When You DO Hit Your Goals For The Year

Well, that's a relief.

Two years ago, I wrote an article about how I hadn't met my goals for 2019. I wrote about why, and in my mind I thought 'I've learned my lesson'. In 2020, things will be different.

But they weren't. At the end of 2020, I found myself writing another article, 'When You Don't Hit Your Goals For The Year II'. Again, I hadn't met them. I reflected on why, and as I built my goals for 2021 I had doubts. I had failed in the last two years. Would I fail again?

And the answer, thankfully, is No. But it was hard.

I came into 2019 on the back of some amazing results for myself using the idea from this story about Warren Buffett. I've written about it here (under number 2) before. It's a powerful method for remembering that to say Yes to one thing, you have to say No to something else. And the most dangerous things if you want to complete your top 5 goals are goals 6-25. They're valuable, they're interesting, and if you spread yourself too thin you'll never get anything done.

With each year of failure as I've run Buffett's 5/25 exercise I've had to get more rigorous with it. I realised that training had to go on there, as it was such a big use of my time. I realised that I had to be more clear about what the goals were. I had to be tighter. And if a big thing that I really wanted to do came up, I had to be very clear about whether I was going to sacrifice something else to do it. That's the lesson of the exercise: if you say Yes to something you say No to something else.

I realised that in 2020 one of the reasons I didn't meet my goals for the year was that I spent the autumn creating a new way of working with clients and doing it with clients four times! Amazing. But that wasn't in my goals for the year.

And so in 2021, I was careful.

I wanted to work 4 days a week instead of 5. I've always wanted that - why work the arbitrary 5 days? That's not my end game - and my paternity leave and the small bundle of wonder that accompanied that felt like the opportunity and the reason to start. That needed to go on my list of goals, because it was a choice to do something different and if I was saying Yes to that I would need to say no to other goals.

I completed Robert Holden's Success Intelligence Mastermind. As I've said, I'd been stung before by not including training and development on the list. I knew I wanted to work with Robert, knew it was the perfect time and place for him to support me towards the next level of success for me. And those six months of calls plus lots of other work would require sacrifice of other things for me to create the space. I completed it, and learned so much.

I wanted to co-create something. Really co-create, in a new way. I wanted to work closely with someone and make something that couldn't have happened without us dancing in creativity together. And Mike Toller and I have co-created a beautiful coaching training for the consultancy, Curve. It's based on Phil Bolton's (and colleagues') work with the coaching school, but Mike and I have undoubtedly created it together and it has been enlivening.

And I finally, finally, finally published a book. Publishing my books has been the goal that has been kicking my ass for the last three years. And one is now out. Ironically, of course, it's based on an idea about 'better out than perfect'. But if I didn't need to learn from the book I wouldn't have written it.

Interestingly, that's only four. Previously I had done five, and I had five for 2021. But I realised part way through the year that I needed to say No to goal 5 in order to say yes to goals 1-4. And that was tough.

And I did less coaching hours in 2021 than in any year since my first as a coach. And realising that was tough. But it was a choice: I sat down and realised that if I used the last quarter of the year to create new coaching clients as I had done the previous year, my book wouldn't come out.

And that, really, is the lesson of the Warren Buffett goalsetting exercise. It is a reminder that I am the player in my life. That my choices dictate what I can achieve in a year. That I can be deliberate about what I work on and how I create things. Not taking that responsibility can feel nice, but as Fred Kofman would say, innocence leads to impotence. It's painful to realise that our choices make all the difference, that things are down to us. But it's also where the power lies.

And then here I find myself, again, setting goals for the year. Thinking about what I want to include in them, thinking about what I want them to be. Thinking about what I'll choose to say No to and what I won't.

And as I sit here in this moment, at the start of the year, I remind myself that I can choose. Now and at any point. I can choose where I put my time, my energy, my will.

I can choose how I measure my success and my failure.

And that that choice matters. Because, as my friend Ed Watson says, failure is really just when our expectations don't match reality. It's all in my mind.