Goal Setting – Why does it feel so wrong

Goal Setting Quest

Linda Wotring, Elixir

You know, I love to make lists and cross them off. It makes me feel such a sense of accomplishment. But setting goals – that’s another thing! I don’t know about you, but for some reason, I have always found it overwhelming. As a single mom who is a small business operator, I don’t have time to figure out what I want to begin with, so how could I plan it out and achieve it?

What makes this attitude even worse is that since the 1980’s, I’ve been a Zig Ziglar ‘Born to Win’ Class Facilitator and have facilitated three sessions per class on goals. In this role, I have also attended various seminars which included segments on goal setting using different models. I found myself faced with a dilemma: How could I honestly teach goal setting when I wasn’t able to complete the task for myself? Zig summed up my problem with a basketball analogy, “How can you shoot for a goal that you can’t even see?”

Don’t get me wrong – I have lots of success stories to tell about goal setting and achievement. However, they are all about my students!! Some of them took to Ziglar’s methodology and quickly achieved numerous goals. But I also felt like there were many, for whom, like me, it just didn’t work.

The other issue I had was with another perspective I have heard repeatedly, from esteemed folks like Deepak Chopra and others. Chopra calls it the Law of Detachment. It states that once you put your desires out to the universe via prayer or meditation, you should then be unattached to how the desire unfolds but instead just be open to opportunities that come your way. Basically, the universe will provide the solution if you live in the moment. I was wrestling with the question of exactly how this law fits with writing things down and attaching dates to them?

One day, I came across a psychometrics game that related to goal setting. It had you draw five shapes: box, rectangle, triangle, circle, and a squiggly line. As you draw them, you were to think about how they made you feel. Then, quickly and without thinking, you were to put the numbers one through five by the figure most to least like you. (Take a moment and do this yourself now before continuing). The figures were related to goal setting in the following ways:

Shape	Relation to Goal Setting:
Box	Boundaries, closed, square, contained, gift, balanced, equal, neat & tidy. ‘Workers’ that do a task and do it well. Like life orderly and sequential, linear. Left Brain shape .
Rectangle	Like the box, but unique. With more length and flexibility. ‘Team players’ who like to work with peoples and situations, like collective goal setting. Wants fairness and involvement. Left Brain shape.
Triangle	Pointed up, upward mobile bound people who look to the future and take action. They are linear, bottom-line people who are list makers. Left Brain shape.
Circle	No corners, points, softer, smooth ‘lovers’ who go with the flow, accommodators and adapters who fit their goals to those around them. Often talk a lot and don’t like detail. Sets goals spontaneously. Right brain shape.
Squiggle	Not contained, open-ended, no limitations. This person has up/downs, curves and straight portions and tends to be eclectic. Right brain shape.

Guess what I chose? The circle!! So I was ‘right brained’ and the very ‘left-brain’ Ziglar approach, which involves writing down extremely detailed plans toward the achievement of your goals, didn’t fit my personality. Whew – now I at least have an idea what might be going on for me…and I incorporated this idea into my classes for others like me.

Of course, I was still back to the original problem of what exactly ARE my goals?!? That wasn’t addressed by Mr. Ziglar, who seems to have no problem in that area! I have always had short term goals, but seemed unable to pin down an overriding life vision that would drive my life and me onward and upward.

Then, this year I began attending coaching school, which was one of those short term goals I mentioned. The school I chose, Coach Training Institute , has a series of classes to teach you coaching fundamentals following their Co-Active Coaching model. When I got to the segment called ‘Balance’, I was taught a new method of determining my goals that was completely different than anything I had ever been exposed to before. They use the wheel of life, which is also used in the Ziglar classes.

The wheel of life is used to determine how you feel you are doing in various areas of your life, such as career, social, family, financial, spirituality, physical, and mental. Each spoke on the wheel has a scale from one to ten, with one in the center and ten on the outside edge of the wheel, and the spoke represents one of these areas. You then rate yourself in each of the areas and then ‘connect the dots’ to create your wheel of life. Oftentimes, it’s not exactly a circle and this can cause you to have a rough ride through life!! While CTI does use the wheel in this way, they use it differently in the goal setting area.

First, they had us come up with a very right-brain oriented symbol of our life vision. From this symbol, we used the wheel of life and words (and their unique meaning to us) to develop our goals. It was astonishing how such a seemingly bizarre path could lead to such riches!! I was overwhelmed by the results and am finally able to see through the mists that have always obscured my life goals. . Creating this article was one of the goals that came from using the new approach, and since you are reading it right now, it’s been achieved!!

Eureka! Using this highly creative and right-brain oriented method, I’m setting and achieving goals like never before…and feeling great about myself in the process.

If you’d like to learn more about goal setting of EITHER type, Linda Wotring can be reached via Elixir (http://www.theelixir.com or 850.567.8816), which provides personal coaching, programming & training remedies….