Constantly Evaluating, Learning & Revising Keeps You Growing & Improving
Constantly Evaluating, Learning & Revising Keeps You Growing & Improving | The art of setting & managing personal goals | Donald Stevens | Olorin Coaching
“A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”
Gathering
Leaders that work hard on their goals & carefully monitor their progress often run into spectacular trouble. People have a behavioral tendency—known as surrogation— to confuse what’s being measured with the metric being used. To reduce the risk of surrogation, make sure your conscious values are considered in formulating your goals, don’t link your outcomes alone to how you’re measuring your success & use multiple metrics & your feelings to assess your performance.
Opportunity
A mastery orientation refers to the desire to continually develop into the best you can be. You are performing & leading in order to become more competent or effective or more highly skilled than you already are. In any moment, you’re concentrating on what will help you lead better in the long run. With a mastery orientation, you are internally focused & tend to have high intrinsic motivation. With a mastery orientation, you are not concerned with the outcome of any particular performance, because you know, no matter what has occurred, that you can learn from what happened & thus move closer to mastery.
A performance orientation, also called an ego orientation, is when you perform in order to do better than others. You want to win & compare yourself to others. Your sense of self-worth & value is tied up in how you perform. Therefore you judge outcomes as good or bad. People with a performance orientation are likely to be extrinsically motivated.
In terms of energy, a mastery orientation resonates at higher levels than does a performance orientation. However, having goals that are metrics based to measure performance isn’t necessarily a bad thing. A performance orientation has it’s place within the discipline of mastery, it helps you to make sense of your environment, your process & your objectives, which you must do if you are to succeed. Goals can provide clearly defined direction where your mission & vision may otherwise seem too amorphous to have an impact. Because metric goals can coordinate behaviors & actions, their use in developing a mastery orientation are crucial.
Intention
If you completely ignored achieving goals with great success & focused on deeply enjoying the process what would happen? Most people confuse their performance goals with their core goals. In other words, they believe that what they are looking for is the outcome itself, when in fact, the core goal is the feeling of satisfaction, triumph, peace, happiness, or joy that occurs once the goal is achieved. For example, if you want to win your company’s salesman of the year award & you achieved that, you’d probably have a deep sense of satisfaction & accomplishment. Your core goal is what you get as a result of that win—the feelings of satisfaction & accomplishment. Of course, results & goals are important but they come & go in a moment. Finding processes that give you continual deep fulfilment along the way should be the core goal. Metrics are part of the action plan to get you there.
ABC Game Plan: Guaranteed Success
Sometimes, we get derailed & stressed because our performance is not going the way we’d hoped it would. The ABC method of setting goals for your performance allows you to consciously set goals before you perform. Having an ideal plan (plan A), a backup plan (plan B) & a safety net plan (plan C), ensures that you will always be successful in your performance!
Your “A” plan is ideal—that’s the ideal outcome you could experience through any given situation.
Your backup plan B occurs when you can’t achieve your “A” plan. You then change your focus to gain something more achievable & still valuable. And if neither your A nor B plans work, plan C changes the focus again so that you still experience a successful performance. Remember, it’s up to you to decide what success is & making a conscious choice in the moment like we’re describing here allows you to choose success as you define it in the moment.
Example: You’ve been working on improving your presentation skills. You’re very excited to speak tonight in front of your Board of Directors regarding your plans to hire additional team members.
Your stated plan A goal is: Keep the interest of the Board & persuade them to vote your way.
You know that you can’t control their reactions & a variety of other influencers may prevent the vote from going your way, so you decide that another great way to create value is the experience you would gain by simply presenting your plans well. If your A goal isn’t coming to fruition, you can let go of your first goal & then focus on taking the actions to achieve the next one.
Your plan B goal: Speak clearly & confidently about your plans.
This is easier to control & if that’s your goal, you will most likely perform it well. But what if something goes wrong? No need to throw in the towel, because you have a safety net goal:
Your plan C goal: Learn something. The more feedback you get from the experience, the better you’ll be able to do next time.