Inner MBA

“Setting Your Self Improvement Goal”

Lisa Lahey

LISA LAHEY: Welcome back. OK, I'm hoping you're coming to this session with a few
potential goals. Because in this video, I'm going to talk with you about how to choose and shape
up a version of your improvement goal so it's going to be the most powerful it can be, and in the
best shape for the Immunity to Change process.

You're going to find that the ITC process is most useful for goals that you really want to achieve
and are also like a stretch for you. I'm going to start with just giving you a few examples of
what's a high-quality goal, and then I'm going to step back and offer you a few principles and
criteria for selecting and shaping your goal.

So here's a few common, really good, good examples-- to get better at prioritizing, to get better
at saying no, even saying no to myself and to choose just a few things I want to focus on and take
them deeper, that whole cluster of getting better at prioritizing. Or more simply, there's another
one, which is to get better at having difficult conversations.

Another is to-- this is actually very common one-- to get better at being a good listener, to get
better at asking genuinely curious and open-ended questions aimed at understanding the other
person. Another example of a goal is to focus more on the people and relationships and not just
the tasks at work.

Another goal is to be more decisive. Another is to speak up more. And another is to be more
spontaneous. I could go on and on, but hopefully those give you a feel for what we're looking for
in a high-quality goal.

Notice what's common to all of those examples. And there's a few things I want to point out. One
is that none of them is going to be accomplished over a weekend by learning a couple of quick
skills and kind of adding those to the repertoire. These are all kind of goals that are going to take
some time to accomplish. So that's one.

The other is notice that they're all personal growth goals. They're not therapy goals. What's the
difference? To be more decisive, to be a better listener-- those are personal growth and not what
would be a therapy goal or something like to get over my depression or to come to terms with
my divorce or to work through a trauma.

Lahey Inner MBA

Those are two commonalities. The third thing is finally that they're all personal growth goals,
and they're not about intended results. So what's a result? What's the distinction between the
two? By result, I mean something like I could have a goal to lose 10 pounds or 10 kilos,
whatever your metric system is. I could have a goal to bring in more clients. I could have a goal
to feel more confident in myself.

Those are all results, and those are fine, but that's not going to make this process for a good self-
improvement goal because it doesn't actually speak to-- not yet-- what's the thing you'd have to
get better at in order to achieve that result. But it's fine if that's where your mind goes to begin
with, is to some result.

Here is the question I ask you to ask yourself, which is what's the thing I personally need to get
better at in order to bring about that result? So again, just picking up on the examples I shared
with you, what would you need to get better at to lose weight, or to bring in more clients, or to
feel more confident in yourself?

And then you might say things like, "Well, what I can improve is being more consistently
mindful of what and when I'm eating." Or for the goal of wanting to bring in more clients, it
could be "I've got to get better at being more entrepreneurial and self-promoting."

Or the one about feeling more confident, maybe that is something like "To better appreciate my
strengths and draw on them consistently." So hopefully, that makes sense that the result can be
the pull for you. But what I'm asking you to do is identify within that what is your self-
improvement goal, what do you need to get better at.

OK, so enough guidance for the moment. It's time to identify your improvement goal and enter it
into column one of your ITC Map. Remember, this is the orienting question. What's the one
thing that if I could get significantly better at would help me to become a better version of
myself? It should be a self-improvement goal which would make a really big difference to you.
It's clearly about you changing, and it's something that you really, really care about.

So go ahead. Take some time. Identify from all the various kinds of possible goals you came into
this session with, which one of these goals do you want to go with? And spend the next few
months actually making sure that you are able to change your mindset about so that you can
engage in new behaviors to reach that.

Lahey Inner MBA