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Because so many of us desire change in one area or another
of our lives, but just can’t seem to actually make it happen, I thought it
would be helpful to examine the idea of goal setting in greater depth. This is
the first in a series of blogs that will post in the coming weeks about what
goal setting really involves. We’ll
begin by examining what things work against us in our own mindsets when we try
to change or implement newly learned things.
Then, we’ll examine the preliminary planning/thinking steps that are not
only required, but also critical in setting and achieving goals.
What keeps us from attaining our goals?
Why do we solemnly resolve to improve our situations, only
to burn out in our attempts a few months (or weeks or days) after we start the
process? Why does this happen, year
after year, for some of us? Simply
put: we don’t do the necessary
preliminary planning/thinking work it takes before we attempt to change/improve
something about ourselves or in our lives. When we don’t do the necessary preliminary
work, goals can become a moving target and so can our own accountability for
achieving them. If we aren’t clear about
our goals, much less the decisions we need to make surrounding them, how can we
be held accountable for achieving them?
That’s the trap we gravitate towards – that’s the trap that makes it
easy to be pulled off course. Even worse, it creates the situation we use to
let our efforts to reach our goals fade off into the sunset.
Not doing the preplanning is only a part of the problem we
face in goal setting. I think another
huge reason we don’t successfully achieve when we goal set is that we don’t
fully understand what works against us in our own minds and personalities
before we even begin the process. When
we want to change one of our behaviors, we have to begin with what’s in our
hearts and our minds. Once our hearts
and minds are changed, then the desired behaviors will follow. So what is working against us? What do we need to acknowledge before we
begin to work towards our goals?
Ken Blanchard’s book, ‘Know
Can Do!’ gives us a good indication of what goes on in our own head when it
comes to processing new information or thinking about implementing something
new in our lives. It examines the ideas
of information overload, negative filtering, and lack of follow up as reasons that keep
us from implementing new information that we learn (example: courses, seminars,
and workshops). Those three reasons are
not just reasons working against us to learn new information and apply it in
our lives. They are also things working
against us when we try to implement the changes that goal setting brings into
our lives.
Information Overload
Information Overload is where we need to start. Most of us can’t leave home without our own
connection to the Internet. Many of us are joined at the hip to our mobile
devices. We never stop checking email, Googling various subjects of interest,
or spending time on Facebook. We are over
stimulated all of the time. We have such
easy access to so much information that we find ourselves virtually lost in it. We study a little about a lot of things. Our
areas of focus are skewed. We tend not
to focus on just one or two or three important areas of interest. Rather than sharpening our knowledge in one
or two or three areas, we learn a little about many things. As a result, we never really become
well-versed in any given subject of interest. There’s never any real significant knowledge
gain in any one area.
For example, many people take workshops and classes to learn
ways to improve themselves (time management, organization, communication, etc),
but those same people never really implement the new material they learn. Weeks after coming back excited from a
workshop, nothing of significant change has happened for the person who learned
the new material. There’s a gap between the
newly gained knowledge and any useful implementation of that knowledge. It’s more fun to learn the new stuff than to
actually apply the effort to use it.
Human nature pushes us to do what’s fun, not what’s work. So…we take
more classes and workshops on more topics that seem interesting, rather than
zeroing in on one area that needs significant improvement.
The same can be true of us when it comes to goal
setting. We sometimes get lost in
setting the goals and never even get beyond that process because we are
overwhelmed. There may be so many areas
in which we think we need to improve, that we can’t seem to focus on the one or
two that are of critical importance to us.
Rather, we have trouble deciding which one of those areas will give us
the biggest payoff once the goal is reached. We may list so many goals that it
looks like a to-do list to be checked off.
Another problem is that we have trouble saying to ourselves
and others that we’re working on just one thing. We are a culture of multi-taskers. We’ve been conditioned to think we have to
have many things we’re working on all at the same time. We’re embarrassed to say we’ve only got one
thing on our list of improvements that we’re planning to tackle. We think somehow we’re not working hard enough
or we’re afraid others will think that about us. As a result, we plug away until we eventually
give up because we aren’t seeing significant results from our efforts. What we are seeing is our efforts strewn
about many things and not feeling a sense of accomplishment over one thing due
to visible and measurable results. We tend
to look at the overall concept of all that needs to be improved in our lives or
ourselves, versus looking at the improvement process one piece at a time. We have to start to change our paradigm here. When I teach a class on organizing the home,
I start out by having the students identify the one room that each will focus
her efforts on through the duration of the class. We don’t look at the house in its
entirety. We focus on one room at a
time.
Next week: How negative filtering works against us in
goal setting.
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