Business planning

Goal setting in uncertain times

In times of uncertainty, setting business or personal goals can be difficult. The past year has been full of change and the goal posts have moved quickly making it hard to know where to set your sights or what you should aim for. Gain insight from professional coaches Sue Gee and Dave Verburg.

Learn about how people’s brains work and how this influences how we think about the goals we set and how we go about achieving them.

Discover the answers to these questions and more:

• How do I identify the values driving my goal?
• What are the differences between personal and business goals?
• What should businesses do at this time when things are so uncertain?

Meet the experts

Sue Gee, Business Development Director at Prosper?, previously ran her own training, learning and coaching business and knows first-hand how paramount it is to have a goal.

?Personal or business goal setting can be very different?but if you have no goal, and if you’re not clear on what you’re trying to achieve, then it’s very difficult to actually get there.?

Business coach, Dave Verburg runs a consulting business in Liverpool. His clients are left in no doubt that their business is there to help them create the lifestyle they wanted when they started their business in the first place. A large part of this comes from successful goal setting.

How to set realistic goals

Verburg explains how different methods of goal setting can influence whether someone achieves the ultimate goal.

?Some things should be a way of life, and not really have goals set around them. So, things like finances and health, these you should be looking at ways to be financially clever and sound and bright, without setting a physical goal around it.”

Find out how to think about the goals you want to achieve, and how to work towards your goals by creating achievable milestones. ?You need to understand what you’re trying to achieve, before you actually put any form of trigger or milestone or anything to it.?

?The goal in itself is an objective is something to aim towards. But actually, what is more valuable, is the behaviours that you develop along the way.?

SMART ? A good guide for goal setting?

Gee and Verburg also discuss how useful SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time bound) really is when it comes to putting goal setting into practise.

In his work with clients, Verburg finds people ?focusing on what they don?t want?. This often leads to making goals around something they think they want without being really connected to it.

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