Victor is a young man living in Uganda and has a dream to open a hardware store in his home city in Uganda.
He contacted me after watching my video about taking a small step to achieve a key goal and I agreed to provide some coaching. In return he consented for me to share his story and I thought this would be a good case study in goal setting and goal achievement.
Victor studied electrical engineering and earned a technician diploma. He had a good job but was laid off due to COVID-19. He now has work that pays little and he does not have enough money to have three meals a day.
Furthermore, his family expects him to contribute financially so his younger siblings can attend school and pursue higher education. He feels he is unable to fulfill his obligation to his family.
I asked him to fill out a goal planning worksheet and he wrote down a goal to open a hardware store by December 2021. After reviewing his goal, I explained that this is more like a dream as he does not have the resources to have that as a realistic goal.
I advised him to set another goal to find a way to earn more money now and start saving. I also suggested that I share his goal with my audience and ask for their recommendations. Here is the link to his goal planning worksheet. Please look and leave a comment on this blog post or on the YouTube video. What would you recommend victor do to move towards his dream of opening his own hardware store?
Developing a key leadership or management skill is important to be grow continuously as a leader and manager. In fact, the famous inventor and diplomat Benjamin Franklin is known to have developed thirteen skills a year by working on one each for four weeks. Working on the skill daily for four weeks, allowed him to turn the skill into a habit.
I created a training needs analysis worksheet to determine training needs for leaders and managers. This worksheet can help you to choose a priority skill to work on until it becomes a new habit or something that you become good at. You may already have a skill in mind that you want to develop and just need to get started. Once you have a skill to work on, I suggest using my goal planning worksheet to turn the project into a goal and plan how to achieve it. The goal planning worksheet has you set a specific and measurable goal so you can better envision the outcome and track your progress.
Let us suppose you wanted to become better at giving feedback to employees. You realize that you easily point out negatives in performance but do not give equal effort to positive feedback and recognition.
A goal statement example could be, I give positive feedback daily to an employee to reinforce a behavior or to recognize a good result. This is a specific and measurable goal statement that can be tracked daily using a type of checklist form to note if you are doing it daily.
Each section of the goal planning form has you think through the steps to realize your goal from listing the benefits to identifying the obstacles and solutions and writing action steps.
In our example of giving feedback, let us say the benefits are to build trust, motivation and morale and improve performance. The obstacles could be old habits and know-how. Solutions could be a daily reminder in your to-do list and a quick tutorial on giving feedback.
Actions steps would follow and, in this case, might be to set up an automated daily reminder and to search for tutorial videos on YouTube or find a good blog article.
Taking a course in leadership or management is always a good thing, but if you do not prioritize a skill to develop you may only leave the training with good knowledge and intentions.
Skill development is like any goal and project and involves strong effort at first and perhaps some training. But to become an effective leader and manager ongoing skill development is highly recommended.
I am talking here about skills for leaders and managers, but the same approach can be used for skill development in any position.Download my Training Needs Analysis Worksheet complete with leadership and management competencies and assess your training needs now.
Every year I recommend reviewing your previous year and setting plans for the New Year using my Year in Review Planning Worksheet. This makes it easier to go through the process and put your intentions in writing.
I am using the word intention this year as I feel that if you have one key intention and you keep focus on that, then life will help you move towards that in ways you did not dream of. I find this to be true for me and I became more aware of this notion after reading the book The Surrender Experiment by Michael Singer.
In his book Michael tells his story of how life kept asking him to do things that seemed contrary to his intentions but ultimately led him on a path of self-discovery and success.
I realized that in the past I have forced myself to do things to achieve my goals that did not always feel right. Sometimes these were ideas or practices that other people recommended and worked for them but did not work for me. However, when I trusted in life and let myself be guided by my intuition, emotions and thoughts in a balanced way, things worked out better with less stress.
When I speak about surrendering to life as Michael does in his book, it is about letting go of our narrow thinking based on our personality type and our past conditioning and being open to new paths.
I was reading an article about health in this month’s Costco Connection magazine and the author was suggesting a few things that I am already doing or have done. For brain health he suggested exploring your world and discover your environment, so you see things from new perspectives. He also suggested joining or starting a club such as hiking, getting to know your neighbours and getting a dog to stay more actives.
A long time ago I had set intentions to be healthier and both consciously and unconsciously I had done all the above suggestions. Just following my intuition and what life put in front of me has paid off. In fact, joining a local cycling club had me meet my current partner who shares many of my interests and we have been happily together for about 12 years now.
It seems for some especially logical types that trusting life is casting faith to the wind. Yet unconsciously we have trusted life since birth. Breathing is an act we all due every moment to be alive yet is not something we think about logically. We just trust that each breath will come and along with-it life. Yet though there is a logical explanation to how all this works in terms of our physiology, there is definitely something very powerful and almost mysterious going on.
In summary, you can download and complete my Year in Review Planning worksheet that helps you to review your previous year and plan for the new one, or simply set a life enhancing intention and trust that life will bring you what you need to fulfill it. Practice being open to new opportunities that life will present.
