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Chapters
0:00 Cold Open
1:25 Show Intro
1:56 Today’s Topic: Goals
4:05 Why are we so obsessed with goals and goal-setting frameworks?
14:44 What do we get wrong when we set goals?
41:49 Why do we fail to achieve our goals?
53:40 How you can create and achieve your goals
1:08:22 Wrapup
I was skeptical when Corey first proposed we do an episode on goal-setting.
My first thought was: “How boring. Are we really going to add to the never-ending pile of conversations on the ‘right’ way to do goals?”
He bought me over (clearly). Here’s why.
Our culture spends an awful lot of mental and emotional energy on goals.
It seems like everyone has a framework that they claim is the “best” way to set goals. SMART. HARD. OKRs. BHAGs (big, hairy, audacious goals). This article provides FIFTEEN different ways to set goals. The intention is to be helpful, but I struggle to understand how weighing the tradeoffs between fifteen different methodologies is of service to anyone. We are absolutely drowning in so-called “best practices”.
Despite this, it still seems to me that most people fail to achieve most of their goals most of the time.
Which begs the questions, if setting goals doesn’t actually help us achieve them, what is goal-setting actually in service of? What are we spending so much energy focused on setting goals for?
In this episode of No Clear Answers Rikki, Corey, and I discuss:
What goals are for, based on the way we set them now
How goals are fundamentally about energy
How focusing too much on goals is actually a way to avoid or delay getting into execution
Why we fail to achieve our goals
How setting goals looks different if the goal is for an individual versus if it’s for a group
How leaders can set goals to get their team bought in, motivated, and inspired
How to set goals in different ways for different purposes
There was something in the conversation that I was excited to discover for myself for the first time—the reality that goals, meaning a clean one sentence articulation of what we want, is arguably the least important part of a much bigger thing.
What are we really after with all of our goal setting efforts? When we let go of controlling reality or looking good in the eyes of others, what are goals for?
For me, it’s an embodied sense of excitement and attraction for a vision that I want to create. At the core, I’m after an embodied energetic experience. It’s the feeling of being excited to get out of bed in the morning and start building.
Viewed from this lens, the articulation of a goal is the least-important-but-natural-end-result of a much more important process: plugging into that which you most deeply want in life. Feeling into vision, purpose, how you want your days to feel, and getting excited and energized to create that possibility. Once you have that knowing in your body, articulating a goal happens naturally and easefully.
Some of my favorite quotes from the episode:
”We look to control reality by controlling how we set our goals.”
”A lot of people obsess over the goals and forget to actually accomplish them and do the thing.”
”Did that actually facilitate your desired transformation, or did you get so caught up in micro-managing your goals that you lost track of the actual bigger picture of what you were trying to accomplish?”
”Goals are one thing in the toolset of creating a vision or an energy that we want to go toward. The reliance solely on a one sentence goal and not bolstering and supporting that goal with vision, a sense of purpose, with what you want your days to feel like, without all of the richness of things that are less succinct and clear in a sentence but create an embodied sense of wanting and attraction is a big mistake.”
“One thought is: where am I at right now and what goal is going to create the most energy for me to get what I REALLY want here? That varies RADICALLY based on where people are at on their journey, and only YOU can answer that for you.”
Listen on Itunes, Spotify, or YouTube.
Hope you enjoy!
-Justin
If you enjoy reading the Leadership Lab, consider clicking the ❤️ or 🔄 button above so more people can discover it on Substack 🙏