Are “You” Lined up with Your Goals?

As a coach, I help you achieve your goals faster. But I’m less interested in your actual goals than how you can most easily achieve them. And, I’m less interested in how sensible your action steps are than how lined up you are mentally and emotionally with those steps. Simply put, if you aren’t lined up with your goals, you wont achieve them. So my most important mission when I talk with prospective clients about their goals is to ask the kind of questions that will reveal any hidden values conflicts, fears, or attachments connected to those goals.

When we work together, our most productive work will be addressing those conflicts and getting “you” lined up with what you want to achieve. Once you are lined up with your goals, then the action steps are easy to take, and over time, with consistent action, there’s almost no way you can fail. But when you aren’t lined up, no matter how clear you are on your actions, no matter how committed you feel when we get off the phone, by the next session, it’s predictable that you will either be frustrated with yourself for procrastinating, or you will cite many legitimate reasons why you could not take the actions required to achieve your goal. You may even be distracted and want to talk about other things, until after a few months you look back and wonder what you accomplished.

How do you know if you are “unaligned” with your goals? Here are just some of the signs:

1. It takes a whole lot of willpower and discipline for you to follow your plan.
2. You feel that you need accountability – someone to push you.
3. You really don’t enjoy doing the specific actions required to succeed.
4. You find yourself procrastinating and feel ashamed, but that doesn’t change things much.
5. Other, more important things keep getting in your way so you don’t have time to do what you need to do to succeed.
6. You keep changing your mind about your goals.
7. You set a goal and work towards it for awhile and then, without even realizing it, you seem to drift into not working on it, until one day you notice you’ve blown it off for weeks.
8. You feel like if you could only just get this one thing worked out and achieve this one goal, everything in your life would finally be ok (the right job, the right weight, the right relationship, etc.)

In contrast, how does it feel when you ARE lined up with your goals?

1. You may be tired or unmotivated, but you take the action steps anyway, and you feel good about it.
2. You might want an accountability partner, but you look forward to the time together instead of feeling pushed or forced.
3. Taking the steps required to achieve your goal feels energizing and exciting even if you feel scared, even if you fail.
4. Once you get some momentum going on your actions, they get easier, more enjoyable, and you feel more efficient.
5. You can see yourself having achieved your goal, and it feels possible, not like a “too good to be true” fantasy.
6. You know achieving this goal will be fulfilling, but you don’t expect it to make all your problems go away.
7. You might procrastinate or get distracted sometimes, but within a few days you are naturally thinking and focusing on your goal again, and wanting to take more steps.
8. As you work towards your goal, you continue to grow your confidence, even when things aren’t working out like you’d hoped.

If you look at the two lists above, you may notice that there is a distinct difference in the overall feeling and forward motion. When you aren’t lined up with your goals, your emotional state is more conflicted, your mental state is more confused, and although you may take some action, you never gain enough momentum to see results. When you are lined up with your goals you still feel all the same human emotions like fear and frustration, and you still face setbacks, both internally and externally, but through it all you naturally hold the vision, want to move forward, and find the energy you need to do what it takes. So eventually you gain momentum and get results.

If you are becoming painfully aware that you are in the “not lined up” category, don’t despair. You wouldn’t “want” whatever it is that you want if it wasn’t lined up with at least one real value or need. And that means the possibility exists for you to achieve at least most of what you want. However, if something isn’t lined up, you will have more long term success working to identify your internal conflicts and working them out than in attempting to force yourself through willpower to take action.

This doesn’t take as long as you might think. You don’t have to go into years of therapy and resolve everything in your past that affects you now. Just shining some light on your values, thinking about what makes you feel happy, fulfilled, and purposeful, and understanding what tends to get in the way for you can make enough of a difference to get you moving forward.

That’s why, at Aspyrre, December is the month of “self-discovery”. January is a big month for goal-setting, so in December we get back in touch with our core values, think about who we really are, what we most want out of life, and identify what gives us a sense of fulfillment and purpose. Then, as we plan for the year ahead we can make a conscious effort to line our goals up with our strongest values and give ourselves the best chance for success.

There is an exercise I have my clients do each year in December that helps shine the light on what is most important, and sets the stage for setting solid, values-based goals in January. The exercise is on my website, and is called “Your Year in Review”. Feel free to go through the questions yourself for this year, and when you are done, see if you have uncovered any gems that help you line yourself up with what you want to accomplish next year. I’d love to hear what you come up with!

P.S. As I write this at the end of 2009, I am working on a new website, so if for any reason the link doesn’t work – just go to my website and look in the articles section, or feel free to e-mail me and let me know so I can get the exercise to you.

What to Tweet About?

People keep saying, “You should be on Twitter”. Yes, I know. I’m on there all right. But I don’t “tweet” much, because up until now, I haven’t really “gotten” what I should be saying. I mean, who in the world cares when I wash my hair or that I had a great talk with my daughter or whether I’m answering e-mail or talking to a client in any given work moment? And I know people definitely don’t want to read a bunch of workshop or coaching advertisements. So, what to write?

And then, today, the answer began to form around the edges of my mind. It happened when I was writing my weekly update to the Aspyrre Community members. I realized that the update created intimacy, a conversation for those who did not have time to show up for the live event that week. And for the first time, I realized I wanted to have that kind of conversation with more people. It occurred to me that the question “what do I tweet about?” is the exact same question as “what do I write about?” when I think about writing an e-mail or a blog.

Except with my blog and articles, I take time to write, and my readers take time to read.

But the world is changing, accelerating at an outrageous pace. Nobody has time to read or write anymore.

In my recent workshops on time management, participants grappled with the idea that they simply can NOT complete or even begin everything there is to do anymore. They have to choose. In my career transition workshops, job-seekers are learning how to write resumes that will not actually be read unless they make it through the first few rounds of selection. Everything has to be in bullets.

So the pieces of the puzzle begin to converge, as I realize what twitter gives me – a place to blog in bullets.

The whole world has access to the bullets, and yes, they are quite lost in a sea – like “pings” from a submarine. But there’s always someone else on line the same time I am and, the more followers I have, the more interested those “per chance” people are in what I have to say. After reading the bullets, some will honor me with more of their time, and read a paragraph or an article. And some of those people might want to delve in deeper and join the community, attend a workshop, hire me as their coach.

We live in a new world, where people can choose who, where, when, and what to engage with. Twitter is a selection tool that enables people to come together quickly around what they care about, and disengage just as quickly when they need space.

At least I think. But today, I’m going to step in and give it a try.

Your “To-Do” List – Is it a Tool or a Weapon?

How do you feel when you look at your to do list?

• Do you feel confident that everything is contained in one place, or do you wonder what’s missing?
  
• Do you feel clear about what to get started with, or do you feel overwhelmed at how long the list is?
  
• Do you feel a sense of accomplishment as you check items off throughout the day, or a sense of desperation as you watch the list grow throughout the day?

A to-do list is supposed to be an organizational tool, used to keep you productive, prioritized, and focused, and as a result it should greatly reduce your stress. But all too often I work with clients with to-do lists they want to hide from. The sense of overwhelm they experience as they see an unending list that can’t possibly be completed is enough to send them crawling back under the covers and take a sick day. If your to do list makes you feel bad and doesn’t help you work more productively, it may be a weapon you are using against yourself instead of the tool you originally created to serve you.

When facing your to-do list feels like facing an enemy, chances are it has become a trigger for negative self talk. If you listen closely to the words of your thoughts, you might notice things like, “I am so incompetent – I’ll never get all of this done”, or “what a loser”, or “this will take weeks and I’ll never get any time to relax and enjoy my life”, or “it’s useless, I can’t get on top of it – why bother doing any of it?” There are many variations in what you might be saying to yourself, but if the sight of your list triggers feelings of overwhelm, impatience, exhaustion, or other draining emotions, you can bet there is some form of negative thinking and self-talk behind it.

For many people, the energy drain is so severe that they avoid the list and procrastinate on tasks they might have otherwise enjoyed or easily completed. When that happens, your to do list has become a weapon you are inadvertently using against yourself, and it is no longer effectively serving its purpose as an organizational tool.

So, if this is happening to you, what do you do about it?

The first thing is to get back to the purpose of the to-do list. The to-do list serves you; you don’t serve it. Ask yourself why you have a list in the first place? Is it to keep you more organized, or prioritized? Is it to prevent you from forgetting things? Once you get clear on what you wanted the list for in the first place, you can make some adjustments to your list, or you can use an alternative tool that might work better. Here are a few ideas:

1. To keep you prioritized and productive: write a “top 5” list each day, of the five most important things you want to get done. There may be a longer to do list that you use to contain ALL your projects, but the top 5 is much less overwhelming, and keeps you focused on the 20% that will give you 80% of your results.
2. To move through your list faster: Most people know about the A,B,C method of prioritization. A items are the most critical items, B items are important, and C items are things you’d like to do when you can find the time. Add a Q designation for anything that takes 10 minutes or less and is relatively easy. Each day when you get 15 – 20 minutes of open time, such as before a meeting, knock one or two Q’s off your list. You might be surprised at how much shorter your list stays as a result.
3. To get rid of the overwhelm: The bottom line is that technology has changed the nature of work over the past decade such that it is now literally impossible to get everything on our lists done. The people who survive in this new age of information overload have changed their mindsets and expectations accordingly. It’s no longer “getting it all done” that is important. It’s choosing what’s most important now, given the current circumstances and opportunities in this moment, which may be entirely different from what was relevant just a moment a go. Shifting your mindset to a new way of judging your competence can be powerful. Instead of “getting it all done”, if “getting what’s most important done” is what makes you competent, your to do list may lessen its power over you, and go back to its rightful place as your servant.

I’ll be talking about this mindset change in my Calming the Chaos workshop November 17th. To see a list of workshops I’m currently offering, you can always visit my website at

www.aspyrre.com.