Focus on your goals

February 3, 2009
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executive, employee and business coachingIt’s early February and you might be asking yourself  ‘does all of this goal setting and resolution stuff really make a difference?’  The research says it does.  Locke (1996) found (among other things) that goals stimulate planning.*  That might not sound very exciting until you think about the impact.

Setting goals directs our attention to something  in a positive way, as if to shine some light on it and say ‘I would like this to be different’. Our attention, awareness and actions are directed there – where the light is shining. 

I had a chance to see this in action last week.  I was invited back to a company to repeat some skills training for their sales team.  Before we started this training,  I worked with the team members for about an hour to clarify their personal goals around selling – not about what they wanted to get from the training, but what they wanted to achieve in their selling in the next 6 months.  For the rest of the day, I conducted the training.

Guess what?  The students reported that the content was significantly more valuable to them than it had been the first time around.  Guess what else?  The content was the same.  The difference was them.   Setting goals before the training had made the content more valuable to them. 

I love it when something is both simple and powerful.  How might that apply to your own work and life experiences?  Could those experiences improve by linking them to one of your own goals or resolutions?  Why not give it a try?

*Locke, E.A. (1996).  Motivation through conscious goal setting.  Applied & Preventitive Psychology, 5(2).  117-124.

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