When a goal is not the goal

When I set my goals for the next year I test each goal by floating into the future and considering how my experience will change once that goal has been accomplished. It means I can approach the goal from both ends and see how they meet in the middle. Usually it pulls up some questions about how the goal will be achieved and clarifies the steps to achieving it.

A strange thing struck me this year, it is so obvious that I wondered why I hadn't noticed it before. When I go to December 31 and look at the finished goals there seem to be two types.

1. Goals that will be great to have accomplished regardless of how it happens. These goals are changes that I want to have accomplished and won't really gain a lot from the process. There are things that I will ask someone else to do and my only involvement is paying for it. e.g. Getting the flat roof resurfaced. There are other things where I am heavily involved but rather wish I wasn't such as dental work.

The thing I notice about these goals is that once there are done that is the end of it. Job done.

2. There are other goals where the process is actually a big part of the goal. The changes necessary to accomplish the goal are really what I am looking for. It is one thing to get extra income by winning the lottery but changing my business so that the profit increases is much more exciting. It means that I have gained new abilities that are mine forever and that the business has potential for years to come.

Perceiving goals as a way to learn new skills, make new distinctions and build long term changes in life or business is so much more exciting than just getting stuff. Running a marathon is a huge achievement but having a mindset and a body that can run a marathon is the real goal. Increasing turnover or profits is great but being able to make that change is the real goal.

The great thing for me about this distinction is that achieving a goal provides a lot more satisfaction than ticking it off at the end of the year, I know that each week I am making changes to my business and more importantly to myself that will stay with me. At the end of each week my business muscles have become a little stronger and my perception of what is possible has changed. Each stage of the goal becomes as important as the goal itself.

The picture is of one of the many ceps (called porcini in Italy) that I have found in the local forest. My initial goal some years ago was to find edible mushrooms to eat. Now I could just have bought some (available in Covent Garden at around £50 a Kilo) but learning to find my own is cheaper and much more fun. The skill is now mine for the rest of my life and searching the forest at dawn is a great time to see wild horses, deer, foxes and all sorts of other wild things. Once you realise that the goal is not the real goal life becomes a lot more fun and achieving the goal a lot easier.

Real life only happens once, You can't rewind and play again.

A few days ago I boarded a ferry for the short trip to visit a new customer on the Isle of Wight. The sky was a hundred shades of blue and the water was calm. I stood on the top deck and thought. Wow.
I could see for miles, the sea and the sky looked beautiful. The flat path of the ferry stretched behind the boat and into the distance.I could hear the gulls and the lapping of the water. I felt a cool breeze on my face , the movement of the boat and was suddenly an excited small child again.
I don't know why the moment was so special. I have seen movies of more spectacular sights and been to some amazing places in the past but this was here and now.
Real life happens only once. You can't rewind and play again. Take in the experience and then the moment is gone. There are some things that remain. The memories of the sights, the feelings,the sounds and the experience. People can describe some thing or show me a film but I am the only one who can have the experience.
That experience will change my perceptions, perhaps for the rest of the day, maybe longer. On some level this is what this site is about. Changing how you are inside so that you react differently to things on the outside. Every experience changes things slightly and real life only happens once. This is what makes it so intense and why it is so much fun.
What does this have to do with your business? Glad you asked.

It doesn't matter how much fancy PR a big company uses, when your customers interact with you then you will get 100 times the attention because it is in real time with a real person. No chance to pause, fast forward, rewind or change channels. You have a much bigger chance to change their perceptions, so that they remember you. Communication is two way so you can really be of service to them by giving them exactly what they want.

Try to do something every day that inspires you and makes you come alive. Your business will have more energy, but more importantly you will have a wonderful life.

A charm of goldfinches, build it and they will come.

I have lived in this house for for over 20 years but have never seen a goldfinch in the garden. During the very cold weather at the start of January I put out a new type of bird feeder and suddenly there are goldfinches in my garden all day long. The seed is a type that finches particularly like so I'm not surprised that having found it they have stayed. I am amazed how quickly they found it in the first place.

When something happens in nature I will often look for an analogy in my business. It reminded me of the Waldo Emerson quote "Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door". This is attacked by many marketing people as they say that however good your product no one will know about you or where to find your door. This may have been true in the past but search engines have changed the game. In the last year at least 50% of my business has come from people who found the company using a search engine. We have spent a lot of time experiencing the business like a customer so that the website tells the story in their language. When they search for what they want our website is there waiting for them

The finches are out there but you won't see them until you have exactly what they want. It is the same with customers, keep refining what you do based on customer feedback and as it gets better and better the customers will find you. Just make sure that your website provides the necessary signpost.

A question of attribution

There is a brilliant play by Alan Bennet which includes a conversation between Anthony Blunt (surveyor of the Queens pictures, later exposed as a spy) and Queen Elizabeth. At one point he points out that one of the pictures in the royal collection is a fake. The Queen looks at it and even she can see it is a fake. She asks why no one spotted the fake at the time it was added to the collection and Blunt says that a fake is not obvious in it’s own time, whilst later it becomes obvious.

There is something about this idea that struck me as an amazing distinction although I wasn’t able to put my finger on why. The idea that only when viewed from the future does the forgery become obvious even to someone that doesn’t know that much about paintings.

Look back at some family pictures from 20 years ago and instead of noticing the difference between the people you just observe that they all have very curious clothes and hairstyles. Look at a costume drama from the 1970s and even though it is set 200 years ago you will still realise that it was made in the 1970s.

There is so much about the way we dress and do interact now that tells us far more about 2009 than it does about what we think we are.

The same idea applies to music, and business. Things that seem very different are just another version of the norm. The key to creating something new and interesting is to realise how much of what we do is just the fashion of the day and putting our focus on what is not.

Goals aren't just for Christmas

I have been setting and recording my goals since January 2000. It has always been a tradition in my family to make New Year's resolutions and this was initially an extension of that. I didn't do much to follow them up when I started but looking back at the computer file that I have kept for the past 10 years it is surprising how many of them I have accomplished. There are a few that turn up each year and don't seem to have made much headway. I am now beginning to understand why, I'll talk about that in the future. Today I wanted to talk about how I set them and when.

My initial method was to use a CD in a set by Tony Robins called Personal Power II, it got me started so it was useful, but I don't think the method was quite right for me. I won't give a link for it as you can find the whole 25CD set on ebay for around 10 Dollars. The Robins method is to write down all the things that you want to achieve in a great long list take about 5 mins writing as fast as you can. You then repeat this for all the thing goals, and then all the financial ones.
Once you have 3 long lists you write next to each item when you want it (1, 2, 5 and 10 years). You then pick the top 3 from each list to get a total of 9 goals. For each goal you then describe what you will see feel and hear when you get it. Lastly write down the one thing that you will do tomorrow to get you started.

The structure is pretty good but it seemed to me to concentrate on getting stuff rather than enjoying the journey of getting it. I also noticed that there were 2 other problems. I wrote down stuff that I didn't really want that much and the more difficult goals like learning a language or keeping fit require something built into the process to keep me going.

I have made changes over the years and developed my own approach. Some of the main things I do are.
1. When considering a goal, does it make me excited, does it make me go WOW. Coach Michael Neill is responsible for showing me how important this is.
2. What will I get from the journey rather than the destination? There is no point spending 30 years getting something if you hate what you have to do to get it. Change the destination or the mode of transport.
3. A goal often seems fun when looked at as a whole but what will the minutes be like. Does paradise become less appealing if I have to stay out of the sun all day and the food all has to be flown in. I consider how I will pass my time and how satisfying it will be.
4. When a goal requires long term commitment I make sure I am willing to put in the time and effort necessary and use some visualisation and anchoring techniques to keep that motivation in place.

This summer I took Your Best Year Yet: Make the Next 12 Months Your Best Ever! as part of my holiday reading . It uses your values and your roles as a way to set goals. This seems to be a much better way to get at what you want rather than what you think you want. I worked through the process and I feel that I have chosen goals that I will achieve. They tie in pretty well with the ones in my own method but I like the structure that results from Best Year Yet.

I strongly recommend goal setting during a summer holiday. There is a lightness and a fun about it that I don't feel in the middle of winter. Deciding what you want next is much easier when you are aware of how much you already have.

Finding your inner consultant is like taking a holiday without leaving home.

When I started running a business I didn't go on holiday. I thought that I didn't have the money or the time. When I finally did take a holiday I made a strange discovery. I discovered that a holiday actually gave me more time. When I returned many of the things that I had been struggling with had answers that I had previously missed because I had been working so hard on them. Solving a problem by taking it head on can work but often the answer is to go around it or to solve a different problem instead. You have the wisdom but you prevent yourself from using it. A holiday frees you up.

I was bought up with the ethos that the harder you work the better you will do, it certainly goes a long way but I think working smarter is more effective. I think this is the trick with holidays, when I return I apply my effort in just the right place so it is far more effective. The thing that interested me is that I had the knowledge of the right place to apply that effort all along but somehow I didn’t think of it. This is what I mean by “your inner consultant”, the wisdom that you have gained from experience and from all the books you have read. Most of us can’t go on holiday everyday so I started to search for ways to use this ability without actually going on holiday. This website is all about that search. Check out the Audio book to get a great overview of what I have found so far.


There is actually a great way to have a real holiday without leaving home. My partner and I call it a Mykonos holiday or a Paris holiday but you can name it after any place that you have had a wonderful time. This is what you do.

Choose a day on your calender when you don't have anything that you need to do. Block out the day and make sure all the chores, work and other stuff that you would usually do on that day are taken care of. Sort out any food the day before so that you won't need to do any cooking other that a quick 5 minutes putting things together. You can always go out to eat if that is what you would do on holiday. Put on the phone answering machine.

Now having set things up there is only one rule.You can only do stuff that you would do on holiday in the place you have chosen. No TV, no Internet, no phone calls. If holiday for you means spending the day in a café then do that, if it involves just siting in the sun do that. If you like to do more energetic things that is fine but remember the golden rule. You can only do stuff that you would do on holiday in the place you have chosen.

Please comment on your plans for a holiday at home.

Reading the signs. What can you learn about an organisation from its car park.

One of the things I have learnt over the years is that most organisations are like holograms. Something that applies to a small part of it applies to the whole. I think this is because over time any part that did not reflect the rest of it would change. It is an organic thing, if part of you is injured but the rest is really healthy then the injury tends to heal quickly.

You can learn a lot from a company's website but feedback to the web designers is often slow. Visit the factory or offices and you can learn a great deal without even going in the door. There are so many signs, not just about how things are now but also pointers to the history of the company.

The most obvious thing to look at is the cars and bikes. The number will give you a rough idea of how many people work there, particularly if there are poor transport links. The age and type of car will then indicate the income of the owners, the age (look for stickers) and possibly their gender and interests. Whenever you consider a factor I recommend that you then look at how it has changed. Is the car park struggling to cope with the number of cars? If parking in the area is not generally a problem then it could mean they are doing really well or possibly that they can't afford to move at the moment. Remember it and consider other things. A car park with a lot of empty spaces also tells a story.

How are the bays labelled? If the ones near the front door are reserved for certain company positions (finance director, MD etc) then it indicates a company with a strong hierarchy. It is interesting to look for changes in the way the bays are marked. Removal of designated spaces indicates a change in company culture. When and why did that happen. The company attitude towards wheelchair users may be indicated by the designated bays. Are there more than the statutory minimum? Has a lot of thought gone into their positioning? Are they being used?

There are many other signs that point towards the culture of the company. The name board(s), smoking areas, rubbish, air conditioning, plants etc. The point is not to focus on what is there but what it indicates about the beliefs and values of the people who put it there and allowed it to remain.