Overview: Long-term goals give us purpose in life, but only if they’re meaningful and we find the strength to chase them. Having a purpose is essential for leadership success. Business coaching can help organizations evolve and succeed. Leadership coaching can help leaders define meaningful long-term goals and develop the ability and motivation to achieve them.
Leadership coaching understands the value of long-term goals and encourages leaders and organizations to formulate clear purposes. A clear long-term goal gives one purpose in life and business. When repetitive work with no end in sight leads to burnout, a worthy long-term goal can re-energize leaders and employees.
Executive coaching professionals encourage clients to visualize an ideal future when setting their long-term goals. Prioritizing goals, breaking them into smaller, achievable, and realistic sub-goals, and measuring them are also standard practices.
How Do Intelligent Leaders Set and Achieve Long-term Goals?
Setting long-term goals is beneficial in business and life. Successful leaders are good at setting and pursuing goals while convincing others to help them on their journeys.
We often think of leaders as larger-than-life, exceptionally-skilled, and motivated individuals normal people could never hope to match in prowess or stamina, yet leaders are just like everyone else. They experience similar emotions and struggle with challenges.
We’re all little people with big goals, but small people can achieve big goals if they put their minds to it. They must overcome self-limiting beliefs to succeed, however.
Leadership coaching is no stranger to mind-hacking. To overcome ingrained beliefs and think outside the box is what leaders often need to do. Here’s how executive coaching can help leaders transcend their limitations.
Redefining Reality
“I reject your reality and substitute my own.” – Adam Savage and others.
Our realities are full of rules and limitations, many of them self-imposed. Whether we like it or not, we cannot think away the glass ceilings we create for ourselves.
We may dream big, but even as we conjure up limitless possibilities on the one hand, our mind is quick to dismiss them on the other. Dreaming is easy; believing your dreams are possible is hard.
An effective technique to overcome these limitations is to reconfigure reality. What one wants to achieve may not be possible in this reality, so the answer is to create a reality where these things are possible and perhaps inevitable.
An example would be drowning out all negativity. Some practical steps would be to avoid the company of negative people, refuse to “join the club” of those hamstrung by the same problems and limitations, and close off channels of communication that lend themselves well to negativity like television.
Reconfiguring one’s reality this way is not insanity. On the contrary, it’s a powerful psychological exercise that can profoundly alter lives and shatter self-imposed limitations.
Developing the Willingness to Pay the Price
They say the best things in life are free, but that’s wrong. The best things in life may not come with dollar costs attached, but they require profound and far-reaching sacrifices.
You can’t buy a happy family with money; that much is true. You can “buy” it, however, for:
- Giving up all potential intimacy with members of the opposite sex other than your significant other
- Constantly putting the needs of your children ahead of yours
- Wrestling your way through traffic to take your kids to school every morning
- Sinking your time into your son’s math homework instead of pursuing your passion
- Navigating and reliving the traps and psychological hardships of growing up with your children
- Never finding out whether you would have succeeded if you remained single and followed your passions.
The best things in life are the most expensive. One of the things setting successful entrepreneurs apart from people without entrepreneurial inclinations is they’re willing to pay the price of success.
Inducing Urgency
Lacking self-awareness grants us the blissful ignorance that allows us to assume we always have time. We can start chasing that goal tomorrow or address that problem later.
Successful leaders and business coaching professionals recognize that time is the ultimate resource. When they set goals, they attach consequences to failing; consequences that make the cost of failing steeper than the cost of succeeding.
Executive coaching can help leaders set goals, devise purposes, and create plans to reach those goals. In some cases, skilled professionals can help leaders psychologically compel themselves to achieve said goals.