Last week we addressed aligning goals with your heart and mind to help clarify your goals for 2010. You can read last week’s post here. Here are some techniques to enhance your success.

Overcoming obstacles

Achieving goals may require changing some behaviors. Competing intentions are the greatest obstacle to change. As explained by Carl Jung, competing intentions occur naturally when we desire two outcomes that appear as polar opposites. The ones we are more unconscious of often undermine our efforts to achieve the others until we recognize and address our needs and fears around them.

In The Real Reason People Won’t Change, Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey suggest the following mind-map steps to deconstruct competing intentions:

1. Define your commitment or goal: I’m committed to the value or importance of….
2. Identify what you’re doing or not doing that prevents your commitment from being fully realized.
3. Define your competing commitment: I may also be committed to….
4. Identify your big assumption: I assume that if…

For example,

• My clients are often committed to supporting staff members in exercising more individual initiative.
• However, they don’t delegate as much as they could, or refuse to get involved or take over if asked. As well, they’re often drawn into things they should refer to those delegated to.
• Thus, two commitments are in conflict: avoiding making their staff feel abandoned or unhappy, vs. desiring perfection. They end up taking over, which disempowers and de-motivates their staff.
• The big assumption is that work quality would suffer with delegation and without micromanagement, and thus they’d be seen as failures.

Another common example was raised by a recent RUI coaching client:

• You’re committed to securing sufficient resources and personnel support to thrive in your job.
• You don’t set boundaries (by saying no to additional work) because…
• You also are committed to avoiding conflict at all costs.
• Your big assumption is that you’ll become uncontrollably angry or incur the anger of others.
• Success requires overriding our irrational big assumptions. Sometimes small steps, which I like to call “safe recoverable experiments,” are the best solution.

Anchoring your goals

Anchoring goals prevents them from drifting out of consciousness. Proven techniques exist for enrolling your brain to make goals more than just words on a page. Chemicals that our brains produce are released by imagination as well as concrete realities. (For more on this, see What Happens In The Brain During Visualization.)

You can create your own internal streaming media:

1. Write down a vision of what you will experience when you achieve your goals. This is best done in the present tense, as if it is happening. Be specific and believable.
2. Visualize your success sequentially, with each of your five senses: sound, smell, hearing, sight, and feeling or touch.
3. Choose something at which you excel, and approach a challenge task as that expert. If you’re a great tennis player, approach an organizational goal with a tennis pro’s mindset. Trust what you know in the present moment and don’t let your critical mind undermine your efforts. My colleague Tim Gallwey, author of Inner Game of Tennis, Inner Game of Golf, and Inner Game of Work, demonstrated this to me while giving one of my clients a golf lesson.

Are these too woo-woo? What do you have to lose? These are merely suggestions. If not now, there’s always 2011.
What do you think?

Steve Bornstein is an executive coach, strategic planning consultant, and former entertainment and media industry executive, with executive experience including CEO of Sunrise Films; Senior Vice President of Programming and Feature Film Acquisitions at Lorimar Home Video; and Chief Operating Officer of Lion’s Gate Films.