As I wrote about earlier this week, Clarity is of the key factors in continuous growth and development. As Robin Sharma said “Clarity proceeds success.” If you’re like me, you thought you understood what that meant until you really decided to be clear about a goal you wanted to achieve.

Being Clear about Goals

I thought I was pretty good at setting goals and being productive. That was until I had surgery and was recovering. It was at this time that, for one of the first times in my life that I realized my habits and routines were in real need of revision.

After surgery, I wasn’t able to do any physical activity for 8 weeks other than walk. During this time, I ended up adding over 20 pounds. Now, this wasn’t the first time I had added weight from inactivity but, as I tried to take it off, I struggled. In fact, instead of losing weight, I ended up adding weight because I didn’t really pay attention to what I was eating as I added a tiny bit of exercise to my day.

I spiralled downward, not sure what to do as for one of the first times I wasn’t able to make any progress. And I found different things to blame – my age, my mobility, my work, my family – all these became ways of explaining away my lack of success.

Clearly “losing weight” wasn’t a clear enough goal to help me make progress. Then two things happened: my daughter got engaged to be married and I tried on my suit. Needless to say, it wasn’t a successful attempt. I had worn the suit just two years earlier at my son’s graduation. It felt like a lifetime ago. But now I had something I didn’t have before – a time specific goal and a reason to achieve the goal.

I don’t know if I would have made the necessary changes and delved deeper into my goal if there was a clear reason for what I was doing. Now, I had motivation and reason to push me during the slides and surges.

Clarity and Continuous Growth

This is similar to how I see many people approach their own growth and development. They know they need to do something. They realize they have to grow in order to continue to meet the challenges that are being presented by the changes taking place with the growth of AI and it’s integration into all facets of life. But, like my struggle with losing weight, they don’t have a clear focus – they lack clarity about what they need to do.

So they try this and that, adding knowledge and skills but not really sure how it will help them. After a initial surge, they lapse into past practices still unsure what they need to do and feeling less than successful which adds to their stress and anxiety.

This is where having clarity is essential for success. To do this, I used these questions to clarify the path I needed to follow to find success.

1. What do you want to achieve? Here is where you need to drill down past the first response. Continue to ask yourself if your answer is the final answer. If not, keep asking yourself why.
2. Why is this important to you? Again, it is important to get down to the underlying reason you are wanting to reach this goal.
3. What supports will you need?
   • Are there people you need to include to achieve this goal?
   • Are there people you need to distance yourself from to achieve this goal?
   • Do you need to purchase anything? Can you afford the purchase? Are there alternatives?
   • Where will you turn for support – you can’t do this alone!
4. Have you identified any habits that may cause you to falter – (I recommend Chip and Dan Heath’s book Switch to help with this)
5. How will you need to change your day in order to make this change happen?
6. How does this fit with into your continuous growth plan? Into the future you have envisioned for yourself?
7. How will you reward yourself as you make progress (extremely important!)

For me, I had a goal to get control of my eating habits so that my long term health would improve. I wanted to be able to travel, take part in sports, doing gardening and just be able to enjoy daily activities without feeling tired and run down.

As an educational leader, I am very familiar with SMART goals – having used them many times for setting goals within the educational setting. Although this format – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time Sensitive give a place to start, I’ve found they don’t take into account the nuances of daily life when using them for individual goals.

I hadn’t really drilled down into what it would take to achieve my goal. It wasn’t until I had a motivation to do it that I sat back and took the time to drill down to the core of what I needed to do and was honest with what I was capable of doing, what I needed to do to be successful and accepted that it would be hard and there would be setbacks. Using the questions above, I continued to ask myself what I needed to do in order to be successful.

And, yes, I fit into that suit again! The wedding was amazing but that’s another story.