The Emotional Side of Goal Mapping

Grant Leboff: One of the things that I’m really interested in, in your Goal Mapping book is about the importance of emotion. You talk about ‘following your heart’ and it’s quite interesting, because as business people, it’s always about business logic and identifying and being very strategic and everything else, and sometimes the emotional stuff gets lost, and it’s really important. So can you widen that out a bit for us a little bit?

Brian Mayne: You’ve got to find the thing that makes your heart sing, and some people find that in their work. Those people go the extra mile and they give a bit more not because there’s a bonus or they’ve been asked to, but because they love what they’re doing.

And then sometimes I meet people who don’t actually love their work that match, but they have learned to appreciate it because they understand that it’s a vehicle that is enabling them to move towards their great passion in life. And it’s the big difference really, in an employed situation your boss is going to give you the goal. They’re going to say here’s the target, But nobody gives you the reason for achieving that target, and that reason always needs to be an emotional reason. That’s the driver. That’s what helps you get up and go out there and push and push and really make it happen. I see it with all the top sales people with whom I work. I see it with all the top managers. They may not always love their job, but they’re very clear about their passionate, emotional reasons for excelling within it and it helps them to be on top of their game.

Grant Leboff: And how to someone start to try and identify that? So if someone is sitting there in a job and thinking how do I get in touch with that in some way? Is there a way of doing it?

Brian Mayne: Yes. Question yourself. And its simple questions. What would you go the extra mile for? What would you make a stand for? What makes your heart sing? What are you passionate about?

When I went through this 20 years ago, the question that did it for me was; What would I be prepared to risk for? I was a risk averse. I had a fear of failure. And so to get in touch with what it was that I felt so passionate about – that I would be prepared to risk failure for – really helped me to get clear on; Yeah, this is my area of passion. This is my purpose in life. This is the path which I choose to follow.

And there’s the distinction between a purpose and a goal. Purpose is like a path, it’s an ongoing journey, it has no defined end date. It will end some day but who knows when. A goal is very specific. It’s smart, it’s measurable, it has a defined achievement point.

And so purpose is like a path, and goals are like milestones along the path. Motivation is your reason to walk the journey, and it’s always going to be an emotional reason.

Grant Leboff: So if you’re the boss who is setting goals for other people, how important is it to contain that – it might be a tangible goal about a target or whatever – in some sort of emotional wrapping? Is it possible to do that or do people have to do that themselves?

Brian Mayne: I think you can help people do it, and that’s a big part of why my clients pay me quite well to go in and run workshops, because the goals are announced to the team at the start of the year, as they always are, and a lot of the team are sat there paying lip service going; “yehhhhhh… mmm… (shaking his head) but not really”.

If you help those same people find a passionate reason, and you connect it up and show them; ‘Achieve this in work and it’s going to do this in other areas of your life’, that connection helps them then to have a feeling towards the achievement of the target that makes the difference. It helps them to go that extra distance when they are tired, to push a little bit more, and to bring in the results.

There may be small changes to the spoken word in this transcript in order to facilitate the readability of the written English