Tuesday, January 16, 2024

I’ve been thinking about professional goals and accomplishments.

The first draft of that opening sentence came out as I’ve been thinking about professional accomplishments. But besides only being half of the story, it also has the unfortunate quality of placing the cart in front of the horse. To have the professional accomplishments you hope for, you first must define the professional goals that will please you. Otherwise, you will have accomplishments, but not necessarily the ones you’d prefer.

Goals can be tricky things. Sometimes we are too busy to sit down and curate our minds, to cut through the clutter and set goals that actually matter to us. Oftentimes we will set a goal we think we should have. Or we will select one that is a perennial go to … despite our having grown out of it, or it being generally impossible to achieve. I’ve even known people for whom setting a goal was a surefire submarining of their ability to accomplish it. Because once they named it, they began an open rebellion against doing the work necessary to achieve it. Still other times, we feel obligated to accept goals others have for us, without examining what meeting the goal might really mean for us.

And yet, I’ve found that success as I define it comes not only from naming one’s own goals – no matter how small or wildly large they seem – but also in not talking yourself out of the steps required to accomplish them, at each moment along the way.

Effective goal setting often means affording yourself a significant chunk of quiet time, so you can cut through the layers of chatter in your mind. Clarity can often be found by asking yourself a series of “why?” questions. Drilling down through levels of thought to distill and determine why something is important to you really helps to clarify if it should persist as a goal worth having. If you like your reasons, even if they are ultimately in service to someone else’s goals, then a particular prospective goal is a keeper.

Next is where it gets ridiculously easy to blow it. On the path between where you start and when you accomplish that goal, there will likely be several opportunities to discount, dismiss, distract from, or entirely abandon what it takes to get there. That is tempting, but don’t do it! Sometimes this requires a bit of forced optimism or commitment to keep taking the steps, even though doubt has crept in.

Chances are, if you sustain, things will unfold in such a way as to get you very, very close to realizing your goal, or even (gasp!) meeting it. Few things feel sweeter than this moment.

And friends, that is the backdrop for this post to you today. My brilliant colleague Elizabeth and I are positioned in Washington, D.C., to report for you from oral arguments of the Supreme Court of the United States tomorrow. That’s a big goal, met.

Last Summer, Elizabeth was in D.C. on a personal trip. Standing in front of the SCOTUS building she claimed, “I am going to be inside that building for work one day.” Less than four months later, she was.

After setting that goal, she had clarity and then she took the necessary steps. Her goal came true in less than four months, and she reported on an important case you need to know about, involving the legitimacy of the CFPB’s funding.

After hearing of Elizabeth’s accomplishments, I then matched her goal and claimed what at the time was a Wild Goal for myself, of also reporting for you from inside the chambers of SCOTUS. She’s an editor, she is brilliant, she has a J.D. I’m just a big mouth and an average mind.

We watched the calendar intently, setting up Google alerts for when arguments were slated. But when the date was published, I nearly choked and stopped walking the course of meeting this goal.

You see, these two are very big cases, impacting many industries. I knew that both the gallery and the press box would be packed full. The number of amici briefs for these cases said it all; interest is exceptionally high. I also suspected the calendaring would happen in January, when it would be ‘impossible’ for me to make it, due to other work travel commitments. For more than a moment I thought “why bother?” and “well, maybe next time.” I had to actively work to reroute those thoughts. As well as mute the ones speaking inside my head that said, “you’re not qualified to be there.” Sound familiar?

Instead of yielding to that mental garbage, we immediately contacted the court, requesting day press passes. All the while the soundtrack in my brain went something like “they won’t pick us, everyone and their brother will have applied for passes” and “it will go to larger, more universally known outlets” … all that mental clatter was loud, but it wasn’t nearly as loud as the shrieks of joy when word came that we had been accepted.

So today, if you’re reading this contemporaneously, Elizabeth and I are in D.C., anxiously awaiting the opening of the Supreme Court of the United States tomorrow morning, Jan. 17, 2024, so we can bring you reportage of two cases whose outcome will be highly impactful for you and your business.

We’ll keep you informed. You keep reaching for your goals.

Until next time,

Mary Schuster
Chief Knowledge Officer
October Research, LLC