Goal setting

A few weeks back I was at interview. I can say that now as it's no secret any more. There was one question that completely stumped me .... and got me thinking, on all sorts of levels. The question was

Tell us about a personal goal that you have failed to achieve and how you dealt with that

Hmmmmm. Now I've been on the other side of the table doing competency based interviewing so I have an idea what they are looking for. They are not trying to get me to confess to something "bad".... they are trying to find out more about how I deal with things going wrong.

My brain starts mentally thumbing through the past to try and come up with an example that fit the question. And I'm struggling.... the examples that I can think of have really related to things outside of my control. Like my horse having arthritis.

Whoa....

Do I only remember success and I have blanked out all the bad stuff ? Is this selective memory ?

Or....

Does this mean that I don't set myself goals that I can't achieve ? I know I have a "talent" for pacing myself - I know my own limits and I work within and up to them. But have I got too good at that and don't actually challenge myself ?

Oooo.....

Does that mean I don't actually set myself goals at all ?? If they are always within my limits, always "do"able, are they really goals ?

Needless to say I only went through parts of this at the time, and some of it later when I was pondering my reaction. Though I suspect I did briefly have that "deer in the headlights" look as I tried to work out something....anything.... to say. Inventing things in an interview is never a good idea and not an option. But I was coming up empty. I explained the only example I could come up with (wanting to do things with my horse but being limited by her physical issues) but that I wasn't sure that was the kind of thing they were after. We moved on.  I got the job so it can't have been too much of a disaster.

Don't get me wrong, it is not that I have never experienced failure. I have. We all do. And I have learnt from it. In fact if they had asked me to talk about what I had learnt from failure, that would have been easier to answer. For example, my degree result was pretty useless. But I was lucky in that my future employer wasn't bothered about that and so the related "goal" still went ahead. I didn't fail to achieve the goal, but I did learn from the experience.

Do I remember the good stuff more than the bad ? I'm not sure (is that because I'm blanking out the bad stuff ? I could paint myself into a corner with this one !). But that isn't the question they asked. Would I have had equal difficulty answering a "tell us about a goal you succeeded at and how" ? I suspect so. I think I tend to assume failures are *mine* whereas successes are about the whole team.

They did ask me what I would see as my greatest achievement.... and the next question was whether my boss would agree with my answer. There is a saying that

Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; show him how to catch fish, and you feed him for a lifetime

My answer was that my achievement was building the team,. as it wasn't just about the projects *I* had delivered, but about the ongoing value the whole team were adding. And no, I didn't think my boss would have the same  answer (after all, they had just restructured my team out of existence !).

Do I set myself goals ? Yes, though not all the time. I don't think we tend to think of everything in our life in terms of goals and objectives. Sometimes we are just doing stuff ;) And when I deliberately set myself a goal, yes it probably is carefully thought through, planned, considered in a way that makes it a stretch but achievable.

If  reality intervenes, then I have options - in the way we do with managing risk. Say something changes to make the goal unrealistic. When my horse was simply lame, I managed that lameness but I confess I had not really given up on ever riding her again. Maybe this was just denial. (as part of the change/transformation cycle) But it did mean I had to consider a longer timescale for what I had hoped to do.

And then last year she lost the sight in one eye. And that meant having to accept that I really wasn't going to achieve certain goals with her. It didn't necessarily mean I was never going to achieve those goals - but certainly not in the near future and with my current horse.

So what I did was redirect. In this case I was lucky that my mother has a little pony, not suitable for my original goals but in need of a jockey to "do fun stuff" with. In an ideal world would I be riding a small native pony ? No. But can we have fun together - yes. (And am I learning from it..... absolutely !)

I don't think I would have considered my original goal as being "have fun". It was more about the what and how I wanted to have fun. But when the chips are down, you often have the chance to realise what is at the core of your aims. Maybe it's a bit like Maslow's hierarchy of needs. In this case the original goal (with my horse) was further up the needs pyramid. But with her issues, I wasn't then fulfilling needs at a lower level. She simply needs to be a horse - and by effectively retiring her, I can let her get on with doing that. And in the meantime, there is a win-win by working with another pony.

And maybe one day I will get back to those unmet equestrian goals ;)

Are there other areas of my life in which I am not setting goals (and should be) ? Well there are certainly areas where the report card might read "could do better". I guess I need to think some more about whether that is something within my circle of control (something I have the power to control myself)... and if so maybe set some appropriate goals and actions.

I've been reading a book called "Grow Your Own Carrots". It has a structure for goal setting. What I like about it is that rather than setting the big, long term goals, they encourage you to set shorter term goals that you can achieve in, say, 8 weeks. I need to finish it soon as it belongs to my current employer - so that gives me a nice short term goal... to finish the book this week ;)