David Hollingworth

I first read about insighta.com in one of Gretchen Rubin’s posts on Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain.

Towards the bottom of the posting (great sketches by the way Gretchen) she mentions the site insighta.com which I duly surfed off to investigate.

The site appeared to be a social site devoted to personal development topics. You could link in your blog postings for other members to vote on. If you got enough votes you’d get the article posted on insighta.com’s front page.

It seemed cool so I thought I’d give it a try. That was back in mid-April so I thought I’d check out how things were going after a month. I was most surprised to find the site replaced with a photography site.

Does anyone know what has happened to the personal development insighta.com?

You know, making goals SMART doesn’t make them happen. A great deal more effort needs to be put in before a SMART goal becomes a realized goal. However there are some things you can do to bolster your SMART goals and shorten the odds that you’ll achieve them.

1. Compelling Reasons. What are the compelling reasons for you to complete this goal? Write them down! If you’re struggling to think of some compelling reasons then take a step back and ask yourself, “Why am I committing to this goal if I can’t think of any compelling reasons to do it?”.
2. Additional Benefits. Under this heading list all the additional benefits you’ll accrue by achieving this goal. For example the additional benefits for my weight loss goal would include:
   • More of my clothes will fit
   • I’ll have more energy
   • It will ease my hiatus hernia

   to name but a few.

3. Challenges To Be Overcome. Get these out on the table right up front, don’t let them lurk in the background waiting to leap out and trip you up. By identifying the challenges up front you might recognize early on that extra steps will be required to get you to your goal and you can plan for these now.
4. Resources You’ll Need. Again identifying the resources you’ll need to accomplish your goal as early as possible will give you the opportunity to build these into the plan and avoid nasty surprises later.

This upfront planning is well worth the effort. It helps integrate the goal into your subconscious and identifies things early on that might otherwise knock you off course. By getting a grip on them now it will boost your confidence in your ability to achieve that goal.

You’ll probably know by now that the “A” in “SMART goals” stands for Attainable. In other words a goal must be attainable for it to be worth pursuing.

The examples I gave of unattainable goals were things like taking lunch on Pluto or becoming the next king of England. These were deliberately extreme examples; but when we get closer to home where do we draw the line between what’s an attainable goal and what isn’t. If we decide a goal isn’t attainable then are we just making excuses and holding ourselves back?

Let me give you another example. Suppose you’re a high level executive and you’re considering setting a goal; “Become a CEO within 12 months”.

• Specific - yes,
• Measurable - yes
• Attainable - I’ll come back to this
• Relevant - yes
• Timely - yes

So that just leaves attainable. At first you think this goal is relatively easily attainable; until you realize that it will take you away from your wife and young family who need your support. Eventually you come to the conclusion that this goal isn’t attainable because of family pressures.

My argument here is that this goal, and many like it, are attainable if we’re willing to pay the price. The price in this case is spending time away from the family.

In fact almost any goal, even the daft ones I mentioned above, are attainable if you’re prepared to pay the price.

So where does that leave us when trying to assess attainable goals? We need to decide:

1. How badly we want the goal
2. What the price will be of attaining the goal
3. Are we willing to pay that price?

If we are willing to pay the price for attaining the goal then we must recognize that this is our choice! If we’re not willing to pay the price to attain our goal then, again, this is our choice. In exercising those choices we are empowered to shape our own future.

A recent article from Mark Forster came up with a useful idea for those of us who tend to get distracted away from the items on our to-do list by other less productive pursuits.

Mark suggested that rather than use a time log, to record everything we’ve done; use an “event log” to record everything we’re about to do.

What advantages does this have over a time log? Basically if you have to stop for a second and write down what you’re about to do before you do it then you have to make an active choice as to what it is you’re going to do. So when I complete this posting I might write down:

21:57 - surf on over to gamestar

and I must just stop and think, “Hang on, I still need to sort out the laundry. Gamestar will have to wait”.

You get the idea? I’ve made an active choice as to what I’m going to do rather than just let the fancy take me where it will.

In the next day or so I’m going to give this a try and I’ll report back how I got on.

I was listening to the radio this evening, with it being Saturday the football results from the UK were on and I heard one of the commentators refer to the “gigantic step” one of the clubs had taken today.

That got me thinking. You know we all expect instantaneous results these days. Look at the Internet, instant information, instant purchasing power. We want to buy something, we don’t have to save for years we can get instant credit. Heck, even my porridge is instant these days!

We live in a world were we want it and we can get it now. Or do we? If we have a goal then our underlying belief maybe that this too should be instantly attainable and when it’s not we may loose heart, loose focus, loose direction. However we have to remember that it’s the little steps that take us steadily forwards and that will eventually lead us to our goal. Those little steps that we take every day are the ones that will eventually lead us to success.

That gigantic step the club took was a gigantic step out of the relegation zone. Perhaps if they’d been taking little steps all season they’d not have been in the relegation zone today.