Goals that attain mastery

Even harder to get out of bed at 5.30 this morning to run, but nevertheless I managed 1.4 miles and explored a new route on my Brough adventure.

I read something new about goals today in Daniel Pink's "Drive". I've never been entirely comfortable with the concept of goals that are imposed by others.

Here's a couple of things that I read:

"Goals that people set for themselves and that are devoted to attaining mastery are usually healthy. But goals imposed by others - sales targets, quarterly returns, standardised test scores, and so on - can sometimes have dangerous side effects."

"Goals may cause systematic problems for organisations due to narrowed focus, unethical behaviour, increased risk taking, decreased cooperation, and decreased intrinsic motivation. Use care when applying goals in your organisation."

Interesting ideas. Whilst increased risk taking is not always a bad thing as far as I'm concerned, unethical behaviour, decreased cooperation and decreased intrinsic motivation are always a bad thing, I would suggest.

Maybe that's why my mile each day seems to work.

And the mastery I am attaining is probably the mastery of my side that is tuned to possibility, over my side that is concerned with negative and self-critical internal dialogue.

Five to nine

Two-miler this rainy, rainy morning, which was fine except I forgot my gloves. Very cold hands.

I took my iPhone and earphones with me yesterday when walking a couple of dogs using the walk as an opportunity to thrash out some ideas using the voice recorder on my iPhone.

I wondered out loud why, when I had written down what I thought my goals were for the week on a whiteboard in my office, rather than feeling energised and empowered, I felt overwhelmed and confused with where to start?

Whilst talking, I remembered, from my NLP practitioner training a few years ago, the magic of the number seven.

A pyschologist carried out a survey on how humans deal with information, and he discovered that the maximum number of pieces of information a person can deal with or "process" is seven, plus or minus two, hence five to nine.

When I got back from my walk I looked at my whiteboard and, rather than a few clear goals on there, I counted sixteen items that were really things to do.

The first thing I did was wipe out anything that wasn't a goal I wanted to achieve, and I kept going until I had nine or less.

I got the list down to eight, which I thin prioritised into the top five, then the next two, and the final one.

Funnily enough, I now feel focused and energised, and I'm really looking forward to the rest of my day.