Goal Diggers. Come escape the darkness of the goal mine.
Goal Diggers: come escape the goal mine
GOAL DIGGERS; Come escape the darkness of the goal mine
“Goals. So, I hate goals, like hate them, and I know I’m not meant to say that in my position, a leader, a director… It’s actually such a relief to say it, ‘cause I have to talk about them all the time with everyone and secretly I just hate them. I suppose that makes me un-coachable, right?”
For him it’s a stinking hangover from years of setting/being set goals, annual reviews and bonus criteria in a culture of big goals, small goals, team goals, his goals, their goals - goals, goals, goals. For him, now, he feels like they are nailed on to self-regulation and feedback control systems, they feel constraining, turgid, soulless, fake… Boring! And I believe it’s soooo important to listen to your knowledge emotions; your knowing.
What we worked out in the first session was, for him, the connection to reward or punishment, achieve or non-achieve flowed through to a black and white view of good and bad, good guy or bad guy. As this was so closely linked to his own connection to skills and performance results and had become so intertwined with his own identity over time - he realized he sometimes measured his sense of worth through this black and white lens and rather horrifying to him, he realised he did this with others. This brought up all kinds of feelings, in short it made him feel like shit; therefore, goals made him feel like shit. A reasonable connection perhaps; but I was drawn to understanding if it was truly the case.
He was describing SMART goals; specific, measured, achievable, realistic, timebound goals, also commonly known as objectives. This is often the only goals we know, revered by many and standard practice across many organizations and workplaces.
I notice that many of my clients tell me they have put off seeing a coach for some time. There are many reasons for this, one I frequently hear is, they simply can’t face talking about SMART goals. They just can’t stomach the thought of a coach asking, “So what’s the goal? let’s break it down”. They’re sick of that prescribed, distant approach that they use all the time in a formal capacity at work being applied to their life, feelings, hopes, wants, needs and more importantly their unspoken anxieties and fears. Frankly, they hate the idea of creating a set of objectives for their life. And they’re getting a wee bit bored of making SMART goals with others too. Why though?
SMART goals, often the only goal setting framework we’ve learned and absorbed, are fundamentally linked to skills and performance improvement, and they can jar when you no longer need upskilled or to improve your performance per se. If you are considering some, let’s call it deeper perspective such as your self-awareness, personal growth, development of your whole-self, personal values, experiencing the signs of burn out, working through a period of grief or loss, in the process of transforming you life or career or desperately wanting to, you’ll be asking asking yourself some bigger picture life questions – SMART goals will feel like you’re peeing on your own bonfire.
I totally ‘get it’. In that context the SMART framework feels inappropriate, at best like a subtle coercion, at worst direct pressure and manipulation. It’s unsatisfying. It leaves an unsatisfactory taint, it’s just not enough. It’s a turn off. It might also feel contrived and tokenistic. It might also feel like you’re setting yourself up to fail as you know you won’t meet your contrived timescale. What you want is by nature a wee bit unrealistic and how on earth would you begin to measure it. Feels wrong; no-one is going to want to do that. No-one. Your successful self will probably just not allow it. And so you might dismiss what you really want completely…
You will know where you are on your own development path. Most people I work these days with are asking bigger questions of themselves than how I improve KPI’s. They are contemplating some huge and deeply personal stuff that affects who they are in the world:
Who am I now in this phase of my life?
What’s my purpose, my legacy?
What do I love doing? What do I really want to do?
Where do I really add value? What am I bringing to the table?
How can I give back?
How do I bring my whole self wherever I go? What do I need now, to do that? Why is that important?
What’s missing?
I’ve always wanted to do / be and do I have the skills or the capacity to learn it?
What do I need to give up / unlearn?
How’s that all that playing into my work and professional life?
For sure, there is still a need to be great at what they do and there’s always one eye on theirs’s and other’s perception of performance, but they no longer need that part managed by themselves or anyone else quite frankly. They are expanding, growing, developing and transforming, but their measurement system is still a wee bit stuck back there somewhere in traditional goal setting land – mainly because it’s just so ingrained and has actually been quite effective in the past.
Goal mining: searching for the goal, starting with your goal, bringing your goal to a coaching session, is a common misconception of coaching. Quite a few of my clients bring this up in the chemistry session right off the bat, “I don’t have a goal”. And that is totally fine with me (In fact I quite love that). Or they bring what they think is their goal, because they feel they have to have one, you know it’ll get ditched before the end of the first session.
Coaching with me isn’t about shoehorning you - your hopes, dreams, ambitions and purpose into a set of SMART objectives – that makes me feel really icky too. If you don’t want to talk about goals, then we won’t, simple.
“No Goals? What kind of coach are you?” I hear you cry. Before you dismiss me as some kind of charlatan or rejoice in your validation of throwing away goals altogether forever, you might like to consider that goals exist on a very broad continuum:
🔎 From highly specific to highly abstract goals: So, ‘100 squats daily’ through to ‘To get closer to my ideal body’.
🔎 The running away from to running to: So, ‘From Avoiding heart attack’ or moving to ‘staying fit and strong’.
🔎 Performance to learning goals: So, from ‘I must sell 10 doofers every day’ versus ‘mastering the sales process’.
🔎 From proximal right through to distal: ‘I need to write 700 words today’ through to ‘I’ll finish my book this year’.
🔎 From controlled to autonomous: So ‘Must deliver £2k per day of Bob’s widgets’ to ‘We need to hit the annual target across all products this year”.
Traditionally and simply SMART goals are set in a framework of: identify what you want, make a plan on how, take actions, maintain/review – they are quite brilliant in their simplicity and work really well in their natural habitat of a skills and performance setting.
But, the funny shaped abstract, distal purposeful learning goal in your heart’s desire and mind’s eye that might be a combo of running from and toward is either often not considered to be remotely valid as a goal as it’s too abstract (I mean how do I even articulate it) or it’s squished and stuffed into a SMART framework often overridden by shouldistic judgements and expectations – laced with all the things you think other people think you should or shouldn’t do. Let’s face it, it’s hard enough to say what you want (what you REALLY want) out loud to yourself, never mind edit it into a SMART goal, right?
Yet you might give it a bash, dilute it, rip it’s soul right out and then feel deflated and maybe even let it go as ‘daft’.
Yet we have to remember some folks love SMART goals, they thrive on them, and they attribute them to a large are a part of their success. Horses of courses n all that; I work with goal lovers and haters.
The vital part is YOUR why in any goal of any shape of size. In a workplace setting this can easily be overridden by the organization’s why and so you as a person with your own values and principles can feel a wee bit railroaded. This can lead to a deep sense of incongruence; an internal conflict – why am I doing this? or I don’t really believe in my organisation goals, this yet I’m doing it anyway and having to wax lyrical to my team about it. Or perhaps I have so much more to give than my annual objectives, but there’s no space for me to ‘be’. Incongruence can compound over time, and this can make you feel like shit – not goals as a concept per se, but you can see the connection. Your why is out in the light above ground and your stuck in the goal mine.
So, for him, we worked out he was in a period of personal questioning and expansion, something way beyond any tangible goal he was able to articulate right now, and he had a growing sense of conflict with his own values and those driving the organisation he worked in. Once we established that, we were able to explore this growing sense of incongruence and how, or if, he can find the sense of alignment he knows he needs to the goals of the organisation he worked for, to continue to feel engaged and engaging – the leader and person he wants to be. Huge questions in there, massive! So, exploration was his goal in our coaching sessions – an abstract, distal, autonomous broad learning intention in anyone’s book! Still a goal in the sense of being what we focus on, but a deeply personal learning intention. The big difference is, I encouraged him to get to know intimately, it yet hold it with the lightest of touch, like a delicate fascinating orb that changes shape and texture, our intention is to add gently to its structure, to eventually be able to touch it and hold it – but not ram it into a framework. And if he never articulates it to another living soul, that’s fine too. (But, you know he did, right).
You’re a smart, capable human. You’re coming to work with me as your coach as you want to work on, explore or change something. You bring so many fast-moving parts in your life, many of them you can’t control or even influence; so much of it is unpredictable and unrealistic. Therefore, a set of SMART performance goals just won’t cut it and spending time goal mining is fruitless, frustrating, suffocating and boring.
Coaching at this point in your life is learning and exploring, not goal mining. In a coaching session, we delve into complex problems in your world; things are either changing incredibly slowly or changing at a rapid pace, so learning aspirations and broad intentions are so much more appropriate. These types of aims and intentions are unstable, a bit hazy, flexible, confusing at times, adaptable, and temporary. Do not confuse them as flighty, they are not at all flighty even though they may seem so when your conditioned to look through the SMART lens; they are very real!
Your aspirations and intentions are continually moving yet still defined -they are defined by your Ideal-Self, not your Ought-Self—a reflection of your choices, values, personal identity, intrinsic motivation, and passion for what truly resonates with you. Moving into a deeper understanding of goals can make them and the whole coaching experience so much more satisfying and way more productive. Coaching is not just a talking shop, contemplating your navel, gazing out of the window – you will take action, but in the way that’s right for you because you believe in it and fundamentally want to.
💡The choices we make for ourselves are the ones we act on💡. The End.
The stuff you don’t believe in, pay lip service to or go along with never really sits right and continually doing it has a compound effect of wearing away your oomph. Together, we challenge your Ought-Self - that shouldistic wee monkey that hijacks your aspirations, dreams, and wholehearted intentions or stuffs them into a SMART framework and then takes a pee on your bonfire!
Goals are not black and white folks; it’s just not that simple. I welcome you to escape the darkness of the goal mine and step into the technicolor space of coaching with me - allow yourself to ditch the traditional goal lens for a bit – I promise you the view is amazing! He did; it involved some unlearning, and it felt a bit hazing emerging adjusting his eyes from the darkness of the goal mine, but it opened a whole new space to learn and explore and do. Yes, take action, the stuff he actually cared passionately about and stop feeling all weird and shit about it.
Who you are, as you are and want to be, your whole environment and natural feelings about development and learning matter to me. It’s multifaceted. You are multi-facetted. I’m no goal digger and my coaching room is not a goal mine.
Full disclosure. I’m a recovered goal digger and I welcome all you goal diggers and escapees of the goal mine. I’ve spent eleventy nine thousand hours in my old corporate career squashing my team’s and my own creativity into an ill-fitting goal framework rigidly attached to shouldistic perceptions of what ‘works’ and the old ‘What gets measured gets done’ trope.
I’ve gone rogue, escaped the goal mine.
FREE THE LEARNING!
💡The choices we make for ourselves are the ones we act on💡
If you fancy a break from goal digging and you like the cut of my jib, you know where I am.
Gill
I coach humans (mainly) women, but also guys like him, to step into, be brilliant in or step away from C&D-Suite positions in commercial and highly competitive environments. If you like the cut of my jib and fancy checking me out you know where I am.