SMART versus HEART
To have a gold medal winning life, we need to have a gold medal winning mindset and I have a few tips to achieve this.
My first tip is to set a HEART goal, not just a SMART goal.
In this Covid era, that’s a really important thing because if we’re setting goals that we think we should, that are someone else’s goal, or we think look impressive to someone else, we haven’t really aligned our goal to our values.
We’re not going to be able to stick it out when the going gets tough, and we hit a barrier.
A lot of people setting goals have heard about the SMART goal technique. You’ve probably used it yourself.
That was invented back in 1981 by George Doran, Arthur Miller and James Cunningham. And that’s admitting my age, but that was the year I was born.
A lot has changed in the world since 1981, so I’ve come up with HEART goals as an add-on to SMART goals, to give us a bit more of what’s happened in the modern world to go with the SMART goals.
For me, the biggest change about that is we’re looking at how our emotions fit in – if it’s healthy to our lives, good for our mental and physical health, does it empower our relationships with other people and is it good for us as a whole?
One of the downsides I saw to many athletes that come into a sport at a young age, your whole world is funnelled towards achieving one thing.
And that’s a gold medal at the detriment to almost everything else around you.
That’s why I’ve come up with my own goal setting and personal development formula around having a gold medal life and not just the gold medal moment. Because what do you do once you’ve won that gold medal?
I think during Covid a lot of people realized they had been so obsessed with their career and discovered how amazing it was to be at home with their kids or their dog or to not be spending six hours a day in traffic.
While the year has clicked over and it’s been first of January already, we can’t just go back and rewind and not have those life changing experiences. But we can realize that wasn’t important to us.
So now we can’t set the same goals that we did last year.
And if we’ve gone ‘Let’s put my goals on hold for two years until Covid is over’, when we go back we’ll probably realize we don’t really want to do those goals because they no longer align with our core values.
You’d be spending the whole year in friction with yourself having this internal debate of ‘get the corner office, get a pay rise, impress the boss make money for someone else climb the corporate ladder’.
But really if you’re saying ‘I want to spend a lot more time with my kids’, this career goal and you are not going to get along very well.
So, before I actually write any goals, I do a lot of work on myself.
And it’s a lot of deep work that I take people through in a workshop, so I can’t share it all in this one article – not because I’m being selfish but because genuinely it takes days to go through and explore where this comes from.
But the essence is to look at your SMART goals and add on your HEART goals to create a more balanced list of goals that you’ll actually have a better chance of achieving this year.