're still there.

These are great dreams, but they never even get out of the box.

It takes an uncommon amount of guts to put your dreams on the line, to hold

them up and say, ‘How good or how bad am I?’

That's where courage comes in.’

Erma Louise Bombeck

NB: Successful people know where they want to get to, although, in the beginning, they rarely know how they are going to get there – the `how’ comes along the way. We sometimes limit or stop our dreams by simply saying, ‘How am I going to do that?’ Sometimes other people limit our goals by saying, ‘How are you going to do that?’ or even worse, ‘You’ll never do that’.

Because we can’t answer that how question, we think we can’t achieve our goals before we’ve started. People who achieve their goals dream and think big. They use the power of their mind and fuel their imagination to see themselves achieving their dreams. This also helps to keep them positive and focused on their goal, which is especially useful when the going gets tough.

equipped2succeed Goal Setting Process 

Below is a brief summary of the goal setting process I developed for the equipped2succeed programme.

I saw lots of goal setting processes and couldn’t find one that I thought combined effectively using the power of our creative and logical mind. This is only a brief overview with a few of the materials attached. I know it seems like a fairly long process but it’s worth it and the more you do it the more it will become part of your development. Sometimes I’ve had the same goal for a few years until I’ve achieved it. Others are achieved sooner.

Step 1

Reflect on Your Wheel of Life

This is snap-shot for us of where we are now. It gives us a basis on which to build and helps us to focus on the areas we want to improve. Use the attached Wheel of Life template to reflect on where you are now, the centre of the wheel being 0 and the outer circle being 10.

(I’m never a 10 in any area as there is always room for improvement.)

Step 2

Remind Yourself of Your Top 5 Values

What are your principles or standards of behaviour; your judgment of what

is important in life?

Step 3

VISION and DREAM

Make an ‘I want’ list The things you want to BE – DO – HAVE

Take yourself off to a quiet place – put on some relaxing instrumental music and for 15 minutes write down everything that comes into your head that you want to be - do – have. Don’t censor – just write down everything that comes into your head; can be short-term, longer-term, things you know you’re going to do, things that surprise you etc.

You will have a rush of ideas and then your ideas will slow as your subconscious works on it – just continue to ask yourself, ‘What do I really want?’ Stick with it, if your mind wants to wander, bring it back to what you want.

Step 4  

Decide which are your most important goals at this time.

Choose a few: no more than 2/3 development goals and 2/3 maintenance goals from your ‘I want list’ to translate into specific goals and action plans.

Remember to think about focusing on things that are really important to

you: for example, balancing family, health, work.

Step 5 

Create your goals using the equipped2succeed template and guidance.

You can download these from the resources section of our website.

Step 6  

Create action plans for each of your goals.

What? When? Who? How? Create your own Plan - Do - Review cycle.

Step 7

Create your reminders

Cue cards or electronic versions to carry with you with your goal and affirmation of you achieving your goal.

Step 8  

TAKE ACTION – Do what you need to do to keep moving forward towards your goals.

Stay in the now and take 1 step at a time. Build your foundations and build towards your desired outcome.

Step 9 

REVIEW – REVIEW – REVIEW

Where do I want to be?

Where am I now?

What’s the gap?

What am I going to do about it?

Who can help me?

Step 10  

BELIEVE

Visualise and mentally rehearse.

See, feel and hear yourself achieving your goals.

Keep your goals prominent in your eyeline and your thinking.

Use visualisation and mental rehearsal to reinforce your vision. This is especially useful when the going gets tough!

Visualise and Mentally Rehearse.

Imagine yourself achieving your goals every day.

‘Think ‘impossible’ and dreams get discarded, projects

 get abandoned and hope for wellness is torpedoed.

But let someone yell the words ‘It's possible’, and resources we

hadn't been aware of come rushing in to assist us in our quest.

I believe we are all potentially brilliant and creative - but only if we believe it, only if we have an attitude of positive expectancy toward

our ideas, and only if we act on them.’  

Greg Anderson