You may already be familiar with SMART goals, but Jody Gold teaches us the real way to tap into your deepest motivation and harness the power of HARD goals.
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Are you a Soldier or a General in your personal and professional life?
Are you a Warrior or a King?
Are you soldiering through, fighting to meet your daily obligations, bleeding too much of your life’s force on survival and immediate threats? Or are you using everything you’ve got to set and pursue the strategic goals to move from where you are, to where it’s most important for you to be?
It’s a question of perspective, discipline, intention, and execution.
Soldiers serve. Generals decide, inspire, and command.
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Napolean
Legend has it that when Napolean arrived at a battlefield before the fighting started, he went to a high point to see all he could of the land and the armies below.
Then he took a little nap…and emerged from his tent with his strategy, fully formed.
Napolean innovated new ways to use terrain, infantry, cavalry, and pursuit of the fleeing enemy to his advantage. And like so many other brilliant and effective leaders, he also used perspective, intuition, and the power of visualization to lock onto directions so clear he could pursue them with unswerving devotion.
Research confirms that people who set goals are far more likely to achieve them. Napolean achieved greatness by setting goals that were both SMART and HARD.
You can too.
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SMART Goals—Necessary but not Sufficient
Many of us know and use SMART goals. I’m working with a technology team that’s launching a system called HealthLink211. HealthLink211 finally makes it possible for healthcare providers to connect poor and vulnerable patients to the full spectrum of community services (food, safe housing, transportation, etc.) that in addition to medical interventions, they need to get and stay healthy.
SMART goals have transformed a vague aspiration (let’s improve healthcare!) into concrete steps to achieve their mission. Setting SMART goals forces us to answer five questions to ensure our goals are right-sized, workable, meaningful, and can be accomplished within a given timeframe. SMART goals create essential, though as you’ll see, often uninspiring road maps to get from here to there.
- Specific—is the goal clearly defined? Flesh this out by answering questions like: how much? what kind? and who will?
- Measurable—Goals are most effective when you can measure them. This gives you something to shoot for, and allows you to track progress against resources and time.
- Actionable/Achievable—Can it be done? Do you have the resources and skills to achieve the goal? If not, how will you acquire what you need in time to succeed?
- Relevant—How will meeting this goal move you toward your life’s ambition or your organization toward its mission?
- Timely/Time Bound—Setting aggressive though reasonable deadlines drives appropriate urgency that focuses resources and attention on the goal.
Looking at goals through these five lenses sets us up to achieve them. But, except for Relevant, (which most people think stands for Realistic—which would be redundant), SMART goals fail to connect us to the motivations within us that are the source energy for perseverance, creativity, and achievement.
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HARD Goals—They Matter so Much, Success is the Only Option
What’s one of the proudest achievements of your life?
Give that achievement a moment to take shape in your mind, to find substance in your heart. Remember. Breathe in as you count slowly to three. Breathe out as you count to six. And “re-member”. Put it back together again.
Remember the whole of the experience. Remember your fear that you wouldn’t be able to do it. Remember how deep you had to dig to get it done, how much of yourself you poured into it. Remember the help you found and how you grew along the way. Remember how it felt to succeed.
Chances are good that you’re thinking of something that was really HARD (Heartfelt, Animated, Required, Difficult).
You can use these same elements intentionally to create goals that are so vivid, compelling, and valuable, they draw you toward them with what feels like their own power.
- Heartfelt—You feel it in your chest. The more emotionally attached you are to the outcome, the more likely you are to go after it with everything you’ve got.
- Animated— The best way to predict the future is to create it. This is the practice and discipline of visualizing the goal as though it’s already here. What is different now? What do you see? What do you hear? What do you feel? It’s not enough to check the intellectual box of knowing that people like Einstein thought largely in pictures. It’s populating the world of the achieved goal so you can walk around in it, smell it, it’s so real. The stronger the picture you can paint of what success looks like, the more magnetic that future will be, the more easily you’ll find the energy to make it so.
- Required—This goal is critical for you. Absolutely necessary for your success, or your marriage, or your kids. If the relevance and requirement of the goal isn’t obviously high enough, you can dig down to find why it matters underneath and make that connection meaningful and motivating.
- Difficult—Growth begins at the edge of your comfort zone. The goal has to be hard enough to maintain your interest and build you in the process.
To learn more about how to set and benefit from HARD goals, check out this 9 page, .pdf summary of HARD Goals: The Secret of Getting From Where you Are to Where you Want to Be, by Mark Murphy.
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HARD Goals are Very Personal
I met a woman at a holiday party a year and a half ago, before I had any clients in my new work consulting with organizations. She challenged me to earn 50% more money in the coming year than I ever had in my life. I was scared to accept the challenge because I seemed sure to fail. I feared the main result of setting this goal would be to erode my own faith in my promises. But this HARD goal went to work on me right away. I made it even HARDer, intentionally.
The goal was Required because I’d been living in my dad and stepmom’s house during grad school and my job search. I needed to earn 50% more than I ever had to service my newly minted debt from school and step into the next phase of my life.
It was Heartfelt because I was 43 and my chest ached with the desire to build a rockin’ life, contribute my gifts to the world, get paid well for them, and find some terrific woman to marry and make some little peanut children with.
I Animated the goal with the vision of living in my own house, playing guitar on my porch in the afternoon sun, and having enough money to breathe easy again. The wolf of money fear was constantly at my door those days, and was a primary driver for me to return to school in the first place.
It was Difficult because I saw no obvious way to make it happen. And I knew I’d have to learn to live with a lot more rejection professionally, something that had never been easy for me.
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We Go Toward Our Focus
Looking back, it’s clear that I pursued this HARD goal in a SMART way through all of the twists and turns since that party. I’m still a little shocked that I actually achieved the goal and am setting the next HARD ones now.
What’s Your HARD goal?
What’s the HARD goal that’s going to make the difference for you now?
Take the time to breathe life into that Heartfelt, Animated, Required, and Difficult goal before you go to sleep tonight. Notice how the few minutes you devote to finding and making a HARD goal real for you begins to draw you toward it over the next two weeks.
Where you’re headed in life is too important to leave to chance.
I hope some of these ideas serve some of you as they do me.
Also check out http://www.GoalsOnTrack.com, a nice web app specifically designed for tracking goals and todo list, and time tracking. It’s clear, focused, easy to navigate.