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Although I'm not necessarily a Pittsburgh Steelers football fan, as a goal accomplishment coach, I was loudly rooting for the team to win the Super Bowl for one reason: to help prove the importance of setting goals and using list-making as a tool to get there.
Mike Tomlin, the 36-year-old head coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers and the youngest coach in Super Bowl history, is an inveterate list-maker and goal-setter, and always has been. In fact, he still has notes about goals he set decades earlier for his personal life and sports career, all meticulously tracked and organized in binders. "I'm a big dreamer," Tomlin said about his penchant for creating lists of goals he intends to accomplish. Sometimes Tomlin can't believe how far he's come himself, and will flip through old stacks of Franklin Covey planners to remind himself of how his audacious dreams, backed up by small goals, led him to where he is today.
In my newest book, "Creating Your Best Life: The Ultimate Life List Guide" (Sterling 2009), I write about the fact that most successful people have life lists and are goal-setters. Edwin Locke, the co founder of goal setting theory, wrote in the book, "The Prime Movers," that the most successful wealth creators are characterized by a few traits, including "vision" and "action." He goes on to add that these prime movers have two types of goals they set: "difficult" and "impossible."
I encourage all of my clients to have short-term and long-term goals that they track in lists. These lists can be on goal-setting internet sites, spiral notebooks, scrapbooks, or daily paper organizers. It doesn't really matter what form these lists take; the only thing that matters is that we have goals at all. In one of the only studies of its kind, 3,500 people from around the world were followed to determine what brought them joy. The happiest people, the study found, were guided by the daily pursuit of "clear-cut" goals.
From my vantage point, I find that most people don't know how to set the "right" goals and they need coaching to understand the intricacies of how to break these goals down into meaningful chunks so that they have steady feedback along the way to accomplishment. If you haven't yet created a set of your own goals, this is a terrific opportunity to start. New Year's resolutions have passed, but use the impetus of spring cleaning to clear the clutter from your life and start afresh. Where do you want to be in one year? Five years? Ten years? What do you need to do to change direction now? You may not win a Super Bowl by doing this today, but by having goals for yourself, you'll certainly get back into the game of life.
