The Leadership Year: Month Three
It’s month 3 of the Leadership Year. So let’s recap… we’ve covered some self-analysis with a SWOT tool looking at our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Then we’ve looked at different styles of leaders from role models and authoritarian, democratic and laissez-faire leaders. This starts to build a picture of where you personally need to make changes, and the direction you want to head in as a leader. But getting there needs more of a plan.
We’ll put in place this plan with a well-known topic: goal-setting. But despite many goal-setting techniques being widely written about it’s still an area many people struggle with. It’s like the classic New Year’s resolutions where the grand plans for a year of change don’t ever materialise. Setting a goal and then not achieving it can leave us feeling even further behind than when we started. So it’s really important we learn the skills of good goal setting and apply them as well as we can.
The first part of goal-setting has to be ensuring it’s a goal you’re truly motivated towards. Achieving our goals takes focused time so if we don’t have a strong enough reason to put that effort in we’ll soon find other things to turn to our attentions instead. A key word here is ‘why?’. It’s such a simple thought but asking ourselves why want to achieve this goal is powerful. Of all the techniques I’ve found this is the one that has the biggest ROI. Really think about the answer to this. Why is it important? Why do you want to achieve this goal now?, then add even more layers to give yourself a strong justification for pursuing the goal. How will you feel if you achieve this? What difference will this make to your life? At this stage I recommend writing down the goal and all the reasons you can think of. Put everything into actual sentences not just bullet points as even though it may be crystal clear why the goal is important in your own mind, the exercise of putting this into words will cement it even further. Writing something (be it paper or digital) also gives you a feeling of having committed to it and many studies talk about the benefit of written goals. Perhaps the best known being where a group of Harvard graduates were interviewed about their goal setting habits. 3% had written plans for their future. When interviewed again 10 years later, that 3% earned more than the other 97% combined. Before you even start to think about next steps, begin with justifying why the goal is so important in the first place and write it all down!
The next step is one that not everyone likes the idea of, but I promise you it works! Write down that goal in the past tense. So rather than “I will learn how to bake bread” it becomes “I learned how to bake bread”. Then think about how it feels having achieved your goal. What difference has it made? Do you feel proud of your achievements? What opportunities do you have as a result. We’re essentially tricking our brains into committing because we’ve already had a taste of what achieving the goal feels like, and now we want it even more. It improves motivation and gives us a stronger vision of what the future can look like if we hit our goals. There’s a part of our brain called the reticular activating system, the RAS. It’s the part of our brain that seeks out information to help us. So if I asked you to look for Where’s Wally in a picture book, the RAS helps you pull out all the characters, shapes and colours that look most like Wally. When we use this in goal setting, the RAS will seek out all the opportunities we have to reach our goal. It will pick up on signals from other people, information in emails and even seek our gaps in our diaries where we can dedicate time to the goal. The RAS is like the most confident cheerleader you’ll ever have. Once ignited, it already believes you can hit your goal and continually seeks out the chance to show you how, where and when. The best way to engage the RAS is to paint a picture of what the goal looks like after it’s been hit. It’s the reason why visualisation techniques can be so powerful, and we can get there by writing out goals in the past tense and imagining ourselves already having hit them.
Most goal-setting training I have received in the past has been centred around that tried and tested method: SMART. There’s a reason why it’s so widely adopted, it’s because it works. It encourages you to think and then plan in a more focused way than simply wishing your goals true, and this is no bad thing. But I’ll be honest, I just find myself resisting them. They feel too ‘tick a box’ corporate for my liking and if they’re not used properly they fall apart quite quickly. SMART goals work when they are embedded into regular interactions in the workplace but for self-led personal development I think there’s a better way.
I should be on commission for BSQ goals. I love them and recommend them to everyone. They take the best bits of SMART but dial up the pace of progress whilst also making the goal feel more manageable. They stand for Think Big, Step Small, Act Quickly. In action, they encourage us to work towards our goals near-enough every week but break down into small steps that add up to bigger success. It starts with Think Big. What is the overall goal? Where do you want to head to? I love that this is an unapologetically big start. Despite BSQ goals being a series of smaller steps there is no compromise. We start with just as big a goal as we would with SMART or any other mechanism. Then we move onto Step Small. What one thing could you do that would move you forward? This is where mentally the goal can become much easier to achieve as each small step feels do-able. It could be as simple as arrange a 121 with someone, write an email or listen to a podcast. If the only task you can think of is still too big, even that can broken down into smaller steps, such as analyse your market for 10 minutes or create 2 slides in a strategy presentation. Although the steps may feel too small to make progress happen, when you move onto the next part of BSQ, Act Quickly, the speed means that the steps start to add up really quickly. I recommend no longer than 2 weeks maximum for every BSQ Step you identify. If it needs longer than 2 weeks then maybe the step needs to be broken down yet further. After each step is hit, you set another one, and another and another. This way the BSQ goals start to really add up and gain momentum
BSQ goals are in essence the embodiment of the VIA philosophy. To move forwards we need to take a series of steps. But I truly believe that a series of BSQ goals will take us further than a SMART goal within the same time period. Every time you achieve a BSQ goal you will feel a surge of dopamine, encouraging you on to carry on and achieve more! This makes motivation easier, and makes us feel more in control. Thinking about 1 overarching SMART goal takes discipline and there’s always a reason to procrastinate, but BSQ becomes part of your regular habits and is worked on so frequently that there’s little room for delay. As we see results materialise at pace, we feel buoyed by our own progress and yet again more confident and motivated for the step ahead.
The other benefit to BSQ goals is that during uncertain times it can be even harder to plan out our goals. The pandemic continues to be unpredictable with many of us struggling to commit to a future without knowing about basics such as social distancing and quarantine processes. When faced with uncertainty, we often scale back our ambitions or worse still fail to set goals at all for fear they can’t be hit. In the short-term this is understandable. A brief ‘freeze’ to get through the most unpredictable of times is well justified. But with Covid continuing to impact on us both professionally and personally, we need to find ways of moving forward despite this uncertainty. Successful business globally have spoken about the need for shorter, surer goals in times like these, and BSQ is a great method to set them.
To set a strong personal goal:
· Set time aside to really understand your ‘why’
· Write your goal in the past tense, and visualise having already achieved it
· Set a series of smaller steps in quick (2 weeks max) windows using the BSQ technique
Want to add more depth? Every week take the time to reflect back on achievements to date (preferably in a reflective diary or log of actions), and then look to your week ahead and allocate time to work on the next stage of your goal. Carve out time in your diary and commit to using it for your goals, even if it’s just for a few minutes.
Struggling to get into the mindset? Don’t tackle all 3 steps at once. Start with understanding your why and find a supportive friend or colleague who will listen to you explain it. The act of explaining the why to someone else can spur us on when we’re finding the early stages hard.
