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Personal Business Coach
Inspired Development and Coaching |
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Success
To succeed or not to succeed
People who are successful do not leave success to chance. In his book “True Success” (1994), Tom Morris describes the characteristics of successful people. According to him, successful people:
o Determine what they want – that is, a goal or set of goals “powerfully imagined”.
o Show focus and concentration in preparation and planning.
o Have the confidence and belief in themselves to see the goal through – that is, “self-efficacy”.
o Commit emotional energy.
o Are consistent, stubborn and persistent in the pursuit of their goal.
o Have the kind of integrity that inspires trust and gets people pulling for them.
o Enjoy the process of getting there.
With regard to those who consistently fail to achieve their full potential, Hammond, Keeney and Raiffa identify the following characteristics. They:
o Work on the wrong problems.
o Fail to identify key goals.
o Fail to develop a range of good, creative alternatives.
o Overlook crucial consequences of their alternatives.
o Give inadequate thought to tradeoffs.
o Disregard uncertainty.
o Fail to account for their personal level of risk tolerance.
o Fail to plan ahead when decisions are linked over time.
Further evidence
A key theme in this and most other objective studies of the differenced between successes and failures is the critical role of goal setting. Effectively, people with a sense of direction, people who get things done, people who shape their world and reap the material and personal rewards, in short people who succeed, do not waste time in vague wishful thinking. Rather, they translate their wishes and aspirations into specific outcomes towards which they can work.
In an extensive programme of research in the early 1060’s, Harvard academic David McClelland found a striking correlation between the success of executives and their habit of setting formal goals and plans of action. Many subsequent studies have reinforced these findings. For example, Gerard Egan (2002) found that goal setters:
o Have a sense of purpose.
o Live lives that are going somewhere.
o Have self enhancing patterns of behaviour in place.
o Focus on results, outcomes and accomplishments.
o Don’t mistake aimless action for accomplishments.
o Have a defined rather than an aimless lifestyle.
Being in the driving seat
In part two of this piece (to be circulated as no. 4 in our series of free articles), I will describe how specifically you can use goal setting to define and move towards successful outcomes that you value. The theme will be that of taking charge of your career and your life. The challenge is to make sure that you are in the driving seat steering in the direction of the outcomes that you value. If you do not, others will be only too happy to do the driving for you, steering you in the direction that benefits their goals and their outcomes.
In more than one coaching session, senior executives have turned to me and said: “You know Martin, looking back now, if I had actively chosen where I wanted my career to end up and what I wanted to do, it would not have been here doing this”. Not only is that person less happy than she should be, as a victim of other people’s plans and ambitions she is almost certainly less effective and successful than she could be.
So how do you get back into the driving seat? Next time, I will talk about how to set goals that are powerfully imagined, and about how to be consistent, stubborn and persistent in the pursuit of them.
In order to avoid the “ready, fire, aim” behaviour frequently displayed by the busy and pressured executive, we first need to identify the areas where your goal setting is likely to deliver maximum benefit. To do this we will use a classic tool preferred by many executive coaches, the Balance Wheel.
The Balance Wheel
This simple but powerful tool asks you to compare your satisfaction with your life and career as it is now and how it could be.
The image of a wheel is deliberately chosen to represent a well rounded life. If one or more of the spokes is missing or weak, forward progress is going to be slower and more precarious. If two many spokes are allowed to weaken, the wheel may come off as too often sadly happens with derailed executives.
Exercise
Please do not simply read the following sections. Follow the instructions and try it out. A small investment of time will be substantially repaid.
On the diagram in the attached PDF file at the bottom of this article I would like you to assess your satisfaction with each life area as it is now. The centre represents complete dissatisfaction. The outer edge represents the ideal. Using a 0-10 scale mark your current level of satisfaction on each spoke, then draw a line connecting each spoke.
Having completed the wheel, ask yourself the following questions and write down your responses:
o What are my reasons for marking this area as I have?
o What evidence and examples to I have?
o What specifically do I want / need that I do not currently have?
o What links do I see between the ways I have scored the various areas?
o How would I prefer the wheel to look?
o How much energy do I have for change in any of the areas that show dissatisfaction?
o Which areas do I most want to make changes in?
o Which areas are potentially powerful areas for turning into goals?
o What could this area of my life look like if I was managing it better?
o What changes would make sense?
o What would I be doing differently with the people in my life?
o What would I be doing to make life better?
o What achievements would I have made?
o What opportunities would I have grasped and developed?
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Written by Martin Gillespie, the UK based executive coach, facilitator, leadership development expert, trainer and speaker.
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