Goal Mapping – Why is it so important to set goals?

Grant Leboff: Brian, a lot is spoken about setting goals and having goals. In your opinion why is it so important for people to set proper goals?

Brian Mayne: Because every body has a goal, whether they’re aware of it or not, is the bottom line. Whatever you think about most, becomes a goal for your subconscious to follow, and if you don’t set a conscious goal, your subconscious is going to follow your strongest thought. And for a lot of people, that strongest thought is not of what they want – it’s of what they fear – and it leads them into a bit of self sabotage. So learning how to set goals in a way that it impacts your self-conscious, I believe, is really the top skill for the age in which we live.

Grant Leboff: I agree with you 100%, everyone has a goal. When you start to take that into the business environment, for the moment, how does a business owner / business person, decide which are the right goals to be going for at any one time? Because sometimes they have a lot of goals, how do you identify that?

Brian Mayne: There are seven steps in the goal mapping process that I teach, and step one is; ‘Dream, and if you’re going to dream, dream big’. That first step dream is about using the right hand side of the brain – imagination – the creative side. But the second step, equally as important, is using your left hand side of the brain – logic, your strategy – to work out; ‘well what is the main goal?’

There’s one simple question that I ask people, which is; out of your list of goals, which one – once achieved – is most going to give you the leverage in helping you achieve some of the others? Quite often, that one isn’t the one that people are most passionate about, but it’s the one that makes the most logical sense. And then from there, we map it out.

Grant Leboff: In some ways it’s almost about, having a strategy for defining which are the goals you prioritise, and which ones come a little bit later down the line.

Brian Mayne: I often find the experience, even with my big corporate clients like Microsoft, they are often very adamant, going into the session, that they know what their goals are and they’ve thought it all through and spent a lot of time on it. We then get halfway through the session and they realise that there is actually a different goal that they hadn’t seen before we started, and things change.

So it’s this process of going through the seven steps that gets people to think with both their creative brain and their logical brain. It’s the interaction between the two that helps them to really achieve two things with the goal mapping, one is a great level of conscious clarity about what they want and what’s most important, and why, and when, and how. The other thing that’s achieved by mapping it out is the influence it has, the command on their subconscious mind, so that it moves them towards their goal on autopilot.

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