Practical EQ

Inspiring quote: Sir Alan Sugar (!) on doing what you love

I never thought I'd be quoting the famously grumpy Sir Alan on an emotional intelligence blog, but here he is:

"You've got to be happy, it's not just about making money and all that stuff. There should be no drudgery in work. You have to enjoy what you're doing, and if you don't, you'd better get out and do something else because you're not going to be a success."
- Sir Alan Sugar, interviewed by Liz Hoggard for the London Evening Standard, 26 March 2008

Note for non-UK readers: Sir Alan Sugar fills the Donald Trump role in the UK version of The Apprentice, and it's riveting viewing!

Goal-setting interview

Just to let you know that I've been interviewed about goal-setting for Gavin Ingham's sales blog - which has already created a nice little surge in my readership figures.

I've also had a less satisfactory interview experience - a journo from Crain's Manchester Business phoned me about business coaching, we had a nice chat, I directed him to a satisfied client to interview, and the next thing I hear about it is when the client emails me with a link to the article saying it's rather strange as I'm not named in it. So you'll just have to trust me when I tell you that the coach who helped award-winning Manchester design company True North to greater success, and who its MD Martin Carr is praising to the skies, is actually me!

New Year's Resolutions - what works, for women and men

A year-long study by psychologist Richard Wiseman has been looking into New Year's Resolutions and what helps people to stick to them, and it's come up with some useful findings. Interestingly, they have been able to generalise that different things work for men and women.

The main findings in brief:

• Don't wait until New Year's Eve to decide on your resolution - take time to reflect on what's really important to you and what you want to achieve.

For men:

• Make your goals specific and measurable. Make a plan, mapping out the steps to your goal, and stick to it. Put the plan where you can see it.
• Focus on the benefits of achieving your goal. Again, list these benefits and put the list where you can see it every day.

For women:

• Go public. Tell someone about your resolution, to make it less likely that you will forget about it.
• Get encouragement - if you slip from your resolution, having someone to encourage you will get you back on track again.

The results were written up in these articles in the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph, although there aren't many details on Wiseman's own web site. The advice is pleasingly in line with what I've written in previous blog entries about goal setting.

Of course, these are generalisations - some of what they found worked for most men may still help if you are a woman, and vice versa. There's nothing to stop you using all Wiseman's tips in combination to give yourself the greatest chance of success. And remember - New Year is just an arbitrary date. You can start making changes in your life at any time.

How to find the best route to your goal

Even when people have set a compelling goal for themselves, they may struggle with knowing where to start. Of all the possible actions, which step should you take first?

One way would be to engage your unconscious mind by walking the goal into your timeline as we do on the final day of my NLP Foundation Skills course. As you walk back along the timeline from having installed your goal at your chosen date in the future, you may find that 'milestones' along the way just pop into your mind.

But what if you don't have access to the course and don't particularly want to learn about NLP, but just want to be able to set goals more effectively? You might want to try this more 'left-brained', based on the principle that it is much easier to find the route to your destination when you start from where you want to be and work backwards:

1. Take a large sheet of paper and write your goal at the right-hand edge.

2. Imagine that you have achieved your goal – take a moment to experience it fully in your imagination. What will achieving the goal mean to you? Write whatever it means and connect that to the goal.

3. Ask yourself: "What conditions needed to be in place immediately before this goal happened in order for it to be achieved?" Write each condition down to the left of the goal, and draw arrows joining them to the goal. For each condition, write what fulfulling it will mean to you and link it to that condition.

4. Treat each of the conditions you have identified as the result of some other previous conditions. Ask, "What conditions needed to be in place in order for this to happen?" Write each in its appropriate place to the left of the result you stepped into, and draw an arrow joining the condition to its result. Add each condition's meaning.

5. Continue to work backwards until you arrive at your first step, or at conditions that are already fulfilled.
   

You may be tempted to omit the 'what does it mean to me?' step, as this may not look like it adds much until you try it. In fact, the meaning of each step is what gives it emotional energy. Your route to your goal will feel much more alive and motivating if you take a moment to think about the meaning of each step.

You may find that you have more than one possible route to your goal. The 'meanings' of each condition along the way may help you to decide which route will be the best, most enjoyable and the least hard work.

In any event, you now have the essential steps to your goal that provide the "milestones" along the way.

Note: this method of working backwards from your goal, and eliciting the meaning of each step, is based on the 'backward chaining' method developed by the NLP trainer Jonathan Altfeld as a small part of his excellent Knowledge Engineering seminar and audio. Check them out!

By the way I teach some of this material ("Knowledge Engineering Lite") on the Modelling Excellence module in our Master Practitioner training.

And there's lots more about emotionally intelligent goal setting in my book Achieve Your Goals: Strategies To Transform Your Life (Dorling Kindersley 2006).

Tips to make your resolutions work

As you would expect, this is the biggest month for new gym signups, as millions of Brits resolve to exercise more and eat more healthily. But by February, 30% of the new year joiners will have dropped out, according to a report in The Guardian today, which goes on to estimate we waste £200 million in gym membership fees each year.

In general, our new year's resolutions don't come with a very high expectation of success. Many people go into them expecting to fail, even if they don't admit this to themselves. And if you're at all interested in personal development, no doubt your inbox this week will be awash with newsletters from life coaches telling you how to avoid this fate.

Now someone is actually doing some research on what works in resolutions. Professor Richard Wiseman, author of The Luck Factor,  is conducting the study. No details on his web site yet, but he  does give some tips in this article for increasing your chances of success. The tips iinclude:

1. pick just one aspect of life to improve
   
2. plan your resolution in advance, to give yourself time to think about what you really want to achieve - don't wait until New Year's Eve
   
3. if a previous resolution didn't work, don't repeat it - at the very least try a different way of achieving it
   
4. keep it specific
   
5. reward yourself for steps in the right direction

... all of which will come as no surprise to anyone who knows about NLP.

"Realism" versus "unrealistic optimism"? Hooey!

Julie Kay's article in her Leading Questions blog about Marcus Buckingham's new book "The One Thing You Need To Know" made me think:

(Buckingham) argues that recent research shows that realism in our self-assessment can hinder our performance while unrealistic self-assurance fosters enhanced performance. He describes studies where children from lower socioeconomic sectors of society were asked how likely they felt they were of getting into college. Research had shown that these children actually had little chance of completing high school never mind being admitted to college. The children who were “realistic” about their chances performed in line with the assessments and very few made it into college. On the other hand, a significant percentage of children who were “unrealistically optimistic” about their ability to gain college entry actually achieved it. So Marcus Buckingham states we should be building self assurance rather than self awareness.

I haven't read the book yet, but based on Julie's reading of it there’s a bit of a logical error in what Buckingham describes as a "realistic self-assessment". The research presumably didn’t show that those individual children had little chance of completing high school - only that the *average* educational attainment of children from that socioeconomic sector was lower. The optimistic children weren’t being unrealistic ,because the research said nothing about their individual abilities! Particularly as we know that attitude and expectations significantly affect performance (see for example the study known as ‘Pygmalion In The Classroom’) and so become self-fulfilling prophesies.

In fact I would argue that someone who bases their expectations of their future performance on an average for their socioeconomic category, as if their own skills, interests and expectations had no bearing, is actually being more unrealistic than someone who reckons they will succeed - and does.

The apparent conflict between self-awareness and self-assurance is illusory, as the research says nothing about the individual, only about the average for their socioeconomic category. Of course Buckingham is hardly alone in regarding averages as defining what's realistic - it's endemic in psychology, education, medicine and management.  I believe we will get better results if we look instead at what enables exceptional performance.

The 7 Biggest Mistakes In Goal-Setting (and how to avoid them): #7

#7: Not Knowing What You Want

This is the biggest and most common goal-setting mistake of all – not getting round to setting any goals because you don't know what you want.

You can be an expert in all the goal-setting techniques known to man, but if you haven't taken the time to find out what you really want, one of two things is bound to happen:

1. You don't set any goals. This means that you drift, and life just happens to you, and you have to react to whatever it decides to throw at you. This might work out OK if you're lucky – and it might not.
   
   (It's perfectly possible to drift in a well-paid corporate career, by the way – for the first twelve years of my working life, I sleepwalked through my IT career and was quite comfortably off by the end of it. But because I had no direction, I was unfulfilled and also vulnerable to career upsets.)


2. You set goals (because you think you should, or because someone else tells you to) but they are not really about what you want. You don't achieve your goals, because your unconscious mind sabotages them, or you achieve them but discover they are not what you really wanted. Either way, you still feel unfulfilled.

So how, in Carlos Castaneda's words, do you choose "a path with heart?" How do you find your calling?

You can use either or both of these methods:

• Take some time to discover your values in each area of your life – for example, what's important to you in a career? What's important to you in a relationship? Elicit the values for each area in turn by asking just that question: "What's important to you?"
  
  You will get the best results when you get a friend to ask you this question, especially if they keep asking even after you think you have found all your values. Some of the deepest and most motivating of your values will be the ones that you are not at first consciously aware of.
  
  Some values are more important to you than others, so decide which are the 'must-haves' and which are the 'nice-to-haves'  - and then go for fulfilling all of them anyway!


• Try different experiences out. Notice what you enjoy (or don't enjoy) about them? What is it about each experience that you really liked? Which of your values was it calling to?
  
  The more reference experiences you have, the clearer idea you will have of your preferences, boundaries, and the 'hot buttons' that really excite your motivation; ultimately, the more idea you will have of who you really are.

The 7 Biggest Mistakes In Goal-setting (and how to avoid them): #6

#6: "Taking too much on" and getting discouraged

It can be very easy to set a big, compelling goal – and then feel overwhelmed by the perceived slog of getting there. The goal is so big, and so different from how things are now, that getting there by the deadline you have set will surely demand too much of you. And the more you think about the legwork it will take, the more discouraged you feel.

There are two things you have to do to regain your motivation.

1. When you think about your goal, picture how great it will be when you have achieved it – not what you will have to do to get there.  This will instantly feel more motivating. When you book a vacation or a weekend away, you are thinking about what you will do when you get there – not about traffic jams or delays at the airport.


2. Break the goal down into smaller sub-tasks that feel easier to achieve. Make each of these tasks a goal in itself. This means that you can feel good when you achieve each one – maybe even give yourself a reward.

Sometimes it isn't easy to see what you should be doing first. The smart way to decide on the sub-tasks that will form your route to the goal is to start from imagining the position of having achieved the goal already. From that perspective, ask yourself:

"What conditions had to be in place in order for this goal to be able to happen?"

Ask the same question for each of these conditions – and so on, working backwards through time until you arrive at the very first step you have to take.  This gives you your route to the goal (or routes as there may be more than one way to get there).

If the first task still seems overwhelming, break it down into smaller tasks until the first step is one that you can definitely, no question, accomplish.

Remember what management guru Peter Drucker said:

"We overestimate what we can accomplish in one year, but we underestimate what we can accomplish in five".

The key is to get started.

The 'Law of Attraction'

The 'Law of Attraction' - the idea that you attract whatever is dominant in your thoughts and feelings - is very widely believed in in life coaching circles. More skeptical people will find it hard to believe that everything - illnesses, lottery wins, job offers - is determined by your thoughts.

Here's an interesting critique/exploration which addresses this concern from the perspective of Ken Wilber's 'Integral' model, from Graham English's 'Integral Conversations' blog. Well worth a read.

The 7 Biggest Mistakes In Goal-Setting (and how to avoid them): #5

#5: Not taking into account the knock-on effects of achieving your goal

The ancient saying "Be careful what you ask for, in case you get it" is a very wise one. Because your unconscious mind will do its best to give you what you ask for – no more, no less – you have to be very clear about what the goal is that you are setting.

Consider a businessman who very single-mindedly sets a SMART goal of owning a company with a turnover of a million in its first year.

A year later he has his company, it's turned over a million, so he has achieved his goal. But – his health is shot due to working 19-hour days, he's a hundred pounds overweight because he's been living on junk food, his wife has left him because he's never home, and he has no friends left because he has made deals with them that left him with a big profit and them with very little.

This is not where he wanted to be, but because he did not consider the consequences and knock-on effects, his unconscious mind gave him exactly what he asked for – and no more.

How could he have avoided this? As well as making the goal sensory-specific and putting a date on it, he also could have looked at the consequences of achieving the goal on every other area of his life:

•    his health
•    his family
•    his friendships
•    the wider community

If you don't consider all the consequences  of your goal, you may end up with something you don't want. The smarter way to set goals is to take the consequences into account, allowing you to make changes to your goal and/or your route to achieving it. That way you stand a chance of getting the benefits of your goal while avoiding unwanted side effects.

Bonus tip: listen to your unconscious mind

The conscious mind can only track around seven "chunks" of information at a time (less on a bad day) so it's easy to miss something vital when you are thinking your goal through.

Your unconscious mind, by contrast, is potentially aware of everything, and it can notice pitfalls that the conscious mind overlooks. Generally it communicates with the conscious mind by means of feelings. So – check how you feel when you think about your goal. Do you feel enthused and energized, or tired and discouraged?

If you feel less than 100% about your goal, that may indicate that your conscious mind has missed something about the consequences of achieving it, so check again.