Team Goal Setting - Support for Achieving Your Goals By Josh Hinds

Ask the question, "should I keep my goals to myself or share them with others?" and one things for sure -- you're going to hear more than your share of differing opinions.

Yet for the most part, the answers will come down to one of these two responses...

Some folks will say, keep your goals to yourself to avoid those people who might otherwise attempt to discourage you. There are yet others who suggest telling everyone and their brother about your intended goals. As if doing so were similar to the old story where the decision was made to burn the ship the soldiers arrived on, so they would have no choice but to be victorious in battle.

I would guess that one could make a case either for or against the ideas I just mentioned. It's not my intention to do either in this particular writing. What I am going to do is share a concept you may have not even considered yet. That being -- brining a group of people (that is, 1 or more) who can get together for the purpose of supporting one another in the pursuit of setting, and more importantly achieving their intended goals.

We'll call this... drum roll please...

Team Goal Setting

While I'll admit it could be as simple as sharing your goals with others, and setting up times where you all call each other to follow up and track each others progress -- if we were to leave it at that, where would the fun be? Besides, in this day and age, there's way to much handy, dandy technology we can put to good use. So with that in mind I'll offer up some ideas to make your adventures in Team Goal Setting not just more enjoyable -- but more rewarding too.

Collaboration Tools. There are any number of web sites and resources out there which make collaboration not only easy, but dare I say an enjoyable experience.

Here are a few of them (it's by no means an exhaustive list) if you have a preferred method, or want to suggest one that you think will work equally well, by all means feel free to do so in the comments section below.

Examples of Team Goal Setting -- Tools You Can Use

Google Docs is one solution that comes to mind. Implementing the Team Goal Setting approach using it could be fairly straight forward.

For example: You create a simple google doc (that's google's word processor by the way -- it's accessible via the web, and you can even share you're google docs with others if you'd like) where you list your goals, along with your name of course, so it's clear which goals belong to who among your chosen "team" of people who will be supporting each other on the team goal setting adventure. Each of you could either add your own goals to the google doc, or for that matter you could each create your own specific document with your goals written on each persons unique doc (i.e. document).

To take it a step further each person can leave comments, both track and leave notes of encouragement, etc. next to each particular persons goals. If you happened to choose to create separate documents for each individual person, the same applies, you would just be commenting individually on each particular persons doc, rather than having everyone's goals in the one file.

While I've used the example of Google Docs to put into place the idea of team goal setting, that's really only one of the countless number of web based resources which you could choose to use which would accomplish what we're talking about.

Another way to foster collaboration and garner support in a team environment with your goal setting would be to use a site like, stixy.com -- they explain it as an "online bulletin board" where you can share it with the people you choose. What's interesting is that at the time of my writing this, you could upload files created on your particular computer (or obviously created on the machines of others who you gave permission to collaborate with), you could also include photos, create notes, and to-do lists. My description isn't doing service as to what all you can accomplish by using a service like Stixy, but I think it gives at least a good glimpse into the possibilities.

To help, allow me to paint the following picture for you -- one in which you might find using stixy.com (or a similar service) helpful if you wanted to give Team Goal Setting a go.

You could create a specific place where you give permission to a select group of people, from there both you and the people you have allowed access could go about sharing goals, and supporting each other. Alternatively, you might opt to simply allow others to view your goals, but not create or alter what you've got written there. That's handled through the controls/settings which are pretty easy to get a handle on. Also, as mentioned there's an easy option you can choose which will give you a unique URL that you can use to share your stixy board (that's what they call it, not me :-))

Microblogging -- twitter and the like

If you're not familiar with microblogging, think services like twitter, or pownce just to name a few. Twitter for example, asks the question: "What are you doing" -- and then gives you 140 characters to type whatever that happens to be. Of course, people use twitter and services like it to answer (and communicate) in ways far beyond simply answering what they happen to be doing in the moment.

That being said, it's a good lead in for how you can use the microblogging type services in your team goal-setting. One scenario that comes to mind is you share your goal, or goals as the case may be, and from there a dialogue can unfold which creates support of your groups goals. This might approach might not be as ideal (due to the fact that most people have public microblogging accounts). However, if the idea of your goals being public isn't an issue for you, this may very well work well for you.

Those are just a few ideas that come to mind. Again, ultimately it will be up to you to decide if something along these lines is for you or not. That's the beauty of personal development -- what works for one person, may not for another and vice versa. That being the case, if you don't try new things, you're guaranteed to miss out on something that might otherwise work for you. In summary, give the idea a try, if it's for you, wonderful, if not, by all means kick it to the curb, with the confidence of knowing that you've identified something that didn't work for you, but very well could have -- or as Thomas Edison might suggest to you, provided he were still around to do so -- you've not "failed" at all, but rather simply found something that didn't work, and in doing so you're now ever closer to finding something that will.

That's all for now...

Happy goal-setting ... and remember

It's your life, LIVE BIG! Josh Hinds :-)

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