Do your goals have the appropriate constraints attached to them?

Transcript

Hi there, it’s Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage, and here’s the idea that I’d like to share with you today, and that’s this:

In the world of business, particularly in the world of thought leadership, keynote speakers, experts, advisors, etc., there’s a lot of energy focused on setting goals and achieving goals. And I’m not anti-goal. Goals are important.

But you know a piece that’s missing often, or at least in my experience that I found, is if you’re setting a goal and you’re not willing to have a parallel constraint attached to that goal, the probability of that goal becoming a reality—the probability of you achieving that goal—goes down dramatically.

So, for example, if one of your goals is to, uh, I don’t know, write a book this year, a constraint would be time. Okay, well, I have to carve out X amount of time every Thursday afternoon or Saturday morning—whatever the case may be—in order to achieve that.

If my goal is to move my business from a practice to a real business that has more derivative products, more licensing, more things that don’t require me, then a constraint would be: What am I willing to give up in order to achieve that? I might have to say no to opportunities that present themselves today in order to stay focused on the goal.

So my suggestion, my thoughts for you today, are: Think about the goals that you’ve put out there, whether they’re sort of soft and squishy or really hard and rigid goals. And what are the constraints that are necessary that you might not have yet connected to those goals so that the probability of you achieving them goes up and up and up and up?

Love to hear your thoughts.