“Goals are dreams with deadlines.”
Diana Scharf Hunt

Having bought Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle it downloaded without any problem and I set about reading it. The introduction was fine, reinforcing what I was expecting from the blurb on the web site.

Chapter 1 was Goal Setting. I was interested in what it said. It wasn't the sort of thing I would normally go in for, but I could see the logic of it. Then at the end of the chapter I was instructed to stop reading and to write my goals before I read any further.

Now this left me feeling uneasy. Much of my previous experience of goal setting had been whilst working for The Corporation. We had to write our annual goals in January, at a point where we knew next to nothing about what projects we were going to be working on during the course of the year. And in addition your goals had to be full of inter-personal development and management 'fad-of-the-month' stuff. At the end of the year some darn-fool manager would appraise you against these goals and grade you down because you hadn't done enough for diversity or some such thing. The whole process was a complete farce.

Then when I set up my own business I joined up with a networking group. There were a couple of members there who were dead keen on goal setting, so for a couple of months I tried setting some monthly goals for my business. It was a complete waste of time. The nature of my work is very much events driven, so I never ended up doing what I thought I might be doing.

So that left me in a quandry. I really wanted to carry on reading the book. And I really wanted to get the most out of the book. But I really didn't want to have to write those goals!

Tune in next time to see how I resolved this.