How to Accomplish Your Real Goals
Learn how to work on purpose to align your actions with your goals.
Sometimes you can be doing all the right things, working very efficiently, and still not get where you want to go. Bernice, Melvin, and I were going camping for the weekend. Camping is great fun! Just like meetings. Only with dirt. And worms. And bad food. It was 7 a.m., birds were chirping in the treetops, and Melvin and I were ready to hop in the car and go. Bernice, however, was not.
“I am making an offering to the Goddess. We may not leave until the Goddess is appeased.” Melvin and I paced. Bernice calmly shredded some strange-looking root, placed it in a small bowl, and began chanting. An hour and a half later, she was done. We hopped in the car, pulled onto the freeway, and spent the next two hours caught in rush-hour traffic. We missed the ferry out to the island where we were camping, and had to wait six hours for the next one. As we were setting up our tents in the dark (in the middle of a patch of poison ivy—but we didn’t know that until the next morning), we asked Bernice what was so important that she had to spend an hour and a half doing her ritual.
“I was performing an offering that would ensure fast, speedy travel to our campsite,” she serenely replied. “Imagine how late we would be if I hadn’t done the offering.”
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How to Accomplish Your Real Goals
Bernice is simply demonstrating the human condition. We set goals, make a plan to reach our goals, and then forget the goals. We get so engrossed in the plan that it becomes our be-all-and-end-all, even if it’s not getting us to the goal we want. Bernice decided that the way to be on time was to appease the Goddess. She got so wrapped up in her ritual that she didn’t realize the ritual itself was getting in her way!
“That silly Bernice!” we all think. “Fortunately, I would never do something that foolish.” Ya think? Substitute “finish the current project” for “go camping” and “attend weekly status meeting” for “appeasing the Goddess.”
We can make our lives run as smoothly as melted Velveeta™ by aligning our actions around our real goals. This is covered in detail in my book, in Chapter 1: Living on Purpose. Here’s a quick overview of the basic process.
Reconnect With Your Goal by Asking Why
First, discover why you’re doing what you do. Take out your to-do list. For each item, ask, “Why am I doing this?” Write down the answer. Then ask, “Why am I doing that?” You’ll work your way up your ladder of goals until you reach a top level goal that’s a major business or life goal.
For example, I used to attend four or five professional conferences each year. Why? To get clients. Why did I want to get clients? To earn money. Why did I want to earn money? To run a profitable business. That’s my top business purpose as a self-employed person. Yours may be different. Your driving business purpose may be to ship a product, to keep customers happy, to corner the market in Oreo Ice Cream cake, or to grow and develop professionally.
Be Honest with Your Answers
Be honest with yourself. I used to schedule lunch with prospective clients several days each week. Why? The business answer was, “to get business.” The real answer, though, was because I worked alone in my basement, and this was my only way to spend time with people. My real purpose was social.
You might find you don’t have a good purpose for what you’re doing. Or maybe your purpose is different than you thought. Maybe you’re working on a project because you know it will put you in close proximity late into the night with that cute member of the auditing department. That’s fine. You just learned something about your motivation, and about your taste in romantic partners. Actuaries are adorable.
Test Alignment By Asking How
You now know the goals and purposes behind your actions. First off, you might want to consider if your purpose is the right one. That’s totally your decision. If your ultimate purpose is to corner the market on Oreo Ice Cream Cake, that’s your business. I’ll fight you tooth and nail, but it’s still your right to pick your own purpose.
Now start at your top purpose or purposes, and ask “How can I best achieve this?” If my top purpose is to run a profitable business, my answer might be, “By making more money providing coaching services than I spend on conferences.” Then I double check that against reality. Oops! Oh, my. You don’t say. It seems I’ve never actually gotten a client at a conference. So conferences aren’t actually helping me reach my purpose, even though I’ve managed to fool myself into believing that they are.
Check Whether Your To-Do List Matches Up
Keep asking “How” and you should end up with a list of actions that resembles your to-do list. If you don’t, that tells you you’re pursuing the wrong goals, or you’re filling your days with actions that aren’t related to your actual purpose.
When self-employed people spend a thousand dollars and several months on business cards and websites instead of going out and getting clients, they’re not living on purpose. When job hunters spend a month writing a resume instead of making contact with a thousand people in their desired field, they’re not working on purpose.
Find Where You’re Not Working on Purpose
Where are you not working on purpose? Grab your to-do list and ask “Why” for each item. Then once you’ve uncovered your purpose or purposes, start asking “How”. Find where you’re out of alignment, and then revamp your goals or your actions until everything you do is supporting you.
I would never dream of suggesting to Bernice that her Goddess ritual wasn’t giving her the result she wanted. I would, however, kindly point out that if she begins her ritual at 5:30 am, we’ll miss rush hour, thus saving the Goddess work. Perhaps in appreciation, the Goddess will shower us with Oreo Ice Cream cake. Just not literally.
Work Less, Do More, and have a Great Life!
Man on Computer image courtesy of Shutterstock
About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the podcast Get-it-Done Guy from 2007 to 2019. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BS in Computer Sciences from MIT.
