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Its not my Work, Its my Passion

Hey Boss “ I have completed all my goals”

Do you remember this statement? We all mention this statement once a year or multiple times in our performance discussions. But is this a true statement? Do you really mean it?Please read the statement again “ I have completed all my goals”.

Still not clear…

Now read it again “I have completed all MY goals”.

Please introspect and think if these are “Your” goals or goals pushed from top to bottom. These could be corporate goals which you are completing sometime based on interest but mostly because of the compulsion of your duties.

If we do a close analysis of our organization goals we will find that when people drive goals out of compulsion they either change the goals during the year or complete them halfheartedly. The reason is just to get a completion check mark in the HR system. This is wastage of people time, energy and efforts.

The goals created by organizations are designed to achieve a larger objectives and purpose of the corporate. If all the team members are not aligned to complete these goals, then we are not meeting the purpose and eventually the vision will fail. We all want to succeed and that is why we have created these goals. isn’t it?

How can we change this in our organizations?

Go back to the statement “I have completed my goals”. The key here is “My Goals” and the word ‘My’. Do we have the feeling that the goals we are trying to achieve are “My goals”? if not then we will not give our 100% to achieve these goals.

“You will not do until you want to”

The objective is to generate sense of ownership of our goals through motivation not push. How to generate this want? I think it is possible by

1.      Filling the gap between your life purpose and organization’s purpose.

2.      Aligning your values with organizational values.

3.      Adding your life goals to organization goals.

To achieve this, we need to find answer of 2 basic questions.

1.      What’s my passion?

2.      What’s my life purpose?

“A life without a purpose is like driving on a road without the knowledge of your destination and directions”

Finding passion and purpose is not easy and I found majority of the people go wrong most of the time. Some of them try hard to find the answers but get upset after some time as this requires going deep into self-conscious and self-realization. There are many ways to identify but I found some of my own ways to get answers to these questions.

1.      River of Life – It’s an interesting exercise to model your entire life and find the passion or purpose

  • Think of your life as a river with different moments of happiness, sorrow, achievement and failures. You need to think of major milestones of your life (good or bad).
  • On a whiteboard draw these milestone as a river stream taking different routes. Each route represents a change in your life. The key is to identify the behavior which motivated that change.
  • This will allow you to identify your values and behavior associated with you. Also, what interest you most during a major change in your life.

2      Your Blockbuster movie.

  • When you watch a good movie, you go through emotional roller coaster. A lot of emotions goes through in your mind.
  • For this exercise you create a virtual movie of your own life with you being the central character of that movie. For ex he can become a villain some time and at that moment the focus of the movie is on villain. Later he becomes a comedian and focus shifts to comedian.
  • For each major change in your life you need to re-live that moment. You need to put yourself in that character i.e A Hero, A villain, a comedian or a side artist.
  • In all those situations in your movie try to identify the driving force for your emotions and figure out what you liked and disliked.
  • Things you always like irrespective of what character you are playing are the ones you are passionate about.

3.      Day Reflection

  • Every day before you conclude your day think about your entire day activities. Recall every conversation, every thought and try to identify the feelings. Especially moment of happiness and distress.
  • We have forgotten identifying the feelings we go through every moment, “Thanks to our busy lives” but you can at least retrospect and identify it during this exercise.
  • Go deep in your emotions and identify what you liked doing entire day. What made you happy or sad.
  • You can also ask your family to observe your behavior and let you know what you liked and use them during your reflection.
  • A repeated pattern will tell you what you like doing, what makes you happy and what you want to do with your life.

Once you have answers to the 2 basic questions and you have found the passion and purpose, start devising solid goals to achieve the purpose. Please build your goals using your passion to achieve your purpose of life.

Now comes the most critical and difficult step. How to align your personal goals to professional goals.

To do that work on a frequent basis with your leader and find how can he help you in aligning your personal goals with corporate goals. This cannot be achieved in one sitting nor can be achieved with 100% alignment. The role of you leader in this exercise is to simplify the corporate goals and explain you all the details so that you can easily align your personal goals with the corporate goals. The quality of great leaders is to build connect with their employers and motivate them in all aspects of life not just corporate duties. Good leaders will help you in achieving your life objectives keeping in mind the corporate objectives. We all spend more than half of our productive time doing our corporate duties and remaining time completing social duties but most of the time we forget our self. This exercise will help us in reinventing our self and utilize our productive time efficiently in our personal growth.

Try this and you will find that the drive to meet your goals have changed, and now no one needs to push you to meet your goals. Once the organization purpose is decided Goal setting will not happen Top Down, but all goal will come from Bottom Up.

Now you can go and say

Hey Boss “I have completed My Goals”

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