Setting objectives

And The Art of Working

Eric De Pooter

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Part 1 – Defining our goal ................................................. 3 Exercise – Defining our priorities ................................ 12 Success for me is: ...................................................... 13

Part 2 – Formulating our objectives successfully ........... 15 Relevant ..................................................................... 17 Specific ....................................................................... 19 Time-limited ................................................................ 21 Measurable ................................................................. 23 Achievable .................................................................. 25 Exercise: define your SMART objective ..................... 28

Part 3 – Visualising your objective .................................. 31 Visualisation exercise ................................................. 36

Part 4 – Letting go of limiting thoughts and emotions .... 39 Step 1: Recognising ................................................... 43 Step 2: Recognising or accepting ............................... 45 Step 3: Letting go ....................................................... 47 Exercise ...................................................................... 54

Part 5 – Awareness and gratefulness ...................... 57

Afterword ........................................................................ 61

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You are what your deepest wish is

What you wish, is what you want to be

What you want to be, is what you will do

What you do, will be your fate

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Part 1 – Defining our goal

We start here with the question:

What does success mean for me?

or

How do I see success?

You can ask this question about lots of different facets of your life relating to your profession (your job and career), your family, finances (money), free time and health.

It is important to ask this question consciously. Today, more than ever before, we live in an era where we are inundated with choices, we are bombarded by immense numbers of products, services, and possibilities.

If you go to buy a new mobile phone you find yourself completely lost in the number of different brands and models.

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People complain about not having

enough time when in fact what they are

missing is

a goal.

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Advertising and different slogans are constantly telling us that we need things or must do things in order to belong, to be happy. We are constantly bombarded by a blizzard of these types of messages.

Trying to decide for your self what you really find important in the midst of this chaos is a real challenge. It is an art and it’s no easy feat.

One of the reasons that people experience stress in their lives is the excessive number of choices that cause them to doubt, to lose their focus.

In short, know what you want, what you really want and your life will become simpler, more relaxed. If you know what you really want the chance of your getting it will increase exponentially.

This is why it is necessary to ask the question in the purest sense, in the most personal way: how do you see success (and happiness)?

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“If you want to lead a happy life, set yourself a goal and don’t let your happiness depend on other people or things.”

Albert Einstein

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And the two words, happiness and success are not synonyms by the way.

Another marketing trick of course is to persuade us that we can buy happiness. If we buy this car or this cream, we will be happy, “Because we deserve it, we belong, we are back in fashion”.

You know that you cannot buy happiness. So remember this when defining your criteria for success. Most of the things you achieve, will hopefully give you a good feeling, perhaps even a feeling of triumph.

But don’t let your happiness depend on what you own or achieve in life.

Scientific studies reveal that more than 10% of your happiness is defined by material things such as money.

50% of your happiness boils down to your genes, the other 40% could be put down to doing certain things effectively including setting goals in your life.

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“Most people are disappointed when their worries become reality.

Speaking strictly logically it is a bit strange to be disappointed. You have worried about something and it has become reality. So, actually you have succeeded and the creative process has worked.”

Marinus Knoope

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If we look back at the question of what success means for you, then we notice that most people are very aware of what they don’t want in life.

The question you should now ask is, do you know what you do want?

Formulate your criteria, your expectations positively not negatively. In other words: what you want more of, what you want to be better, not what you don’t want or what you want less of. Our minds are not so good at dealing with negations and so actually the things they remember are exactly these negations.

Example

Imagine that you are working very hard and you want more time for yourself. Formulate your goal, what you want to achieve not as “to work less”, but as “to have more free time”. A positive statement therefore rather than a negative one.

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“Nothing helps calm the spirit more than a well-defined goal, a point towards which the soul can focus its intellectual eye.”

Mary Wollstonecraft

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With each of the expectations of what success should look like for us, you should ask yourself the question: why?

Why do I want to achieve this? Why is this important for me?

This question will help you to clarify an expectation by bringing the underlying driving force behind the objective to the surface.

If we look at the answer, we may also see that what we want to achieve, what we have written down is not really what we want. It is perhaps what is expected of our entourage and so does not come from our heart.

In short, we may discover that we are not really motivated ourselves to achieve this objective; that we are not really interested in it.

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Exercise – Defining our priorities

Take some time now to write down what you want from one or more aspects of your life.

Formulate your expectations positively and provide an honest answer to the question”why?”.

Take enough time for this question because this list forms the basis for the rest of our work.

You can also write down things and come back to them later on.

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Success for me is:

What I would like to achieve is:

In terms of:

Family: Why?

Profession: Why?

Finances: Why?

Leisure time: Why?

Health: Why?

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“If you have built castles in the air, you have not wasted your time. Because this is where everything begins.

Now you need to just create the foundations.”

François de La Rochefoucauld

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Part 2 – Formulating our objectives successfully

You probably now have a full list of things you want to achieve – things you’d like to change - more or less.

Now it’s time for the next step:

The formula we are going to use to gain more focus about these goals is the so-called SMART method. It’s also used a lot in the business world.

SMART is an abbreviation of

Specific

Measurable

Achievable

Relevant

Time-limited

Now take for this exercise your most important expectation.

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“Our thoughts create our reality.

The point that we focus on is also the direction we are heading in.”

Peter Mc Williams

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Focus is also the word that is appropriate here. If we target too many things at once, we will probably achieve nothing.

So if you want to achieve your expectations, you are best prioritising your goals.

When you have named your most important expectation, we can start working on our SMART principle. Just check whether you have worded it positively before we get down to work.

Let’s muddle up the order of the SMART principle and start with:

Relevant Rank how important or relevant is achieving this expectation for you by placing it on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is totally unimportant and 10 is very important.

If you allocate a score for importance of 7 or fewer than 7 on the 0 to 10 scale, you may want to ask yourself whether you really want to spend time on this goal, if it is important enough, relevant enough.

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“Someone who wants to do something will always find a way; Someone who doesn’t want to do something will always find an excuse.”

Constance Baker Motley

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Time is a priority. The time that you spend on this is time you cannot spend on something else and perhaps it is simply not (yet) sufficiently important at the moment. There are perhaps things on your list that you might want to place higher up on your list of priorities at this point in time.

Let’s say your objective is to have more free time and the ranking for importance of this objective is 8.5, then this is important enough for you to start working on.

The next step

Specific Make your expectation more specific.

Very often, people write down very general things.

Experience teaches us that by making things more specific you obtain a better image of it, it also helps you to clarify the objective for yourself.

If you want to have more free time, you might want to complement this with what you would do with this free time.

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“A goal is a dream with a deadline.”

Leo. B Helzel

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Do you want to spend more time with your family, or just more time by yourself. Do you want time to do sports or to travel? How much more time do you want? In short, imagine what the new situation looks like in practical terms.

Time-limited By what date would you like to have achieved this? Be realistic and generous.

If you set a deadline that is too close, you will become demotivated when you notice that the deadline is upon you and you have not yet reached your goal.

If you make the deadline too far in the future, you may find yourself procrastinating, lacking motivation at this point. There may also be a great chance that you lose sight of your goal because it is so far off in the future.

In our example, it may be that you want half a day a week more to do things with your partner and children before the end of next year.

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“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”

Aristotle

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Measurable A simple question:

How can you prove to yourself and others that you have achieved your goal?

How can you demonstrate that you have succeeded in your mission? What are your criteria in this?

This involves both qualitative and purely quantitative criteria.

An example for us would be: If the members of your family indeed do say and feel that you are spending more time with them, then that would be proof that you have achieved your objective. To demonstrate this quantitatively, there would have to be an example of how much more time you have spent with them. In this example there is no mention about the quality of the time that you have spent with them.

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“Rather the perpetrator of my future than the victim of my past."

Karin Bloemen

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And the last point in the SMART model:

Achievable After all the things that you have now written down, you can ask yourself how achievable this goal is for you. It is sufficiently important (7 or more on the scale), you have made it specific, and you have allocated a deadline and looked at how you would make it clear that you have achieved it.

How achievable is this objective for you now? Give it a ranking on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 stands for not at all achievable and 10 for very achievable.

If you also score 7 or less here, that means that there are a number of obstacles standing in the way of you achieving this objective.

It may be that you simply do not believe in it. So let’s imagine that you still want to go through with it. It’s a good idea to stop and think for a moment about all the things that in your opinion would make it difficult to achieve the objective. What are the obstacles and what can you do about them?

When you have your list with the obstacles, you should draw up an action plan to see what you can do about each of these obstacles. Then ask yourself again: how achievable your objective is now (0 to10)?

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The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks... and then starting on the first one.”

Mark Twain

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Under normal circumstances, your allocated ranking is now higher than 7 out of 10.

Congratulations. You have worded your objective well. You believe in it and you want to give it your all. This is your point of focus. One single thing that you believe in and that is important for you.

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Exercise: define your SMART objective

My objective: (worded positively)

Relevant: (0 – 7 - 10)

Specific:

Time-limited:

Measurable:

Achievable: (0 – 7 - 10)

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Possible obstacles:

What I need to do in order to overcome these obstacles:

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“The soul never thinks without an image.”

Aristotle

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Part 3 – Visualising your objective

You now have a well worded objective that you believe in, that you find sufficiently important to put some effort into, an objective that is clear and that is also delineated in terms of time.

Studies show that writing out an objective increases the chances of succeeding enormously.

My experience has taught me that visualising the objective increases the chances of success even further.

And visualising is fun and simple to do. You do it by finding images, photos, drawings that represent the desired result of your goal as you see it by making drawings or collages.

By putting it into pictures, you turn your objective into something tangible.

Make sure that the images really appeal to you, that you like them and that they don’t create resistance, that they really represent exactly what you want to achieve.

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“The great thing about the future is that it starts right here.”

Marie Louise von Franz

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One of the reasons why footballers succeed in scoring goals is because the players know exactly where the goalposts are. Even though they may not look at them all the time, the goalposts are there and the players know where they have to get to with their ball.

Any skiing or parachuting teachers will tell you tales about pupils that manage to end up in the only tree around, just because they were fixated on it and they forgot to look at the kilometres of open space around the obstacle.

Use this typical human characteristic to your advantage.

Don’t take your eye or your attention off your objective from now on.

In the beginning we observed that people today are overwhelmed by choices and information. The temptation to forget our objective, to let go of it or to change it is immense.

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One picture says more

than a thousand words.

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In short, put your objectives in a place where you will see them regularly: create a ritual that you carry out regularly and that you work on regularly involving your objectives.

Perhaps you will notice after a while that the objective is no longer so important for you, or that this was not really your objective.

Yet again. That’s great too. But you should realise that your life is heading in the direction you are looking towards and so by keeping your goal consciously in front of your eyes, effortless success will be much easier to achieve.

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Visualisation exercise

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My objective

Image(s) / photo(s) / drawings

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“It is a sign of wisdom and maturity to note that we can be neutral spectators of our emotions, thoughts and memories without being ruled by them.”

Nathalie Branden

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Part 4 – Letting go of limiting thoughts and emotions

People often set objectives and do not achieve them.

One of the most important reasons for this is that they often have an unconscious resistance to achieving their own objective.

Each of us seeks three things to a greater or lesser degree: control, security and recognition.

In instances of change – and achieving an objective is also about change – we often have a subconscious notion that we will lose one of these three things.

We experience this as a lack or a need and that is precisely the ideal breeding ground for limiting emotions such as sorrow, fear, anger and even apathy. These are limiting because they can stand in the way of us achieving effortless success.

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“The desire to possess is also

a form of fear.”

J. Gresshof

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In short, if we feel that we do not have enough control, security and/or recognition, or fear that we are going to lose them, we will occasionally feel sorry, anger, fear or apathy.

We are going to remove these resistances. Without resistance the road to effortless success will become smooth. Without these restrictions we can get to where we want to go.

Letting go of limiting thoughts and emotions always involves three different steps:

Step 1 Recognising the limiting thoughts and/or emotions

Step 2 Recognising or accepting the emotions

Step 3 Letting them go

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“I am not my emotions and thoughts,

I just have them.”

Lester Levenson

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If we apply this technique to our objective, that means first looking or feeling what our limiting thoughts and/or emotions are in relation to achieving our objective.

Step 1: Recognising

Read your objective, visualise it and think about the thoughts and emotions (fear, sorrow, anger, apathy) that come up. Ask yourself whether there is a need for control, recognition and/or security underlying each of these emotions.

Write them down, make a list of them.

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“How can people learn without feeling fear?

By first learning to live with fear.”

Francis Lucille

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Step 2: Recognising or accepting Don’t fight against your thoughts or emotions. Be aware of them and accept them.

This step is crucial. Most of us are trained to suppress negative emotions or thoughts, or to replace them immediately with a positive equivalent.

Just accepting them will result in your being able to let them go.

Technique:

Just ask yourself the question:

Can I allow/accept this emotion/thought?

The answer, yes or no, is in itself irrelevant.

Asking the question is actually answering it. By talking about it, becoming conscious of it, you are already starting to accept it.

You never have to accept a situation. I recommend however accepting the emotions that emerge around the situation.

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Beneath the waves of emotion,

is the tranquillity of being.

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Step 3: Letting go

Simple. 3 questions:

- Can I let go of this emotion? - Do I want to let it go? - When will I let it go?

In other words: first ask yourself whether you can let go of these emotions or thoughts.

Ask rather than commanding. Don’t say “I let these emotions go’”, or “I must let these emotions go”. But say, “Can I let these emotions go?” Giving you orders usually has the opposite effect. Our minds do not like being told what to do. If they are put under pressure, they often tend to do just the opposite.

But by asking yourself questions like:

“Can I let it go?”

“Do I want to let it go?”

“When will I let it go? “

Repeat these questions a number of times if you like. You will notice that the emotions and thoughts diminish and finally you will find that they disappear completely.

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“Resistance is a sign of an unfree mind”

Krishnamurti

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If you would like to go one step further, then you can carry out the same process with regards to the need for control / recognition / security that you have found for yourself underlying these thoughts and/or emotions. Here again, you can ask yourself the questions several times over.

If you like you can measure the strength of your emotions or thoughts before you start letting go, by ranking them on a scale of 0 to 10. And then measure them again after you have done a few rounds of asking questions.

When you do this, it will become clear for you just how much they diminish or soften.

I recommend that you go into considerable depth when you do this exercise.

I worked on a number of resistances myself for several days, but the results were phenomenal.

You can also do this exercise for the different activities that you need to do in order to achieve your objectives.

This is how you reduce resistance and ensure that things run speedily and smoothly. Without effort in fact.

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Suffering comes about when

you do not accept what ‘is’.

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There is yet another advantage to letting go: after a while you might not care whether you achieve that objective or not. This indifference will merely work as reinforcement. Indifference to achieving your objective is the best attitude to have if you want to achieve it.

Two other techniques that could help:

Sometimes it helps simply if you repeat to yourself a few times the emotion / thought that you have had. Repeating something is the same as accepting it and accepting it is letting it go. There’s nothing more to it than that.

(The sorrow that I feel, the anger that I have in me)

It sometimes helps to have a discussion with the emotion or thought. They sometimes have something important to tell us. That is also about accepting and can lead to letting go.

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“Emotions: Just by sitting quietly and looking at our emotional state with detachment, we will become calm.”

Tarthang Tulku

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To summarise briefly: Every form or method that you use to help you accept your emotions or thoughts more, or bring them more to the surface will help you over time to let go of them.

And it is precisely here that you will find the key to achieving your objective without effort.

The work that you do here will give you emotional tranquillity and freedom that will spill over into other aspects of your life.

In short, the time you spend on this now will translate into an increase in your awareness, your inner tranquillity and your freedom.

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Exercise

Letting go of emotions and thoughts

My goal:

Which emotions / thoughts does this bring up for me?

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Can I allow them completely?

Can I let them go?

Do I want to let them go?

When will I let them go?

What is the underlying need beneath this emotion or thought?

(control, security, recognition)

(take the one that takes a prominent place in the foreground first)

Can I accept this need?

Can I let it go?

Do I want to let it go?

When will I let it go?

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“It is not happiness that makes us grateful, but gratefulness that makes us happy.”

Steindl

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Part 5 – Awareness and gratefulness

Gratefulness. A word in these days of abundance and always wanting more, that we barely know any more.

In English we say. ‘Count your blessings’. Be grateful for what you have.

One of the habits that being happy encourages is taking a moment from time to time and being thankful for what we have. This, in fact, is scientifically proven as well.

And we have a lot to be thankful for. Each and every one of us. We can be thankful for what we have to eat, for the car that drives us around, for the people around us, etc.

In order to achieve our objective this means being attentive to possible positive changes that start to manifest themselves. And that we are thankful for that.

It is also the awareness of and the gratitude for this that gives us and the universe the energy to allow change and to move ahead.

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“If you concentrate on what you have in your life, you’ll find there is always enough.

If you concentrate on what you don’t have in your life, there will always be too little.”

Oprah Winfrey

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A good habit for seeing whether we are aware of the changes taking place is to carry out a sort of status check once a day. Perhaps in the evening when you are in bed, just before going to sleep.

To do this you just ask yourself a number of questions to which you just answer with a ‘yes’ or ‘no‘ or you give it a score from 0 to 10.

This is not about being judgmental about the answer, no matter what it is; you don’t have to take on any feeling of guilt and you don’t have to let others do that to you either. This is just about creating a status report of your awareness.

A few examples:

Have I been consciously working towards my objective today?

Have I done things today in order to achieve my objective?

How hard have I been working today on achieving my objective? (0-10)

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“This is my secret.

I don’t mind about what happens.”

Krishnamurti

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Afterword

Here you are. You have a clear objective, your priority and you believe in it.

You know what you need to do in order to achieve it.

You know how to identify your unconscious blockages and to remove them. You are aware of the importance of working consciously on your objective and not losing sight of it.

And you have reached the highest stage of your success: a point at which you are going full speed ahead to achieve your objective and you are currently indifferent as to whether you achieve it or not.

In a way ,you are effortlessly successful.

Eric De Pooter

 

 

Eric De Pooter

Senior Consultant

Tel +32 (0)3 890 60 40 GSM +32 (0)476 42 20 78

https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?ericdepooter eric.depooter@actpartners.com www.actpartners.com twitter.com/@ericdepooter