INsight/ Louder Than Goals
What speaks louder than goals?
Manila, 5 December 2016 — As we prepare to close out this year, many people are reflecting on goals they want to achieve in 2017. Are you one of them? If so, how much chance do you give yourself to achieve those goals? What would it take to give yourself a 100% score?
To start off, I agree that doing your homework to set goals is more effective than quickly making new year resolutions. That is... if you also set yourself targets for your progress along the way, and if you put in place the habits and routines that will support you to make that progress every day and every week.
For most people, their new year resolutions fall by the wayside before the end of January because they fail to align their support systems to get them the results they want. While setting goals is a great start, you will need more to be successful. Now is a good time to ask yourself what else you can do to achieve what you really want in 2017. What speaks louder than setting your goals?
Let's take another perspective on this—leaders do that all the time—and look at your habits and routines as a starting point rather than a support along the way. Aristotle's words can help us here. He said that excellence comes from our habits, from what we do repeatedly. No mention of goal setting.
Fortunately, we can get more help in learning to master habits than Aristotle's students in ancient Greece. We can tap online resources to support us.
I recently discovered a nifty app called irunūrun to help me build more high-performance behaviors to achieve what I want to achieve in 2017. After putting in and monitoring habits for daily exercise on my stepper, and for completing my daily wins and week goals, I liked how the app presented my progress, and how that pushed me to focus on performance. So I am happy to share my experience here with you.
The team at irunūrun claims to offer "the world’s simplest, most powerful performance and accountability platform" focusing on recurring behavior. From what I saw, they are certainly on the right track. And if you think that building and maintaining strong habits is easier done together with others, you're in luck, because the app was designed to share your performance with team mates to boost accountability and competitiveness.
So what speaks louder than goals?
Give new year resolutions a pass this year, and start building your high-performance habits now. If you decide to do that, give yourself a fun daily workout on irunūrun, and watch out for our 2017 leadership training programs at TransformationFirst.Asia, where building new skills and strong habits is always a core ingredient for learning.