“I want to become a better speaker.” Okay, “What does that look like to you?”
This is how all of my goal conversations with clients start. People want to improve, and they even know where they want to focus; what they usually lack is a clearly articulated vision of success.
👉 My favorite way to approach these conversations is to ask them, “Let’s say that overnight your fairy godmother came and made you a perfect speaker. How would everyone you work with know that happened without you telling them?”
That always gets the ball rolling. It requires people to visualize themselves in the improved state. They have to think about which behaviors people would need to observe to know improvement occurred.
They’ll usually come up with things like, “Well, I would talk more in meetings.”
I’ll say, “Great, how many times would you need to talk in a meeting for people to notice you’re talking more?”
They come up with a number and bang, one of their first goals towards being a “better speaker” is now observable and measurable.
From there, we run through all the other ways people can tell they made a change and figure out how to measure them.
💡Then they pick which piece they want to focus on first, and off they go into the world, ready to make objective progress.
References: Yapko MD. Brief therapy tactics in longer-term psychotherapies. In: Brief Therapy: Myths, Methods, and Metaphors. Routledge; 1990:185-195.
Post Title: A vague goal is a convenient way to avoid being held accountable for progress.