Goal planning by looking to the future

At the beginning of an MD2MD meeting, Nigel Risner asked the members and guests of MD2MD –  “are you in the room?”  Met with unanimous nods of agreement, he asked again “are you really in the room?”

What Nigel was getting at was the fact that, although there in body, with our lives so full today it is extremely easy for our minds to wander off thinking about that phone call we need to make, that piece of work we need to catch-up on, the milk we must remember to pick up on the way home.  When you are next taking part in or managing a meeting, how many of the attendees are really in the room with you?  To gain maximum benefit from any interaction, all parties need to be ‘in the room’.

Once we all arrived in the room, Nigel shared his strategy for producing goals to ensure we have our best year ever.  Rather than plough straight in, we were all asked to come up with a statement explaining what the best thing we wanted to achieve in the next 12 months was – and we had to imagine we were making that statement in a years time, as if it had already happened.

He then suggested we write our goals using SMART objectives – with a slight variation to the well recognised version.  Nigel’s version was Specific, Motivational, Achievable, Relevant and Trackable by you and at least 5 others.  He later went on to say our goals should also be Enjoyable and Rewarding, making them SMARTER goals.

Next, we were asked to think what, in the last 21 days, we had done to go towards achieving our goals and what we will do in the next 21 days towards them.

Together with Nigel’s ideas on Visions and Missions covered in another article “How to achieve your best year ever”, following his tips will provide clarity and focus to any goal setting process.

Next time, who are your internal terrorists and psychic vampires?!

Written by Bob Bradley, founder of MD2MD.