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As mentioned in the introduction, I am an insatiable reader of self-help, and I have managed to define an entire career on the sentence, "I just read this incredible book. Let me tell you all about it...!"Interpersonal skills, motivation, self-improvement, setting and meeting goals---all of these are subject matter I just can't get enough of. However, I recently started to see a repetition in my reading. The "new" books were all saying essentially the same thing. Yet I wasn't feeling that same "high" that I usually felt after hitting on some new knowledge that would improve my life. I was already doing what the books recommended, yet I wasn't seeing the usual results. I wasn't losing my Christmas weight. I wasn't increasing my productivity from last year. I couldn't seem to make it down to the Humane Society for my usual volunteer time. I was, well, stuck.
One of my favorite standards in self-help/business skills development is the classic, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Now, I have read this book more than once and have taught it as a workshop maybe forty times as of this writing (it's a three-day workshop, by the way, so that's 120 sessions). It's safe to say I know this program inside and out.
But it wasn't until I read a book called The Power of Focus that something really important clicked for me. Even though I was teaching a class called "the Seven Habits," I never really "got" that this program was talking about setting habits. It wasn't called "The Seven Philosophies" or "The Seven Theories" but still, I wasn't clear that the message was to set (or break) habits. In reading just the first chapter of The Power of Focus, I finally had that "a-ha" moment I had been seeking for so many months.
Instead of setting goals, set habits. What I mean specifically is look at your repeated actions and decide if these are getting you the results you want. When we set goals, we tend to start from a place of lack or judgment--i.e., "I need to get more organized." Well, in setting that goal, I would attempt new behaviors like setting up filing systems or trying to de-clutter my office, but this was leading to mixed results.
The problem was not so much the activity as the mindset. I saw the goal as a thing to be achieved like an item on a "to-do" list. I wanted to check off the "errand" and get back to the fun stuff. Consequently, I saw the goal as a burden, a chore, and my enthusiasm was revealed in this thinking. I either did what I "had" to do and then took a day or two off from this effort (and lost any progress) or I avoided it altogether. Only after switching my thoughts about the goals, to those in which I was creating a new habit, did I have that much-needed shift. This shift allowed for increased enthusiasm, an ease in completing a day's activities, and, finally, results.
See more articles on workplace success at my website: http://www.work-stress-solutions.com. You can purchase "101 Ways to Love Your Job" for $9.95 at Amazon.
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