Practical Wisdom from the Entrepreneurs Creative Edge by William Reed

How do you think about your Goals for the coming year? Yogi Berra said that if you don’t know where you are going, you will end up someplace else. If you are not happy with where you are now, it could be that it is because you let yourself drift there, rather than setting your own course and pursuing it.

Are you so busy getting caught up that you haven’t had time to give your goals much thought? Are your goals for the next year just a conservative extension of this year’s time line? Are you planning to think about your goals sometime in the New Year? If so, you can do better, much better if you have a strategy. GOALSCAPE is a great way to make your goals visible and achievable.

One challenge with the conventional way of putting goals into a list, is that the list can be too vague to take action on. At the other extreme, it can grow into a tyrannical to do list that seems to grow faster than you can trim it back. Goals are not particularly motivating when they are imposed from the outside, or when they are not inspired by a sense of purpose. When you really care about achieving a goal, you are willing to go to far greater lengths to achieve it. Distractions are many, goals are few.

It helps to have a way to think about goals, something that goes beyond the typical motivational pep talk. I created a column to help people think about goals called Time for a Change, http://www.activegarage.com/series/time-change.

The GOALSCAPE for the column is at http://budurl.com/vrwl, including PDF downloads of article summaries. The column contains articles under eight separate topics: Goals and Flexible Focus, Problems in Goals Pursuit, Creative Ideas and Focused Action, Presenting Goals to Others, Secrets of Collaboration Success, Templates for Problem Solving, Goals in the 8 Fields of Life, and 8 Principles of Mandala Thinking. These articles contain frameworks for thinking about goals, what they mean and how to achieve them.

As shown in the illustration, the articles are displayed in the highly intuitive GOALSCAPE format. You can download a free trial version of this software which can be set to display in several languages including English and Japanese at http://emcquest.com/programs/goal-management-software/. What it will do for you is accelerate your action by providing a single clear picture of the entire goal structure, indicating content, priority, and progress toward completion.

Another way to improve your Goal setting and achievement is to learn from other people who have mastered the process. Emmett Lazich is the 49er Class National Coach for the Australian Sailing Team, as well as the Software Development Manager at GOALSCAPE. Emmett coached the 49er Olympic Gold Medalists at Sydney 2000, and has twice coached World Championship winners.

For a rare view inside the mind of an Olympic coach, read about Emmet’s High Performance Strategy Definition on the GOALSCAPE blog at http://www.goalscape.com/blog. It starts with defining your next major goal. Most people get this far, but after that the strategy departs from conventional approaches by defining the essential ingredients of that goal, and then assessing the costs or investment required to achieve it. With a clear picture of what you want to achieve, realistic sub-goals in place, and a means of monitoring your progress, you are already far ahead of where you would be working with a mere list or calendar.

The premise behind GOALSCAPE is that although individual time and energy are limited resources that must be brought into focus, you can also leverage your limited resources by working effectively as a team. Because GOALSCAPE also enables you to share your goals with collaborating team members, it can greatly enhance your teamwork and communication.

As we sail into the new year, why not give yourself a head start by getting clear about what goals matter to you most, and how you will achieve them?

William Reed WEBSITE: http://www.williamreed.jp WEB TV: http://williamreed.tv NANBA: http://www.nanbanote.com iPAD CREATORS CLUB: http://ipadcreatorsclub.com BLOG: http://www.EntrepreneursCreativeEdge.com