TRY TAKING A FRESH LOOK AT MAKING RESOLUTIONS
Setting goals can help you focus on what really matters, says John Weston.
The time has come and gone for 2018 new year’s resolution-setting. Or has it? Such was the gist of a recent (fairly friendly) Weston Family Feud.
I’d made my pitch for new year’s resolutions in the highest court — the Court of Family Opinion. One of my children would rather have eye surgery than commit to resolutions; for the second, it was “meh” (From The Urban Dictionary: “Indifference; to be used when one simply does not care”); and the third was keen to spell out specific 2018 goals. Three different reactions, from three motivated, intelligent persons whom I love and respect. I wondered how representative this was of Canadian views in general.
Expanding the sampling size, I took the conversation to the swimming pool lockerroom, where one guy told me he makes resolutions each new year, but only if he can justify a resolution with 10 — yes, 10 — reasons. He’s over 70, regularly attends Toastmasters and follows his swim workout with a session in the weight room. Motivated, intelligent, ambitious — he makes resolutions, but only a few resolutions can meet his tough standard each year.
Some serious academics believe that goal-setting has negative effects. In a 2009 study Harvard Business School’s Max Bazerman and others concluded that setting goals can lead to a range of disruptive behaviours, “including a narrow focus that neglects non-goal areas, a rise in unethical behaviour, distorted risk preferences, corrosion of organizational culture and reduced intrinsic motivation” (HBS Working Paper, Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Over-Prescribing Goal Setting). My wife Donna would add that an obsessive goal-orientation undermines creativity and compassion.
So, despite the high authorities ranged against me, let me try to rehabilitate the new year’s resolution. The calm after the holiday storm lends itself well to a consideration of the benefits of formal goalsetting. In the same article quoted above, Bazerman conceded that “hundreds of studies conducted in numerous countries and contexts have consistently demonstrated that setting specific, challenging goals can powerfully drive behaviour and boost performance.” Mark McCormack (What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School) refers to a study over 10 years that revealed that the small minority of HBS students who made and wrote down their goals greatly outperformed the financial success of the majority of students who refrained from doing so.
Setting goals empowers you by causing you to focus resources on things that fulfil you. My locker-room friend would say that’s a few things, not a huge number (how could you find 10 reasons to justify 50 goals?) Do you yearn for a greater sense of well-being, or a better relationship with your children, or perhaps something as radical as a change of career? Maybe you meant to visit your aging parents more last year? Whatever it is that you’re missing or where you’re not hitting the mark, make that a priority. Write down two or three of these and think about how you’d feel if you accomplished them in 2018.
Setting goals also helps you decide what not to do. Let’s call this “decluttering.” The need for decluttering our lives gave wings to a book by Japanese author Marie Kondo, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, which climbed to the New York Times Best-Seller List. Her followers have converted her name into a verb and even elevated her thinking to a philosophy. Why? Because in failing to know what we really want, we get consumed by what other people want of us. As related in my book, On!: Achieving Excellence in Leadership, former House of Commons speaker John Fraser drove this point home in me before I headed to Ottawa as an MP. “Know the two or three things you want to accomplish,” he said. “Otherwise, you’ll go there and burn out.” For an MP, travel, constituents, policies, committees, ministers and personal life all pulled you in different directions. But whatever your job or role, no matter how much energy you have, no matter how smart you are, if your resources are diluted across many priorities, you won’t accomplish meaningful things.
Identify what relates to your priorities and what stands as a distraction. Drive out the distractions. Focus on what counts. Once you identify your priorities, communicate them to your family, colleagues, your staff and the people you serve. Doing so gives you power. People respond well to your focus. They gain energy from your decisiveness. They will recognize you based on your interests and your presumed expertise. Eliminate from your schedule things that detract from your goals. With focus comes increased expertise. You show up when you get the chance to act in your chosen areas.
As the furor of Christmas season fades, use this early stage of 2018 to take another look at goal-setting. Maybe it deserves more than a “meh.”
While there is no question these projects will consume thousands of hours in the design and construction stages, there is reassuring historical precedent to show they can be successfully completed simultaneously. Keith Sashaw, Association of Consulting Engineering Companies of B.C. The calm after the holiday storm lends itself well to a consideration of the benefits of formal goal-setting. JOHN WESTON