How I use goals

So, I’ve just finished the first of the 2017 Performance Festival sessions at the super nice Dorchester Hotel. Vibe wise, it’s very different from the Vaults where we held the 2016 Performance Fest and an important reminder that the environment is only part of what makes up a performance and you take advantage of whatever any environment gives you.

Given we’re just into February it was a good opportunity to use New Year Resolutions as a prompt to talk about goals and how to make the most of them. It was great to have the chance to talk through some high performance and individually based approaches to using goals and I thought it might be useful to share some of my goals for the session to show a little of how we use goals at PlanetK2.

It’s all about Intentions

The team members at PlanetK2 who work directly with our customers use Slack to share our personal intentions (goals) for each delivery session that we do. Whether it’s 1 to 1 coaching, work with teams or conference presentations, we share our intentions which typically relate to the attitude we’d like to portray or the particular style/emphasis that we want to bring to the session. We also include intentions for how we’d like the ‘audience’ to be thinking and feeling once we’ve delivered the face to face element of our time with them.

There’s a Stephen Covey saying that goes something like, “we tend to judge ourselves by our intentions and other people by their behaviours“. We like that and that’s why we share our intentions, so others can judge us by them too!

For the Dorchester session, I’d shared that for me the session was “a chance to share personal thoughts with passion, insight and an invitation to challenge the audience to apply this stuff”.

From a goal setting perspective, this helps me get my mindset right, as well as helping me to decide some of the tactics I’ll employ at the session. For example, because I wanted it to be about an opportunity to challenge people’s thinking and have them apply something, it was important to provide a lot of room for conversation which helped people connect with their current understanding of goals.

From this clear, personal base, as well as having the chance to hear from other people, a good foundation is built from which to present some insight/concept that helps to challenge and add to the current outlook.

The intent to give people the chance to apply the concepts and take action also helped me to keep the focus on what’s currently working for people and where the value to make a change might most readily be found. I believe that adding to what’s already in place will always result in better results than simply telling people to completely ignore all that they’re currently doing.

Goal reviewing

As well as the intention sharing providing a good focus and game plan for me, the intentions are also an immediate agenda for reviewing the performance. How well did I do what I said I was going to? The simplest review question going. So within an hour or so of finishing the session, I can publicly share on Slack my assessment of how passionate I was, how much insight I shared and how much I challenged people. My assessment was pretty pleased with insight, challenge and application, but needed to think more with this topic about where the passion comes through.

Goals and Feedback

With Keith, Julia and Sam (other members of the team at PlanetK2) in the session as well, the intentions I shared up front can also be reviewed by people I trust and respect. So, instead of just relying on my own feedback, the intention sharing and simple goals means I’m currently waiting for the insight from them to add in important additional perspectives – to see if my intended behaviours were actually the behaviours they witnessed.

This whole process is a simple one for us, but one that requires regular commitment and action. So, rather than goal setting being something that’s a few times a year thing, we’ve moved it into a place where it’s a simple virtual conversation a few times a week. It’s a really simple process and one we’d recommend that you experiment with. If you fancy a chat about any of this, just mail me anytime on hello@planetK2.com.