From the course: Reframing: The Power of Changing Your Perspective

Goal fluidity

From the course: Reframing: The Power of Changing Your Perspective

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Goal fluidity

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- Have you ever set a goal and then after a few days or even immediately felt buyer's remorse? In other words, have you ever fallen prey to the all too common mistake of setting goals that were too rigid? In this lesson, I want to talk about giving yourself permission to let your goals be fluid. As an executive coach, so many of the clients I work with agonize over the permanence of a decision. If they make this move in their career, what if it was the wrong choice? What if they hate it? What if they regret it later? When you surround yourself in a slew of what ifs each presenting a worse and worse outcome, you often get stuck on setting even the smallest goal. When you find yourself feeling boxed in by your goals, scared to put the stick in the ground, try to reframe the time horizon. Give yourself permission to try something for three months, six months, a year, knowing that you'll revisit it at checkpoints along the way to make sure that it's something you even still want. Beyond the time horizon, having fluidity in goals includes reframing what success looks like. When the pandemic hit, I like many others out there decided to become an "American Ninja Warrior," a world-class chef, read 100 books by the end of the year, oh, and meditate an hour a day of course. Many people started designing a bunch of achievement-centered goals that had really narrow success margins, and about two weeks in realized that they were actually in a global pandemic, not on vacation, still working full time and under an incredible amount of psychological stress. As you find yourself digging into the ice cream earlier and earlier in the evening and doing less and less pushups, you started to feel like you had completely blown it on all your goals. But what if you had to celebrate what you had accomplished? I know many people who found themselves taking more walks than ever before, having lunch with their partners or roommates, reconnecting with old friends over video conferences. They were doing stuff. It just wasn't in that one way. In her book "Dare to Lead," Brene Brown shares the concept of painting success. This is when you imagine the picture of what accomplishing the goal looks like before setting out to achieve it so that you're crystal clear on what success looks like. With any goal, I encourage you to paint multiple versions of success. Instead of going all the way to "American Ninja Warrior," for me another picture of success was doing three pull-ups, then I can always build from there. But giving up because I didn't reach mastery after an unrealistic timeframe just wasn't being fair to myself. And no, I still can't do even one pull-up, but I don't hate myself for it. So that's progress. Let's crank up the volume on this fluidity concept and practice with a tool I've been calling the Free Trial. Go ahead and download the exercise file for this lesson. Free Trial is a mindset of try before you buy. It means making an explicit plan to try something for a short fixed period of time before committing to it as a legit goal. Let's say you wanted to learn a new language. What does the free trial version look like? Maybe it's downloading a language learning app and playing with it for 10 minutes a day, each day for a week. At the end of the week, evaluate the free trial. Do you even like the act of learning a new language? Did you find it interesting or a valuable use of your time? From there, then decide if learning a new language is something you want to establish a goal for yourself around. Remember, perfect is the enemy of good. Finding fluidity with your goals is the key to finding many ways of achieving success.

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