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The long road to success

Porus P. Munshi

``Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?'' asked Alice.

``That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,'' said the cat.

``I don't much care where,'' replied Alice.

``Then it doesn't matter which way you go,'' said the cat. -- From Alice in Wonderland.

As the cat pointed out to Alice, you obviously can't get to where you want to go unless you know where you want to go. Goals, in other words, are absolutely necessary for progress.

Anthony Robbins, best-selling author of books such as Awaken the Giant Within and Unlimited Power, calls goal awareness his `ultimate success formula' involving four basic steps:

*Know the outcome you want;

*Take action to bring about the outcome;

*Keep checking to see if the action is taking you closer to your goal;

*Be flexible enough to change your action if it's not taking you closer to your goal.

A note on flexibility: I often see `Don't quit' posters on the walls of offices I visit. And it seems to me that there's often confusion about quitting and not quitting. To set the record straight, you don't quit from the outcome you want. But you often do need the flexibility to change your path if it's not getting you closer to your goal.

The American inventor, Buckminster Fuller, likens it to steering a ship. When you set the ship along a course, you have to keep making corrections as tides or winds move the ship. You can't just set a course and expect to reach your destination by follow ing it without any adjustments. So also with goals. Don't quit from the goal you desire, but by all means keep correcting the course.

Most goal-setting deals with a main goal and then involves breaking it down into sub-goals and then achieving each sub-goal within a time-frame. If this works for you, fine. Some people, however, face a problem in the achieving of these sub-goals. If you 're one of these, try something that Peter Terry suggests in his book `The Winning Mind': Draw a road map of where you want to go and identify the obstacles you face in reaching there. (See figure).

Draw the diagram in your diary or on your whiteboard, and fill in the boxes with what you feel are obstacles to your destination. Also write down what you should do to overcome these obstacles. Achieving a goal now becomes a simple matter of identifying the factors that keep you from it and removing them. Each barrier that you overcome gets you closer to your destination.

A number of people find this easier than setting sub-goals and achieving them, because most activities in life deal with the overcoming of obstacles. Something as simple as getting to the office on time in the morning deals with the overcoming of obstacl es -- factors such as traffic jams, blocked roads, flooded streets and morning alarms that refuse to go off.

Obstacles can be written down in chronological order, in order of magnitude, or at random -- any order, so long as the overcoming of each keeps you moving towards your goal.

So far, we're assuming that you're goal-driven -- in other words, you're motivated by a goal and like moving towards an objective. But what if you belong to the other category of people, those who are only motivated when they have to move away from somet hing?

Moving-toward people are generally considered to be self-starters. They have positive goals, tend to be active, open to new ideas and quick to try new things. They focus on progress and on moving forward, frequently using phrases like `let's get going', `let's move it', or `we're making progress'. Moving-away people are called kick-starters. They only move when they feel uncomfortable in a particular situation. They tend to focus on what they don't want rather than on what they do want. They tend to loo k for flaws or difficulties in situations and focus on what's not going well, tending to get bogged down with that.

It sounds from the above as if moving-away people are inferior to moving-toward people. But the truth is that both factors often interact within the same person and are equally effective at motivation. Both moving-toward and moving-away are active at dif ferent periods and in different areas of our lives. No one is a total moving-toward or moving-away person.

Most great successes start off as moving-away people, where they are motivated by moving away from aversive situations and then switch to becoming moving-toward people when they set goals and go about achieving them. Further, one often finds these same g reat successes turning full circle and again becoming moving-away people after having achieved certain goals or achieving certain standards of living. The focus shifts to not losing, to holding on, playing it safe, and on not-taking-risks. Also, I've see n a number of moving-toward people becoming moving-away after a string of failures.

If you are currently a moving-away person, it could be affecting your ability to achieve goals. To start moving forward, you have to associate massive pain to your present situation. Try the following:

On a piece of paper, make two columns. In the first column, write down where you are now and in the second one, write down where you want to be. In the first column, jot down all the problems that being in your present situation is causing -- low finance s, no promotions, marital difficulties, feelings of inferiority, shame, having to make do with less than your peers. In the next column, write down all that you'll get when you reach where you want to be -- money, admiration, respect, fame, good relation ships, confidence, the smell of success.

Put this list up somewhere so that you can see it every day. See what you have now, what you're suffering with, and also see what you're missing out on. Next, make a road map of your destination with the obstacles you need to overcome. And now, just go f or it.

(The author is a Chennai-based HR Consultant. He can be reached at porusmun@hotmail.com)