Ultimate Productivity
Achieving Your Biggest Goals – 3 Key Questions
By Claudine Motto
Since my coaching work revolves around helping home-based business owners be more productive during their workday, the goals we set up tend to be for business projects they want to complete, or habits they want to create around their to-do lists, schedule, or other challenges they’re facing staying organized and on top of their work.
Sometimes though, as clients get organized and feel more calm, bigger goals naturally evolve, and we work on setting those too. But the process is a little different – with goals that require a bigger sacrifice of time, energy, or other resources, a good place to start is at the emotional level, by asking yourself these 3 key questions:
Question 1: Do I want to achieve this for ME?
“DESIRE is the starting point of all achievement.” Napoleon Hill
A client of mine, we’ll call her Mary, told me during our initial conversation that one of the main reasons she wanted to streamline some of the processes in her business and get more organized was that she wanted to be able to grow her business. She was watching colleagues in similar situations zoom right past her and she felt she needed to catch up or she would get left behind. After working together on her goals, though, she started to realize that growing her business was not what she really wanted – actually, she was quite content to keep it at the level it was, so that she could spend more time with her family. As she put it, she wanted to “work to live, and not the other way around.” So we worked on shifting her mindset, and her goals, so that the work we were doing would lead her to enjoy her business as it was, while making more time to enjoy her family.
Make sure you’re not setting goals just because you or someone else thinks you should be pursuing this goal. If you do that, you’ll either abandon the goal eventually, or you’ll reach the goal, but feel unfulfilled, or resentful. And of course you will also have taken a major detour from the real path you were meant to take.
Question 2: Do I really care about this goal?
It’s natural that you will care about some goals more than others. The goals that you can deeply connect to, the ones that make you feel as if reaching them is the essence of who you are and who you want to be, the more likely you are to achieve them. Be honest about whether this goal signifies this for you.
Question 3: Do I want to improve myself, or compete?
Research shows that when the main motivation behind reaching your goal is to do better than other people, you’re likely to be disappointed at some point, and less satisfied with the outcome. And this makes sense, because you cannot control what other people do. Plus, there will always be someone who does better than you – so your self-esteem will always hang in the balance of something you cannot control.
Take this example – say you set a goal to become a better speaker, and one of your main motivators is to be a better speaker than your friend Susan. You work really hard on your goal, and you genuinely feel that your skills have improved 100 fold – and the world out there is telling you that too – you’re getting more speaking engagements and excellent feedback. People just cannot wait to hear you speak! But then you run into Susan and she tells you she’s done x # of presentations (20 more than you have) and she has just been asked to speak at a conference – one that you would kill to present to. If you’re measuring your fulfillment and success as compared to Susan’s, you’re bound to feel pretty let down.
So whenever possible, resist the temptation to compare your performance to other people’s performance. Set goals that measure you against you, and work on improving yourself, for you. Come up with a phrase that will remind you of that, such as “I matter!” and say it whenever you find yourself feeling less joyful because of what someone else is accomplishing.
Going through these questions may at times feel like too much work, or too much thinking, and maybe even a little scary. But it’s never a waste of time – if you find out you really are connected to the goal, then you gain an even deeper commitment to it; and if you’re not as invested in it as you had originally thought, you have released that energy to pursue something that really will matter to you. It’s a win-win no matter how you look at it.
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2010 Claudine Motto, All Rights Reserved.
Productivity Coach and Professional Organizer Claudine Motto helps home office geniuses, entrepreneurs, and independent professionals get organized and in control of their workload so they can reach their goals with less struggle and less stress. She offers one-on-one coaching and group training programs – please visit http://www.vistalnorte.com or call 561-641-9500 for more information, to sign up for her monthly newsletter, or to schedule a complimentary 20-minute consultation.