How to achieve your goals

Like a lot of us I guess, I’m not long back from my summer break.  This year I was at a place I’d been before a couple of times, so knew what to expect.   It’s the type of place where you can be active in all sorts of ways from when you get up to when you go to bed, or alternatively just sit and do nothing.  My kinda place.

Each time we’ve been there they’ve had a guest presenter, and this time they had Donna Fraser, 4x Olympian.  I went to one of her classes for a bit of craic (as you do) and ended up getting to know her a bit. 

The topic was goal setting.  With Donna’s clear credibility in terms of achieving her goals, I would surely learn something, and it had the added benefit that I wouldn’t have to run too much. 

She gave us all some paper and a pen and asked us to write down on one side of the page our long-term goals, or what we wanted to achieve in the next year or two.  Familiar territory here. 

However after a bit of time, we were asked to write on the other side of the page what we had achieved yesterday.  To be fair, a few of us had to think about that for a while (given that we were on holidays), however we all came up with some sort of list.

Then came the killer question.  How many of the things we did or achieved yesterday would help us achieve our long-term goals?  

For me it was not too many, and the penny dropped at that point.  Pretty much everything you do should help you achieve your long-term goals, or else you won't even get close

In an organisational context I’ve known this for years.  However, this was the first time I had really considered it from a personal viewpoint, and it really hit home. 

On reflection maybe it was the fact that the long-term goals I had chosen mattered to me.  I cared, and really wanted to achieve them.  Organisations would do well to find a way of getting their workforce to care about their long-term goals, to really want to achieve them, so that pretty much everything they did worked towards the achievement of those goals.

Thanks to Donna for her inspiration on this.

Trevor Patterson is the owner of Pattersons Consulting who help organisations across UK & Ireland achieve their Health and Safety, Environmental, Sustainability and Quality goals.

Donna Fraser has become a leader in equality diversity and inclusion with over 10 years of corporate experience within business, sport, leadership, well-being and PMA for both start-ups and established companies.