“If you don’t know where you are going, any
road will get you there.”—Lewis Carroll
As a coach, I often see people
who have good intentions, a lot of options, and numerous ideas, but they seem
to be stuck in one place. There are so
many good things out there to do, but they have a hard time making
choices. In a coaching relationship,
they have the opportunity to identify their values, clarify their needs, discover
options, and then set goals for themselves.
Yes, I know that most
people don’t like goals. I think that
one reason that we don’t like goals is that when we set them, there is an
expectation that we will have to move out of neutral into drive and get down
to work.
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In The Experience: The 5 Principles of Disney Service and Relationship Excellence, authors
Bruce Loeffler and Brian T. Church share this story:
“In 1953, a
group of researchers interviewed the graduating class of the Harvard School of
Business. They found that only 3 percent had long-range, written, specific
goals; 10 percent had “generic goals”; and the remaining 87 percent had no
goals, other than to graduate from the business school. The researchers stayed
in contact with the graduates, and in 1978, 25 years later, they interviewed
them again—and the results were nothing short of phenomenal. The 3 percent who
had had long-range, written, specific goals had a net worth greater than the
other 97 percent combined. That is an incredible statistic, since many of the
97 percent were successful in their own right.”
The moral of
this story is not that if you have “long-range, written, specific goals” you will
make more money in life. The point for
me is that if you have a clear idea of where you want to go, you will know how
to focus your resources in a specific direction and achieve more. We will wander less and travel further.
What are your
goals? If you don’t have any, start
thinking about some.
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