Goals, Outcomes, Success

My coaching experience, much like each new year, started with a list of outcomes I wanted to achieve. After the first two or three sessions, my personal outcomes were centered around my body, my finances, and having a tidy home. My professional outcomes included not dreading work, building my skills, and building up the people who reported to me.

Each one of these outcomes became the starting point of a process that yielded goals for each quarter of the coming year. If you are doing any kind of time, life, or project management, I am sure you can imagine what it would feel like to have all of those new goals added to a weekly or monthly planner. How do you manage all that stuff and fit it into your day without turning your new success program into a second full-time job?

For me, the solution involved doing the easy stuff first and making it as fun as possible. Since I had a fairly good mental model for dealing with money, my financial outcomes were my initial focus. I enjoy graphic design. So I created an attractive layout based on my financial outcomes, vision, and quarterly goals. I added the typeface and colors to make it look the way I wanted. Then I emphasized the things I would be working on in the next ninety days.

Having that part of my life organized felt so good I did the same thing for the remaining areas and outcomes. The result was a stack of papers small enough that I could carry them with me anywhere for daily review. The outcomes were prioritized based on their ease of achievement. On rough days, I only referred to the top two areas. On good days, I could skim through all the highlighted sections.

Over time, I was able to knock out the easy things, which gave me confidence to do more complicated things. It created action and momentum. Daily review of each area's highlights enabled me to develop a level of comfort with the more difficult outcomes. This made them less daunting and more manageable. It also primed me to notice resources I might have otherwise missed as I moved through my day.

So how can you apply this in your life right now?

  1. Identify three areas in your life that could use improvement.
  2. Choose the area where you feel you have the best chance of seeing results because you already have some success in that area.
  3. Determine outcomes that seem achievable in the next year.
  4. Order the list according to the value they will provide when completed.
  5. Make your best guess about what you can accomplish in the next ninety days, and copy those items to a list you will work from.
  6. Start working on the first item on the list.

You will be surprised at how much you can do in those first ninety days. We will talk about refining this process in a later post.