All businesses set goals – financial goals, productivity goals, expansion goals, and sales goals. Most people set individual goals – weight loss, income increases, new and/or better “things”. And, as we approach every New Year many of us also set New Year’s resolutions.

Here’s the problem with this…most people don’t have a clue what the purpose of a goal truly is. It’s not, as many think, to obtain anything. Yet most businesses and individuals continue to set goals under the misguided notion that doing so enables them to have more. And while having more may be desirable it is not the same thing as growing and becoming wildly more effective and productive. In actuality, most goal-setting activities keep businesses and individuals stuck in versions of an existing status quo that only incrementally improves and that are instrumental in preventing them from truly achieving anything of note.

The true purpose of a goal is to grow not to get!

When examined honestly most of the goals we set today – whether business or personal – are set within a context of already knowing how to accomplish them. They are set with a strong reference to past achievements or progress and, oftentimes, are set in response to others’ urging – shareholders’ expectation for returns on their investment or cultural criteria for attractiveness being great examples. Goals set in this manner ensure that, at best, we achieve only incremental improvement over what we had before. Indeed, using our past as a primary reference for goal setting creates a future that is tied to that past.

If you already know how you’re going to achieve your goal there is no growth involved. At best all you’re doing is exercising and further developing a known set of competencies. There are no new skills or knowledge being developed or capacities being expanded. The unknown is where learning and growth occur. The unknown is uncomfortable and it’s only outside of the comfort zone that growth is possible. Goals should make you feel uncomfortable and they will if they involve growth. Goals set in this manner should be a clean break from what was and, done well, the goal setter will have no clue about how to achieve this kind of goal. Significantly, this last point flies in the face of the SMART model many people use for goal-setting activities.

Setting achievable and realistic SMART goals is the way most people and organizations go about it and this SMART methodology keeps us stuck in ways that ensure life and work become mundane and rote – this is anything but smart.

When we look at the causes of employee disengagement in the workplace (upwards of 90% according to the latest Gallup surveys) lack of meaningful work ranks near the top. Human beings want to grow. We want to excel, we want to contribute in ways that allow us to feel unique and valued, and we want the ways we spend our life’s energy to be meaningful. We want to have our breath taken away! Ultimately, we all want to feel exhilarated at the prospect of living inside our own skins. Well-designed goals make this possible – goals that are designed to foster growth as opposed to goals that are designed with acquisition as the primary motivator. Growals are ultimately goals that design me as I enter into the process of striving to manifest them.

Grow-als

Goals designed for growth (what I call Growals) are formulated from different questions that are typically used to set goals designed for acquisition. Instead of questions like “what do I want?” or “what would be a reasonable objective?” being the starting point, we begin with questions such as “what would I love?”, “what problem needs to be solved that would best utilize who I am?”, “how do I need to be different in order to be fully alive?”, “how do I want the world to be in 1,000 years and how do I need to be in order to have that happen?”.

We don’t know how to achieve the answers to these questions because we’ve never traversed this territory and because there is often no single “right” answer. Knowing the answer to “how will I or how will we achieve our goal?” is a sure sign that the goal isn’t a Growal type of goal. We grow as we attempt to come to grips with the implications of the questions – parts of me that have been underutilized or have been invisible, begin to be relevant and, because we’re now traversing territory while at the same time acquiring new skills and knowledge we will become uncomfortable.

This discomfort is typically a good sign that we’re moving into areas we’ve never been before. You will fail in the process of learning to manifest your Growal, and keeping the Growal in focus ensures you’ll fail forward and will grow in the process. What a great way to live!