create the life you want

Start creating the life you want!

Sat, 01 Nov 3000 00:31:00 -0700

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If you want to get clearer about what you want, find some direction in your life, learn how to set goals, and find out how to stay motivated, you're in the right place!

I'm Andy Smith, NLP trainer, emotional intelligence coach, and author of Achieve Your Goals: Strategies To Transform Your Life (Dorling Kindersley 2006). I've been helping people to change their lives since 1993, and I'll be sharing some things I've learned along the way about what works and what doesn't.

Have a look round this site for tips, research, book reviews and ideas to help you clarify what's important to you, set goals so they happen, and get past obstacles along the way.

You can also buy my top-rated book about how to set and achieve goals, and download my hypnotic motivation audio to keep yourself motivated and on track.

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Success! Why Expectations Beat Fantasies — PsyBlog

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 02:28:00 -0800

Are you building castles in the sky? Psychologists have found that fantasising about future success can be dangerous.

We all have fantasies about the future. It's only natural to dream happy dreams about how things might go right.

We often hear from self-help gurus that just this type of happy dreaming is a good source of motivation. If we can picture our future success then this will help motivate us.

Loosely speaking there is some truth to this: positive thinking about the future is broadly beneficial. But psychologists have found that visualization and fantasy can be tricky customers and research carried out by Oettingen and Mayer (2002) shows why.

Fantasy versus expectation

The researchers wanted to see how people cope with four different challenges that life throws at us: getting a job, finding a partner, doing well in an exam and undergoing surgery (hopefully not all at the same time).

Across four studies the researchers examined how people thought about each of these challenges. They measured how much they fantasised about a positive outcome and how much they expected a positive outcome.

The difference might sound relatively trivial, but it's not. Expectations are based on past experiences. You expect to do well in an exam because you've done well in previous exams, you expect to meet another partner because you managed to meet your last partner, and so on.

Fantasies, though, involve imagining something you hope will happen in the future, but experiencing it right now. This turns out to be problematic.

The researchers found that when trying to get a job, find a partner, pass an exam or get through surgery, those who spent more time entertaining positive fantasies did worse.

Take those looking for a job. Those who spent more time dreaming about getting a job, performed worse. Two years after leaving college the dreamers:

had applied for fewer job,

unsurprisingly had been offered fewer jobs,

and, if they were in work, had lower salaries.

On the other hand those who entertained more negative future fantasies were more likely to achieve their goals. Similar results were seen for the other goals.

Although positive fantasies were associated with failure, positive expectations were associated with success. People who had positive expectations about finding a partner, recovering quickly from surgery and passing an exam, did better than those whose expectations were negative.

Recall that expectations are built on solid foundations while positive fantasies are often built on thin air.

Why positive fantasies are dangerous

The problem with positive fantasies is that they allow us to anticipate success in the here and now. However they don't alert us to the problems we are likely to face along the way and can leave us with less motivation—after all it feels like we've already reached our goal.

It's one way in which our minds own brilliance lets us down. Because it's so amazing at simulating our achievement of future events, it can actually undermine our attempts to achieve those goals in reality.

This isn't to say that thinking positively about the future is problematic or that fantasy in itself is dangerous, just that a certain type of positive fantasy thinking is associated with poorer performance.

So that's a warning about the dangers of visualization and fantasy in goal-achievement, onto more positive findings about motivation and success in future posts.

I expect.

Image credit: balt-arts

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Published: 20 January 2011

via spring.org.uk

An NLP way of looking at this (which adds a useful distinction, I think) is that fantasies are associated ("after all it feels like we've already reached our goal"), while expectations are dissociated.

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Going "one louder": what if you scale your life up to 11?

Thu, 09 Dec 2010 09:12:00 -0800

via coachingleaders.squarespace.com

An article from my Coaching Leaders blog about treating your life like Nigel Tufnel's amp!

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How to do things better - the New Behaviour Generator

Thu, 09 Dec 2010 08:53:00 -0800

How to do things better - the New Behaviour Generator

Photo by wia-tirol at sxc.hu

Applications: this is a great NLP technique for being able to do something better, or finding new ways to handle challenging situations. It's like positive mental rehearsal on steroids!
NB. If you are already an NLP practitioner and you covered this on your practitioner training, compare this version of the process with the one you know. I've simplified it to its essentials.

1. Describe a behaviour you would like to be able to do, or how you would like to be able to do something better. Start from a belief and internal dialogue of 'I can do this'.

2. Create a mental 'movie' in which you see yourself doing the new behaviour the way you want. Make sure the picture is big, bright and vivid. Add sound so that you see and hear yourself. Adjust the movie until you are satisfied with the new behaviour. (Extra tip: for most people, looking up and to your right as you do this will help. For a few people - usually if you're left-handed - looking up and to your left will work better.)

3. Step into the 'movie' and check how this feels. Make any further adjustments you need to until you feel the way you want. (Extra tip: for most people, looking down towards your dominant hand will help you get in touch with what you are feeling).

4. Imagine seeing yourself use the new behaviour in 3 or more opportunities in the future to generalise the new ability out. Again, looking up will help you to visualise.

Some extra refinements:

A) Use a role model: In steps 2 and 3 you can use a 'role model' who you know can do the desired behaviour well. Run a movie of that person performing the behaviour (Step 2) and then 'become' that person in Step 3. Then repeat Steps 2 and 3 with yourself in the movie, making any changes you need to.

B) Use resources from your past: if you have dealt with similar situations well in the past, see yourself doing that and then transfer that skill into the new situation.

C) 'Chunk' the behaviour down: if you need to, break the desired behaviour down into smaller steps and run through Steps 2 and 3 on each.

D) Use a timeline: lay a timeline out on the floor, from past to future. See yourself enjoying the results of the desired behaviour and place this goal on the timeline. Step into it, get the good feelings, and notice the steps and any new behaviours associated with them leading up to the successful achievement of this goal.

Step off the timeline and notice where each new behaviour step is on the timeline. Repeat Steps 2 and 3 for each new behaviour. Finally walk up the timeline from now, associating into each step, until you reach your goal. Store your goal and the new behaviours associated with it wherever feels right for you.

E) Create alternatives: at Step 2 ask your unconscious mind to create at least 3 options for new behaviours. Try out each and select the most appropriate.

Let me know how you get on!

Note: as far as I know, the New Behaviour Generator was originally developed by Richard Bandler - although I could be mistaken.

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The Sales Apprentice: Sales Training Tips From The Hit TV Show, Week 10

Thu, 09 Dec 2010 06:57:00 -0800

Hi Guys! I knew that I would be out this week and would not get to The Apprentice in time to write my review. Because of this I asked my good friend Andy Smith (who has been commenting on the series on my blog every week to write a review). Andy is an NLP, EI and AI expert so he has some interesting tips for us…

On that note, I can’t wait to get home… It seems I missed a decision from Sir Alan that without seeing it… Anyway…

Week 10 of the Sales Apprentice and we’re down to six candidates – three boys, three girls, and no place to hide. As usual the contestants are summoned to a damp Wandsworth Bus Garage (because “the red London bus is an icon of tourism”) and given the task of setting up and running a London tour company for the day, to get at the pockets of some of the 26 million tourists who visit London every year.

Stuart is moved over to join Stella and Liz in team Apollo as project manager, monitored by Karen, while Joanna joins Jamie and Chris as PM of team Synergy, shadowed by Nick.

So, Stella, Liz and Stuart on the same team! Stella and Stuart have crossed swords many times in the past, and after last week’s very uncomfortable post-boardroom moment, where Liz made it very clear how much she resented Stella having a go at her in the boardroom, should we expect fireworks there? Not a bit of it – the girls were back on friendly terms, while they were back to their usual relationship with Stuart – think “indulgent owners of a bouncy puppy who can’t stay angry with it no matter how many times it chews up the furniture or poos in the house”.

Sales training lesson: People sometimes snap at each other when they are under intense pressure. If that is a blip rather than a recurring pattern, professionals will not take it personally, move on, and not let it get in the way of the task.

Stella really wanted to do a Cockney tour of the East End. Liz and Stuart, obviously strangers to the delights of the jellied eel, aren’t so keen, but in the absence of any better ideas, go along with it. Stella would be the tour guide – giving Stuart the opportunity to make one of his trademark buck-passing comments to camera: “If we lose she’ll be responsible.” No Stuart, as Project Manager you’ll have at least some responsibility.

On the other team, Jamie elects to be the guide on a ‘Ghouls and Ghosts’ tour, which is fine with the other two.

There are essentially four parts to this week’s task: researching and planning the tour, negotiating with the London Visitor Centre so that your tour is the one they pick to sell, selling the tickets, and actually guiding the tour.

Joanna doesn’t have much faith in Jamie, so she accompanies him as he walks the route of his tour so that she could step in to the tour guide role if he doesn’t feel up to it. In addition to this vote of confidence, she chivvies and nags him every step of the way (or that’s what the show’s editing makes it look like anyway) to the point where he snaps and swearily tells her to back off. She says she feels threatened, although she doesn’t look it.

Sales training lesson: Don’t micromanage – it’s a waste of your time and it kills your staff’s motivation. You may want everything to go right, but you have to trust your team. Give them as much management as they need, but no more – if you pay attention to how they are reacting, you will be able to see the signs that they’ve had enough and head off any discontent long before it becomes a rebellion.

The other team make the somewhat bizarre decision to have the tour guide stay behind doing paper research while Liz and Stuart go round the route. As two of the posher contestants, the East End is not their natural stomping ground, and a bystander tells Liz off for patronizing a jellied eel stallholder as she asks him to cockernee it up with some rhyming slang when the tourists come round. Not walking the route will cause problems for Stella later when she doesn’t know how to find some of the East End’s meagre tourist attractions.

Stuart and Liz set the prices for their tour. “What’s your gut instinct, around £30-£35?” The guy in the London Visitor Centre is openly sceptical that anyone will buy it a tour at £35 (the going rate is more like £25), but they stick to their guns and offer the Visitor Centre a 25% commission.

Sales training lesson: Do some – any – market research before you set your prices! Stuart and Liz have set a premium price for a tour with no obvious premium features, and ignored feedback from someone who knows the market.

Negotiating the Visitor Centre for the other team, Chris adopts an ‘interesting’ strategy. He prices the tour at a reasonable £20, and offers only 20% commission – but on everything! All takings, whether the Centre or team Synergy actually sells the tickets. And 20% of the tips!

Project manager Joanna isn’t happy when she finds out, but did she set any negotiation guidelines with Chris before he went in?

On the day of the tours, the teams go out and sell.

As usual you can learn a lot of what not to do by observing Stuart. First he attempts to tout right outside the London Visitor Centre (until the scary manager lady warns him off), then with the whole of central London to choose from he goes head to head on the little bit of Trafalgar Square that is Chris’ pitch, then he tries to steal Joanna’s customers as she’s making a sale while making disparaging remarks. I’m not even going to dignify this one with a sales training tip…

Jamie’s final tour has no customers at all. It’s at three, while the other team’s last tour of the day is packed. Presumably because the later tour had more time to sell. The LVC doesn’t seem to be doing much. Could it be that because they are getting 20% of all sales, they are leaving it to the team to sell while concentrating on other tours that they get the standard 35% only on the tickets they sell?

In the boardroom: Apollo have made £834.30, while Synergy have made £1099.33! All of a sudden, giving the LVC 20% of everything turns out to be “innovative” in Lord Sugar’s words. Guess what he would have said about it if the team had lost?

Joanna, Jamie and Chris fly off to Jersey for an oyster and Michelin starred restaurant break, while Liz, Stuart and Stella mope in London’s gloomiest caff.

Back in the boardroom: get ready for one of the strangest boardroom decisions ever (and there’ve been plenty through the years). It looks like Stuart will go. What has he done really? What has he done throughout the show – his only demonstrated talent has been doing funny voices, his only demonstrated entrepreneurial quality has been bulletproof – no, nuclear-strike proof – self-belief. He upsets people, his sense of ethics is ‘different’, he’s bumptious…

On paper, Stuart also hasn’t performed. He’s sold £260 of tickets, while Liz sold nearly twice that at £505. It’s also not looking great for Stella as Lord Sugar describes her as “Steady Stella” – remember, he said at the start of the series “I’m not looking for Steady Eddies or Cautious Carols”. He also suggests that she had the easiest job as she didn’t have to sell.

Stuart and Liz, he says, were totally unprepared. He describes Stuart in very unflattering terms as “childish”. Surely he has to go? Stuart’s not going down without a fight, as he once again recounts how he has his own £3m business (he’s only twenty-one you know), and how he’s never had any financial boost from his parents – well they might have given him a tenner to buy a stock of yo-yo’s to flog at school. Lord Sugar is sounding very skeptical – has he done some research into Stuart’s real story and caught him out? No – the moment passes, and Stuart goes on to describe how much money he will make for the boss, and how he’s not a one-trick pony, he’s got a whole field of ponies. My favourite Apprentice tweet from last night really isn’t exaggerating that much:

@heatworld: “Stuart: ‘Lord Sugar: I’ll make you a unicorn made out of rainbows, together we shall run through meadows of joy forever’ #Apprentice”

(if you’re not familiar with ‘hashtags’ on Twitter BTW, searching Twitter on ‘#Apprentice’ will bring up most of the tweets about the show, and adding it to your tweets will make them visible in the wider Apprentice conversation)

Surely Lord Sugar will see through this nonsense. But no – he’s fallen for it! He gives Stuart another chance, and – amazingly – it’s Liz he fires, saying that she lacks a ‘spark of genius’. In the end, Liz just couldn’t come up with anything to challenge Stuart’s narrative. Even though it was all about the what he could do in the future rather than any results he’d achieved (although someone who has build a £3m turnover company at age 21 must have something about them), it was Stuart’s story that Lord Sugar bought into – possibly reminded of his younger self, though I suspect their starting circumstances were rather different.

What Liz could have said: Easy to be wise after the event I know, but Liz actually could have told a lot more convincing story: “No spark of genius? Well, if you want to set aside the record for the highest ever sale on The Apprentice (about £99Ks worth of heat-sensitive babygrows, if you remember). And my track record is based on solid achievements, week after week, rather than pie in the sky. And I get on with people rather than upsetting them….”

Sales training tip: This is actually more of a career tip. Everything you do is evaluated by bosses, customers and colleagues in the light of a ‘story’ about you that people stitch together in their own minds from what you’ve done previously. This story is not the objective truth – some facts will be emphasised, some ignored, to fit with what they think they know about you already. So what ‘narrative’ are you weaving about yourself? How are you seen by others, and what can you do to tell a better ‘story’ about yourself which will help them to judge your track record in a more favourable way?

Who’s going to win? It’s all up in the air now as Liz was previously looking like something of a favourite. What’s your prediction, and what did you learn from this week’s show?

Related posts:
The Sales Apprentice 2010: Sales Training Tips From The Hit TV Show, Week 6

The Sales Apprentice 2010: Sales Training Tips From The Hit TV Show, Week 7

The Sales Apprentice: Sales Training Tips From The Hit TV Show, Week 8

The Sales Apprentice: Sales Training Tips From The Hit TV Show, Week 9

The Sales Apprentice 2010: Sales Training Tips From The Hit TV Show, Week 2

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via gaviningham.com

My good friend Gavin Ingham invited me to do a guest article for his blog reviewing sales training tips from last night's episode of The Apprentice (UK). I trust you will find some useful lessons from the show if you're in pretty much any kind of work. Do leave a comment on Gavin's blog if you are a fan of the show!

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Principles of Effective Goal Setting from ThinkBuzan.com

Fri, 19 Nov 2010 05:51:00 -0800

via thinkbuzan.com

Nothing new here for regular readers of my blog at http://coachingleaders.co.uk/blog/ - *except* for how to use mind maps to support your goal setting! Useful stuff.

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This column will change your life: What's the worst that could happen? - Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian

Sun, 07 Nov 2010 05:23:00 -0800

Another great post from Oliver Burkeman's 'This column will change your life' series - highly recommended for no-woo, evidence based personal development.

This links nicely to Seth Godin's post about unstated away-from goals.

Not everything you do will succeed! So stop worrying, try things out, and build on the ones that work.

'The mindset we need isn’t the positive-thinking mantra that failure is impossible; it’s that failures are inevitable, and for good reason.' Illustration: Claire May for the Guardian
You were as relieved as me, I'm sure, to learn that the terrifying Mayan prophecy about the world ending in 2012 has been postponed, thanks to an apparent error in converting the Mayan calendar. (You've got to feel sorry for the authors of those "2012 apocalypse" cash-in books, though, haven't you? Oh, wait, no, you haven't.) But my relief reverted to terror when I opened The Watchman's Rattle, a book by the biologist and business guru Rebecca Costa that's subtitled Thinking Our Way Out of Extinction. The Mayans, she argues, do indeed have an alarming message for us, as to why our efforts to solve problems – societal and personal – so often go wrong. Unlike the 2012 predictions, her thesis doesn't involve celestial bodies crashing into the earth, which is a point in its favour, unless you're the asteroid-fixated former MP Lembit Opik. But you're probably not, and in any case, Costa's argument is perfectly troubling enough.

Nobody agrees why the Mayans' astonishingly advanced civilisation suddenly collapsed between 750 and 850. Theories abound – drought, disease, war – but Costa suggests it was all of the above. The Mayans had reached their "cognitive threshold", creating a society so complex that it outstripped their brains' capacity to understand it; they could no longer think their way out of their problems. You needn't share all the controversial positions of Costa's specialism, sociobiology, to see how we might be in the same boat today, only worse. Our evolved cognitive capacity is much the same as in 850, but society is vastly more complex: "The rate at which the human brain can evolve new faculties," Costa writes, "is millions of years slower than the rate at which humans generate change and produce new information." What's the solution to global warming, financial crises, terrorism? The answer may be beyond us.

This matters on a personal level, too, and not solely because the destruction of civilisation would be somewhat dispiriting. The complexity of even far more mundane challenges – how to stay healthy, how to be happy in relationships or work – can feel equally defeating, whether or not they're technically beyond our abilities. Any given solution won't work, by definition: Costa defines complexity as when "there are many more wrong solutions than right ones". Worse, they lull us into thinking we're tackling the matter, so extinguishing the sense of urgency. (Are you eschewing plastic bags, imagining you're "doing your bit" for the planet?) The only rational tactic may be trying everything at once – what Costa calls "parallel incrementalism" – in full knowledge that most methods will fail. Should we be fighting climate change at the level of politics, lifestyle or technology? Should you be addressing your chronic lack of energy by sleeping more, eating better or seeing a doctor? All of the above.

We need to think, Costa says, like venture capitalists, who make a fortune despite 80% of the businesses they invest in failing; they know that 20% won't, but not which ones. For complex problems, trying one solution and getting upset when it fails is preposterous: any single solution is likely to fail. The mindset we need isn't the positive-thinking mantra that failure is impossible; it's that failures are inevitable, and for good reason. It's an unexpectedly hopeful conclusion: we may never really understand how to get what we want, or stave off the very worst – yet we may manage it anyway.

oliver.burkeman@guardian.co.uk

twitter.com/oliverburkeman

via guardian.co.uk

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Act as if the future of the universe depends on what you do...

Sun, 07 Nov 2010 03:32:00 -0800

Photo by beer on sxc.hu

"Act as if the future of the Universe depends on what you do, while laughing at yourself for thinking that your actions could make any difference"

-- a Buddhist Saying

(sometimes attributed to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi)

Thanks to @AboodiShabi for alerting me to this.

via coachingleaders.squarespace.com

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From Seth's Blog: The goals you never hear about

Sun, 07 Nov 2010 01:58:00 -0800

Image of Seth Godin by Edward from wikimedia.org

Doing goal setting with friends and colleagues is always motivating and invigorating for me. You hear things ranging from, "I want to help this village get out of poverty," or "I want to double our market share," or "I want to be financially independent."

What you rarely hear is, "I don't want to fail," "I don't want to look stupid," or "I don't want to make any mistakes."

The problem is that those goals are really common, and left unsaid, they dominate. If your goal is not to be called on in class, that's a largely achievable goal, right?

Think about how often your goal at a conference or a meeting or in a project is, "don't screw up!" or "don't make a fool of yourself and say the wrong thing." These are very easy goals to achieve, of course. Just do as little as possible. The problem is that they sabotage your real goals, the achievement ones.

It's not stupid to have a stated goal of starting several ventures that will fail, or asking three stupid questions a week, or posting a blog post that the world disagrees with. If you don't have goals like this, how exactly are you going to luck into being remarkable?

via sethgodin.typepad.com

This is an interesting post. I'm still thinking about the implications of it and have just blogged it to remind myself to come back to it.

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Going "one louder": what if you scale your life up to 11?

Sun, 07 Nov 2010 01:41:00 -0800

In the spoof rockumentary This Is Spinal Tap (high up on most people's lists of the funniest films ever made), there's a famous scene where guitarist Nigel Tufnel shows off his customised Marshall amp, on which all the dials go up to 11 rather than the standard 10.

Now on the one hand, this scene is

"An illustration of the idiocy that human thinking can reach when symbols are mistaken for the things they represent, without any understanding of the true relationship between the symbol and the referent"

as 'Yoism2' who put the clip up on Youtube describes it (this led me to the amazing yoism.org site, by the way, and I'll be returning many times).

On the other hand, there is something gloriously dumb and rock'n'roll about Tufnel's desire to transcend the limitations of normal amp technology - so much so that the phrases "one louder" and "these go to eleven" from this scene have passed into rock'n'roll mythology.

So could there be something useful in "going to eleven"? If we apply the idea to scaling in the Solution-Focused approach to coaching, therapy and personal development, I believe the answer is "yes".

If I ask you to rate how good your life is on a scale of zero to ten, you'll come up with a subjective assessment of how you rate your experience. It's purely subjective - your 'six' could be someone else's four, or vice versa. If I ask you to imagine what life would be like at 10, you will start thinking about the best life that you can currently imagine.

So what would happen if I asked you to go "one better" and turn the scale up to 11? What would your life be like then?

A real stickler might object that going to 11 on a 1-10 scale is a logical impossiblity - in the same way that they would poke fun at those candidates on The Apprentice who were always going on about "giving it 110%". In one sense that stickler would be right; but in another, they would be limiting themselves and missing the important point that over time, our capacities and our ability to make things happen can easily increase, to the point where they are 110% of what they used to be. It's just a 10% rise!

We often tend to limit ourselves by thinking only about what is possible 'now' - within the span of our current time horizon. By asking ourselves to go "one higher" than what we think the best possible outcome would be, we stand at least a chance of looking beyond our typical time horizon, and of moving past any self-imposed limitations, limiting beliefs, or false identifications that might be limiting our thinking.

Try it and let me know how you get on!

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BPS Research Digest: 'Don't do it!' - how your inner voice really does aid self-control

Mon, 25 Oct 2010 02:51:00 -0700

via bps-research-digest.blogspot.com

All the time, psychology is bringing in new bits of useful research, and the BPS Research Digest is a good place to find it in an accessible form.

In this case, it turns out your 'inner voice' really does assist in self-control. By extension, we can guess that it can also help with motivation too.

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Get together and set up a goal-setting group

Wed, 04 Jan 2006 01:31:00 -0800

Last year I was invited to join a 'goal-setting group' of seven people with their own businesses. The idea, new to me, was a simple one - we meet up for one day each quarter and get an hour each to talk through our goals for the next quarter, our progress, and any obstacles.

So far I've been to one meeting, and it was great. I had only met one of the participants before (the guy who invited me) but the other participants turned out to be smart, funny, and non-judgemental. Even though I had not put much time at all into preparation, I came away much clearer about what I wanted.

Obviously it's good to be reminded that you are not the only one facing challenges with your goals, and that there are others in the same boat, especially when, like me, you work for yourself. Beyond that, though, talking through my goals out loud to other people acted as a reality check - it brought home very powerfully that I didn't have enough time to achieve all of my goals by the time I thought I wanted them. It forced me to prioritise my most important goal (getting my book written) and put the rest on the back burner.

Getting together in a group like this and publicly declaring your goals taps into two of the powerful principles identified by psychologist Robert Cialdini in his book Influence: Science and Practice: consistency and commitment.

When you identify yourself as having a particular role, or as being a particular kind of person (in this case, a 'goal achiever') it makes you much more likely to act in a way that is consistent with that role (actually taking action to achieve the goals). Cialdini found that the human mind strives for consistency.

Also, when you make a public commitment to something, you are far more likely to actually do it than if you just make a vague promise to yourself.

Two more great things about a goal-setting group: one is the cost - absolutely free (apart from the time cost of one day a quarter), and the other is the opportunity that the shared purpose gives you to get to know some other people in far more depth than a networking event would give you. Apart from the mutual support, at least two of the people in the group may be helpful to my business at some point in the future, either as employers or suppliers.

So in summary:

1. To make it easier to achieve your goals, get together with a few other people (ideal numbers 5-7) and form a goal-setting group

2. Beyond mutual support, sharing your goals with others gives you a powerful reality check

3. You also harness two powerful psychological forces: consistency and commitment

4. Coming together for a common purpose is a great way of 'depth networking'

Bonus tip:

Use the web to stay in touch with your group in between meetings. There are many free 'social networking' platforms on the web (although bear in mind that if you're very unlucky a free service can disappear on the whim of the owners at any moment). We used Yahoo Groups because the ads are not too intrusive, you can set up a private group, it allows you to post files and set up a meeting calendar, and it can notify you by email whenever someone posts a new message.

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Goal-setting tip: Are you ready for what you want?

Wed, 04 Jan 2006 00:47:00 -0800

Well, I've been writing a book, and it's taken up all my time. It's finished now though! So I should be able to make a few more entries on the blog. More about the book in the next entry.

At the beginning of November 2005 a respected publisher contacted me out of the blue and commissioned me to write a book on 'Achieving Your Goals' (I realise that after that opening sentence, I'm going to have to work hard to re-establish rapport with any aspiring authors, whose first thought would have been "Lucky b*****d!").

The bad news was that because of commitments in January, I had to complete the book by Christmas.

As it happened, I had already freed up that time to write a book. The one I had been planning was the "Practical EQ" book on emotional intelligence that I have been promising myself to write for a while now. At the last meeting of my goal-setting group (more about goal-setting groups in a future article) it became very clear that there were not enough hours in the day to do this and all my other goals as well, so as the book was the most important, I cleared the decks of everything else until after Christmas.

So, I had the space available, and I was able to get the manuscript to the publishers on time. Incidentally, the number of people who have said "Wow, how did you manage it in that time?" is beginning to make me think this was quite an achievement, although while I was writing it I was mainly aware of how much time I was wasting.

The book I wrote, as it turned out, was not the one I had been planning - but I'm not complaining, because things turned out better than I was expecting. If I had written my original book, I would have been happy - but then I would have had to find a publisher, something I had no clue about.

This way, I have a publisher, I was paid an advance while I was writing the book, and of course having to commit to other people to meet the deadline provided an extra incentive on the days I didn't feel like writing.

I have learned a few things from this experience:

Firstly, this tremendous lucky break would not have happened unless I had made myself ready for it by clearing the time to write a book. OK, the publishers would probably still have contacted me, but if the time was already committed to some other project, I could not have said yes - or at least, the lack of enthusiasm as I thought about the hassle of making the time available would have come across in my reply and put them off signing me. So:

- make yourself ready for what you want, otherwise it won't happen.

Secondly:

- when you do make yourself ready for what you want, sometimes what you get is better than you expected!

Finally, I undertook a few assignments in 2005 that I wasn't totally enthusiastic about - because deep down I didn't feel ready for them. Not surprisingly, they were the ones that didn't turn out that well. The money was pretty good, but the wear and tear on the spirit was such that I'm going to be much more careful about what I accept in future. By contrast, it took about a tenth of a second to decide to accept the book commission. This suggests that:

- if you're not 100% enthusiastic about your goal, you're not ready for it

- so what do you need to do to make yourself ready?

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Update - the book is now published!

The designers at Dorling Kindersley have done a fantastic job (the cover is a bit plain but inside there is a wealth of diagrams, attractive layout and beautiful colour photographs) making it easy to read for even the busiest reader. I'm knocked out by how it's turned out.

Anyway, if you order the book from Amazon and send me a copy of your email receipt, I'lll send you a free PDF article on 'The Seven Biggest Mistakes In Goal-Setting'! Email the copy of your receipt to: andy@coachingleaders.co.uk

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