Most of the time when setting resolutions for the New Year, we automatically set health and fitness goals like losing weight, eating better, or exercising more; or financial goals like making more money, saving more, or developing a budget.
Experts indicate that writing your goals (rather than merely thinking about them) increases twenty-fold your chance of achieving them.
What if you took a different approach, and decided to focus more on behavioral goals? Each of us has behavioral patterns that affect how we communicate with ourselves and others. In order to be successful in achieving your goals, you need to be able to overcome that which is holding you back.
Which behaviors can potentially defeat your goals?
There are many assessments out there today that help pinpoint various behaviors. We encourage coaching clients to take a DiSC Workplace profile assessment (see drop-down below). Although it is designed to help you better communicate with others in the workplace, we hear from many who have completed the assessment, and applied the coaching associated therewith, how it has helped them adapt their behaviors better with others in both personal and professional settings.
The DiSC® model provides a common language that people can use to better understand themselves and to adapt their behaviors with others — within a work team, a sales relationship, a leadership position, or other relationships.
DiSC profiles help you and your team:
- Increase your self-knowledge: how you respond to conflict, what motivates you, what causes you stress, and how you solve problems
- Improve working relationships by recognizing the communication needs of team members
- Facilitate better teamwork and teach productive conflict
- Develop stronger sales skills by identifying and responding to customer styles
- Manage more effectively by understanding the dispositions and priorities of employees and team members.
You may recognize that every time you feel like an employer or superior is holding you back, you have a pattern of becoming disrespectful to them and/or resigning from the company. The result of this is you still have not achieved your goal of advancing your responsibilities as a construction manager.
The conversations may have been related to increase in responsibility (titular or monetary), yet your behavior was a result of you wanting immediate action and results. Your employer or superior had full intentions of helping you advance, but they required you to first grasp not only the tasks you do, but why you do them, and how they relate to the overall direction for the company.
Learning what triggers your behaviors will help you to develop the ability to control your reactions and effectively communicate with others. This in turn will help you develop mutual goals, receive buy-in, and ultimately position everyone involved for success.
Setting Behavioral Goals
- Define the Goal through Professional Assessment Programs like DiSC, or by asking others how you might improve personally and professionally.
- Define how you will recognize the behavior. This may be by asking others to give you a sign. Alternatively, you may be able to become better attuned to triggers.
- What will you do if you have a setback? Do you apologize? Do you give your accountability partner a twenty-dollar bill? You must define what specifically gets you back on track.
- How will you record and reward your results? Reflecting on the positive consequences from positive behavioral changes helps encourage you not to fall back into old patterns. Also, it gives you reason to celebrate overcoming and encouragement to continue with personal and professional behavioral development.
Most of us don’t feel like setting goals. Nevertheless, they are critical for our success, even though the process of reaching them can stir a storm of emotions. Reaching those goals is often tied to whether we think we can do it or not.
Emily Dickinson said,
“Behavior is what a man does, not what he thinks, feels, or believes.”
Change your behavior and it will change what you do!
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