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Master Your Game
This Issue: Reaching Greater Success
Dear Reader,
Summary
I hope you had as great a summer as I did. I have been busy finalizing five years of research for this next series of articles. But no need to feel sorry for
me, this research was done during leisurely strolls on the golf course.
The next four articles are focused on reaching greater success in our lives. I would like to share a personal experience and use my golf game as an
analogy for the principles. We will explore:
Establishing your target - what do you really want to achieve?
Your technical game - what do you need to do to get to the target?
Your mental game - how important is who you are on the results you generate?
A consistent swing - what habits will assist
you to achieve success?
Establishing Your Target
If you are going to spend your time playing the game
of life, wouldn't be nice to know the objective of the
game?
To set a target, you need to search deep into
yourself and discover three things:
what you want
your vision for the future, and
specific goals that you set for yourself
Clarity around these will help you set appropriate targets.
What You Want
Imagine life as a grocery store with many aisles and
thousands of products to purchase. If you have
limited money, what is it that you would most like to
buy? Do you make your purchases haphazardly or do
you carefully think about how you will spend your
money?
My experience from presenting Reaching Greater Success
is that most people
have become so busy with life that they have not
stopped to think about what they really want. They
dash into that grocery store, taking the first thing off
the shelf that meets their immediate needs. A better
approach is to think about what you really want,
what is important, and to set a target.
Vision
Part of setting targets is visualizing an end result.
What will success look like? How will it feel and what
will you be saying when you are there? A vision is
your dream for the way things will be at some
specific time in the future, say 20 years from now. It
contains what things you want to have, what you
will be doing and who you would like to become.
Creating a vision is a powerful tool to achieving your
wants. A vision helps stimulate your subconscious to
recognize opportunities that will assist you to hit
your targets. Being consciously aware of your vision
will, in turn, assist you to make decisions.
Goals
Set short term and long term goals only after you
have a clear vision. Goals are the specific,
measurable, relevant and attainable things that you
would like to achieve within a specific period.
Goals allow us to stretch ourselves and take actions
that support us to move towards the targets.
Without a goal, there is nothing concrete to aim for.
No flag to guide us, no course to follow.
My Journey
When I changed careers, I made it a full time job to
decide what I wanted and in what direction I would
aim. In trying to understand me, I came across this
piece of information: women with golf handicaps of
12 or less, earn incomes of six figures or more. That
interested me and it must have been at the back of
my mind as I was discovering my values, my wants.
My other core personal values: I love sports and
competition, I want to be adept at what I do, and
want to continue learning. From this discovery, I set
this personal target: to be an excellent
golfer.
With my finance background, I could have chosen
many routes for my career. However, in creating my
vision I found that my real passion was in helping
enterprising business leaders build businesses that
are not only profitable but a great place to work.
This was a driving force for me when I chose
coaching as a career path. My vision took shape:
to
develop a program where people can learn both the
skills of golf and leadership at the same time.
To reach my target of becoming an excellent golfer,
my goal is to reach a handicap of 12 (average score
of 88) by October 31, 2006. When I set that goal in
2000, my handicap was 26 and my average score for
a round was about 110. Reaching my goal certainly
seems like a stretch, but to this day I continue to
try. More about my golf game later.
In the meantime, think about what you want and
your target. Whether setting a personal or a career
target, the process is the same: outline your wants,
envision the results, set measurable goals.
The next issue will give you some strategies for
achieving your goals so that you can consistently
move towards your target.
Yours in taking aim,
Jacque Small
Life is like a combination lock; your job is to
find the right numbers,
in the right order, so you can
have anything you want.
- Brian Tracy
Catalyst Business Coaching is a corporate development organization. It works with people
who want to achieve a greater sense of success for both themselves and others in the organization.
It supports people to develop strong interpersonal communication skills and build foundations to
develop dynamic teams. Jacque Small, principal and owner of Catalyst, founded the company in 2000..
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