by Wayne Knight, HMI Interim Executive Director
It’s that time of the year when many of us have been thinking about new year’s resolutions or achievable goals that we hope to accomplish in the next twelve months and beyond.
I challenge you to update your Holistic Goal and management inventory focusing on these FOUR specific areas.
Management Inventory: Has there been a change in the management team? Who is a decision maker and who should be incorporated into the holistic goal discussions? Then, define the assets you have at your disposal, not only physical assets, like cash and land but education and contacts, experience, and potential.
Holistic Goal (Quality of Life): Review and clarify the values you want to live by, those things that fundamentally make up what you, your family and your business must live to be and feel fulfilled.
Holistic Goal (Behaviors & Systems): Review and clarify the behaviors and systems you need to have in place to create the quality of life you have articulated. What has been a challenge for you last year? What behaviors and systems are missing or could stand to use some attention?
Holistic Goal (Future Vision): Describe how your work, land, business, community and social environment must be well into the future to sustain you and your family. Again, what have you learned from the last year that you might want to use to clarify this section?
From personal experience, the Holistic Goal needs revising. As your situation changes, as kids arrive and leave, as family members’ aspirations grow or change, the goal is the beacon, but the beacon is not fixed. As life changes, so do our aspirations and goals.
For example, when I joined my parents, my fiance and I were ambitious and broke. My parents were still happy with expansion and growth. My soon-to-be wife & I had goals and wanted to build wealth. We didn’t value time for leisure and comforts. Everything was geared to accumulation. My parents knew what they wanted, and these were incorporated into the business’s reason for existing. But not too many years later, we had changed, but our goal had not. We had kids, we needed to slow down. We needed to make time for family and each other. All the voids had been filled out. The goal and the activities matched, but they did not match who we had become. It was the same for my parents. They were eyeing retirement. Slowing down and not taking risks was far more important to them. We had changed, but our goals, as written, had not.
Abraham Maslow said “A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualization." It refers to man’s desire for self-fulfilment, namely, to the tendency for him to become actually what he is potentially: to become everything that one is capable of becoming.”
We seek actualization in our lives, and this year I challenge you to take an especially close look at the “quality of life” portion of your holistic goal. Use those statements to create some SMART goals that you can test toward your Holistic Goal. Remember, we are more likely to achieve those objectives that are SMART:
S – specific M – measurable A – achievable R – realistic T – time-bound
For some inspiration, you may wish to look up Carol Dweck. She’s the author of the book Mindset, The New Psychology of Success.Her TED Talk, “The Power of Believing You Can Improve”, which has been viewed more than 14 million times is worth every second of the 10-minute viewing. I have found the concepts she speaks of very comforting and inspirational both professionally and over the years as a parent to our three children. If you like it, please let me know.
Would you like to learn more about creating and decision-making towards your Holistic Goal? Sign up for one of our Holistic Management® Foundation courses here.