All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.

T. E. Lawrence

Ever heard the myth about the uber-successful goal setters from the Yale Class of ’53? One that maybe a trainer or executive coach may have told you. This being that in 1953 those who left Yale with career goals were far more successful in their careers and related incomes than those who just went out starry eyed into the big wide world. There was no such study, though Yale of course would have loved for there to have been one but humbly cannot claim such kudos. Personally I’m not a planner by nature, though have learnt that life is fairly chaotic in a stressful rather than exhilarating way without a little. So I loved to read that article, and then threw out my development plan shortly after. Depressing little piece of paper it is cluttering up my second office draw. Clients typically hate development planning, though I try to minimise the pain of the process for them.

The notion however that planning / goals do not help has been plaguing me. It feels so right that they would. So I went back to source. Lazily attributing the findings to Yale is the embellished problem. Of course the research supports the ‘myth’ in a big way. My college tutor would be turning in his grave that I forgot Locke and Latham, gurus of goal setting. Four decades of investigations demonstrate one of the most robust and replicable findings in psychological literature. That specific, challenging goals lead to higher performance than ‘do your best’ goals or no goals. With goal-setting theory, specific difficult goals have been shown to increase performance on well over 100 different tasks involving more than 40,000 participants in at least eight countries working in laboratory, simulation, and field settings (Locke & Latham, 2002).

If you’re not very good at achieving the goals you set for yourself here’s the psychological lowdown (20 pages of dense psychological text summarised).

• Simply speaking, doing stuff with a goal in mind directs your attention – you will get more out of the activity
• ‘Doing your best’ isn’t a goal (take note parents!) – The goal needs to be set idiosyncratically to one’s ‘best’ to reduce ambiguity for loafers and perfectionists alike
• Highest effort occurs with moderately difficult tasks and tails off when the goal is either very hard or very easy. It needs to be difficult enough to energise but not so impossible that it demotivates
• Unsurprisingly, if you think you’ll fail (low self-efficacy) you probably will, and vice versa. Great sportsmen either think they’re going to win or have no expectation but they rarely have low expectation
• Personal commitment to the goal is important. Making that commitment publicly can help, presumably because not to follow through is viewed as a lack of integrity
• Choosing to be purposeful and proactive makes a real difference to achievement, regardless of underlying motivation

Ultimately I was still right to throw out my development plan. None of my goals were mine even if they were SMART (ghastly if useful acronym signifying Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timebound). That’s what comes through personal career goals being part of an annual appraisal process rather than a personal plan for life.

So my resolution involves creating a plan (in process) but one that is for me and me alone. It will journey with me and evolve rather than be 2013 only, though of course there are some critical SMART goals for the next year that will hopefully change the course of my life. But do I believe I can do it?