The intellectual process to Goal setting

No matter where we think or feel we are with our goals, let us be encouraged and say, this is the year… Allow me to share an awareness that I am learning and working to implement. I hope it helps you too.

Goal setting and goal achieving are two different processes and like every process it requires a series of actions to take place to obtain a result. 

So why does this matter? There are times going through this I do not come close and tend to fall back to my old habits, the awareness of this goal setting process allows me to adjust when I choose.  If you have ever set a goal and failed to achieve the goal, it is less about our talent or being good enough or being fully resourced or whatever excuse, we can come up with that lead us to failure of achieving the said goal. I am learning that the failure came, not from the process of achieving the goal, rather from the process of setting the goal. 

As mentioned, goal setting and goal achievement are two different processes. Goal setting is an intellectual process and goal achievement is a lawful process. What does that mean? Let us focus on the intellectual process.

I have read that there are six intellectual faculties that every human possesses. 

These faculties are what set mankind apart from animals. In his 20 years plus study of the wealthiest people of the time, Napoleon Hill author of “Think and grow rich” found that, what set these people apart was their ability to develop and utilize the intellectual faculties. 

When it comes to goal setting, there are four of the six faculties that come into play. However, of the four there are two that we want to be using when setting goals. 

It was brought to my awareness, like most people when setting goals, we tend to use the intellectual faculty of reasoning and memory. 

However, I have discovered these may not be the best intellectual faculties for this process. Let’s take a moment to explain why reasoning and memory are not the ideal intellectual faculties to use when setting goals. Note, this is not to say one cannot use reasoning and memory as part of the goal setting process.

Our reasoning is based on our best or current logic and our logic is based on our current beliefs. The challenge here is that you and I will never outperform our own self-belief (self-image). 

So, if we cannot outperform our self-belief yet we are using our self-belief to drive our logic and logic to drive our reasoning, what are the chances that we will set goals that stretch us beyond what we have already produced? Take a moment and think about that. 

When setting goals using the intellectual faculty of memory, most of us when we think of memory, we are talking about “recall”. Does that ring a bell? Recall is when we remember ideas, concepts, thoughts, experiences, and we recall from our conscious mind remembering them as a picture in our mind. 

For most of us it is very likely that we are looking to our past. 

Think about this, if goal setting is meant to move you into a future state what good is it if we are operating from the past most of the time?

I believe in you, in virtue and wisdom lead the world.

The author, Jerome Emanzi is a transformational leadership coach with the Maxwell Certified Leadership Team.