Beating Unexpected Roadblocks

If you encountered roadblocks on your way home tonight, would you pull over to the side of the road, put a “For Sale” sign on your car, give up and walk away?

Why is it that if you encountered unexpected roadblocks on your way home tonight, it would never occur to you to simply give up trying to get there? It might take you longer, but you’d find some other way to make it home, wouldn’t you?

For the most part, this is because you have a crystal-clear picture of your goal in mind and you also have unshakable confidence in your ability to achieve it. Confidence alone without the picture won’t get you there, and neither will the picture without the belief in yourself. But together, they are an unbeatable combination.

Think about this for a minute. When you discover this hypothetical obstacle, a way around it might not be immediately clear to you. You could be in an unfamiliar area or completely unaware of alternate routes, but that wouldn’t stop you, would it? You would figure out the “how-to” as you went along. You would ask for help, borrow a map, check your GPS or
smartphone app, and, one way or another, you would reach your goal of getting home.

The same is true of any goal you set in life, at work, in your career – anywhere. You don’t have to know exactly how you are going to achieve it at the time you set the goal. In fact, if you expand your goals beyond what you know how to make happen, and if you hold a picture of the end-result you want vividly in your mind – refusing to give up until you achieve it – you set a powerful process in motion that will help you with the “how.”

Take your unbeatable combination of confidence and picture, your persistence and resiliency, add them all together and create the life, the achievements, you want. By the way, organizational goal-setting works this very same way. It’s just that the picture tends to be a bit bigger, but you have the effect of mass confidence, picture, persistence and resiliency.

This is effective goal-setting. Perhaps your first goal will be to become an effective goal-setter.