In our previous blog post, we spoke of how to identify and validate the greatest goals we can challenge ourselves with. As mentioned there, this process of visioning is often pleasant, liberating and energizing, as we look at the blue skies and blue oceans, by mentally elevating ourselves to several thousand meters above the ground and focusing on the distant future when many things become possible. But now, it is time to come back to earth and get our feet firmly on the ground. Not only that – we shall even have to dig deeper down. And this next critical stage in the journey to goal achievement can often be challenging and difficult.
If the visioning process described earlier was to identify our desired state, the process we shall explore in this blog post is to truthfully describe, and in as much detail as we can, our current state. Suppose we have an internet map application and want to drive to our destination; we’ve found our destination of course, it’s listed on the map. But what if we are unable to find our current location? Now this of course does not happen in any normally functioning GPS application whether it is Google maps or any other, as long as you have your location functionality switched on your phone or other GPS device.
But I shall now make a momentous claim: Unlike in the world of GPS map applications, many of us actually do NOT get our current state correct, in the world of goal achievement. I shall further claim that quite often, this is a major reason for our being unable to achieve our long term and significant goals, even if we have identified and validated them correctly. This is because, in the field of goal achievement, our current state is not a simple physical location which can be described unambiguously by latitude and longitude. It is a complex aggregate or many attributes. If we consider the example also referred to towards the end of our first blog post, that of a small neighborhood mom and pop food products store which wants to grow to a global MNC over the next couple of decades (say) – then, the current state would include the state of their products (whether unique and distinct enough, of high enough quality, having enough demand and appeal etc), brands, manufacturing capacity, distribution channels both domestic and international, certifications, professional manpower, funding, strategic planning, operational effectiveness, organizational strength and so on. Hence, for a more complex goal or set of goals, the assessment of our current state can get that much more complex. But for that very reason, it is all the more critical to do a proper assessment of our current state, rather than gloss over it.
If you are pursuing a well defined goal with limited scope and tight boundary conditions, in a well defined domain, and especially with the help of a strong coach, mentor, trainer or leader, then it is likely that your current state assessment shall be quite accurate. Here are some examples:
You are learning to play guitar, your left hand technique and sense of melody are above average, but your right hand technique and sense of rhythm are below average; If you have a good guitar teacher, or even if you are self-taught but can identify the problem, then you can do remedial drills and play with a metronome to improve on your weak points. So you can progress towards your goal of the desired level of mastery, more effectively.
You are a martial artist working towards your black belt, and your strength and technique in sparring with opponents are excellent, but you run out of breath fairly fast in long duels. With the help of your coach (or otherwise), if you identify this as a problem of low aerobic endurance as well as low muscular endurance, you can improve on both by doing cardio and strength endurance (low intensity high volume) training respectively. So you can now close the gaps in your capability and move closer to getting the black belt.
But the situation can change dramatically if the goals as well as domain become fuzzier and less well defined. For example if you are an entrepreneur struggling to attract, hire, train, manage and retain talent; then even a coach or mentor may not help you get a lasting solution, since they shall go by your self-diagnosis of the problem, and you yourself may have blind spots to understand where your people strategy is lacking. Two of the main reasons that current state assessment can go wrong are:
We lack sufficient knowledge or understanding of our domain of goal pursuit, to capture all the relevant variables which we need to consider to assess our current state. In some cases, it could be a blind spot, rather than actual ignorance – but the result is similar: we disregard important variables. For example, over the years I have met a number of tech entrepreneurs who have built great products, but severely underestimated, not understood, or completely ignored the role of marketing to make these products commercially successful. What (ALL) should marketing include? That itself is a long discussion!
We have a good understanding of the relevant variables in the current state, but tend to grossly overestimate our capacity, or underestimate the complexity of the challenge.
Quite often, we are programmed and conditioned right from a young age to respond in dysfunctional ways to accepting facts and therefore doing an objective assessment of our current state, such as:
We may resist accepting unfavorable truths about our weaknesses and our lack of capability or capacity. And if we are operating in a team or organizational environment, the acceptance of gaps in current capabilities, can also be seen as a weakness, a sign of disloyalty or lack of confidence, when it could in fact be a correct assessment of reality.
Or on the other hand, we may indeed accept the gaps... but then, the assessment of our current state seems so dismal that we may collapse under the pressure and give up on the goal.
It is imperative that we take the strong middle path, evaluate our current state accurately and neither err on the side of overconfidence, nor of diffidence. And for this, the way forward to open up our minds, is to separate our ego from our analysis.
Amazingly, all the above problems can be fixed quite easily by one simple step: opening up the mind. We need to open our minds to feedback, reflection, objective reading of data (not selective, biased, self serving) and scientific enquiry. If we ask the correct questions, the correct answers shall emerge.
My mentor, the late Prof M T Mohan Rao had once told me, “just as electric current flows from high voltage to low voltage or water flows from high pressure to low pressure, in the same way, knowledge flows from high potential to low potential. That means, we have to just become more humble and make no assumptions about our existing knowledge or the correctness of our opinions" (humility and openness are equated here to low potential, while being closed and not allowing ideas to come into the mind, are equated to high potential).
Further, Prof Mohan Rao would say, “The knowledge required to solve many problems is actually available as free download from the universe… in fact it is available within us.” That is why, we may all have experienced at various points in our life, that when we are at peace or at least not disturbed by multiple conflicting thoughts, we can arrive at a solution to a problem quite effectively within our own mind, or speaking to a friend of guide who we trust.
The important point is, that in the case of the goal achievement journey, we must make it both a skill and a habitual practice to assess our current state (A) as expansively as possible, considering all the variables we can think of, and also (B) “reduce our potential”, or open up our mind by separating our ego out, so that we can get as truthful an assessment of our current state as we can. It should not merely be something we do once in a while to solve an extraordinary problem, but a method that we can consciously implement to continuously assess ourselves correctly.
Whether we work as individuals on our goals, as a team of many individuals, as an organization pursuing large aggregate goals, or even a nation or civilization trying to reach our most challenging and enormous goals… The true assessment of our current state is critical to our progress. The silver lining is, if we have not done it before, it does not matter – we can start today and now!
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