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Goals - What If You Don't Have It All Figured Out?
Remember back to when you were in elementary school and high
school and you weren’t exactly sure what you wanted to do with your
life? Then once you decided on a dream you had to decide the
specifics of how to get there such as where you would go to college
and what you would major in? Did you discover after you began
pursuing a line of study or even after you graduated with a degree and
were working in a job that you might have made the wrong choice?
Forty-four percent of all college graduates change their major between
the second semester of their freshman year and graduation day.
Five years after graduation, 83 percent of the 2001 graduating class of
Duke University was working for a different organization and 43
percent had changed careers at least once.
So chances are, many of you have set goals and have had to readjust
those goals over time. And that is OK.
Inherently we don’t like to set goals. Why? Because if you set a goal
and miss it you’ve failed. Or have you?
If you remember nothing else regarding goals, remember two things:
#1. Begin with the end in mind
#2. It is important to fail early
College, your job, your relationships with people, your outside
activities – they are like a boat at the dock. You will get one. You will
get in it. And your boat will start to take off from the pier. If you have a
set of oars, you will drive the boat. If you don’t the boat will drive you.
You probably won’t sink. But you might find yourself circling the same
inlet for a very long time heading nowhere.
How many of you have heard people complain, “I hate my job.” “I don’t
like so and so.” “I hate having to work on this report.”
Setting goals are like grabbing hold of the oars. Who’s driving the
boat?
Goals are not only about school or your career. They also revolve
around asking yourself questions such as, “In my next job do I
ultimately want to live around the people I love - my family? Do I like to
sail or ski and want to live in a climate that allows that? Do I want to
take classes that will broaden my skills so that I can be hired in many
different fields?
If you set goals, you will succeed. And goals are not notions. They are
specific, measurable and have a time line. “I am going to finish that
project early” is a notion. “I am going to do the research on Monday,
write the abstract by Tuesday and complete the detail by Wednesday”
are goals.
When I graduated from high school I went off to college in Michigan
where I majored in an allied health profession and took a job in the
Houston Medical Center upon graduation. In my first month living in
Texas I knew I had made a mistake. Houston, though lovely, was not
where I wanted to live the rest of my life, but I could gain valuable work
experience there that I couldn’t get in any other part of the world. I
hadn’t anticipated how much I would miss my family and the familiarity
of a town I loved. I really didn’t want to fall in love and marry someone
and have to live there the rest of my life so I set a goal - I would work in
Houston for two years (personal goal with a timeframe) and then move
to a place where my professional experience would stand out
(professional goal with the end in mind). Two years to the day I moved
back to Pittsburgh. Sure while in Houston I had to focus on smaller
goals like where I wanted to live, what kind of furniture I’d buy, how
long I wanted my commute to work to be. But the ultimate place I
wanted to be was back in Pittsburgh with great work experience
behind me.
Then I got back to Pittsburgh and set another goal. In two years I
would buy a house. Well I hadn’t figured on falling in love so that goal
got tossed out the window when I married and bought a house with
my husband. We had four children. I continued to work in my
profession before my first child was born but I was beginning to see
that while I was very fulfilled in an allied health profession at 25, there
really wasn’t a lot of room for advancement and I couldn’t imagine
doing this work at 45 or even 26 for that matter. I have an
entrepreneurial spirit and that personality type breeds restlessness
and achievement.
I was at a crossroads: I could continue doing allied health work
forever. (Remember the people that say they hate their job?) Or I could
work at something new - which was risky. I decided to fail early at my
first career choice and regroup.
So I started building a corporate gift business and an antiques
business on the side while I was working in a large physician’s office
so that when we started a family in two years, I’d have something in
place for home. (Calculated risk with a time frame that gave me the
luxury of a paying job while building a business on the side.) I had
always loved writing and after my first child was born I began writing
on a volunteer basis for organizations for which I was volunteering.
What happened was that the corporate gift business and antique
business were getting too large to manage from home and I did not
want to work outside of the home while my children were young so
one day I saw an ad that said the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette was looking
for freelance writers and I sent clips of my writing in to the PG for
consideration. (The goal of staying at home with my children was
‘keeping the end in mind’ and being a reporter held a calculate risk of
rejection.) I didn’t have a degree in journalism but that didn’t stop me.
I’ll never forget what the PG editor said when he hired me. “Mary Lee,
you can write like you are having a conversation around the dining
room table. We can’t always find that.” So by now I had pretty much
realized that I was not going back to the profession in which I had a
degree. I was writing five stories a week for the PG. I had picked up a
lot of freelance work such as being the public relations director of a
public school district, the executive director of a trade association,
freelance business writing and graphic design and more - all work I
did from home.
I taught myself to write grant proposals when the public school district
asked me to help them secure a grant for a summer program for
special needs children. This work was not in my contract but that didn’
t matter to me. I saw this as an opportunity to learn a new skill for
which there was a need in society. I went to the Foundation Center of
the Carnegie Library and looked up everything I could on grant
proposals and then started calling funders all over the city to see if
they would read my proposal. We succeed and the district was
awarded $68,000 for the program. Next we pursued a grant to put
Astroturf on the athletic field. I then started to see that raising money
was not just about the written proposal but more about the
relationships between those asking for money and those giving away
the money. I mentored under a keen school board member and we
secured that grant as well - $450,000. I never got paid for working on
that grant either. And I wouldn’t be where I am today without having
volunteered to learn how to do this work. The school district awarded
me a citation from the Pennsylvania House of Representatives for my
efforts in securing these grants. Shortly after this and when my
youngest child was in school full time I took that citation on an
interview which resulted in me being offered a full time executive
director position at a hospital foundation in charge of all of the hospital’
s fundraising. Now remember, I had never worked as a professional
fundraiser. They were not offering me the job of major gifts officer,
event planner, vice president of operations or any of the other myriad of
jobs in the fundraising profession. They were offering me the lead job
because of measurably what I had accomplished in a short period of
time - $518,000 in grants on my first two attempts to fundraise.
I was with that hospital for less than two years and was then offered
the position at a much larger hospital as president of their foundation
where our capital campaign goal was $5 million over two years and
we raised more than $10 million. That led to a bigger position at a
hospital foundation where I was just recently recruited.
“I will do it by taking these steps it in this amount of time” is a goal.
Again: If you only remember two things about goals remember this:
#1. Begin with the end in mind
#2. It is important to fail early – don’t be afraid to take calculated risks
and adjust your goals.
So ask yourself, “Who is driving your boat?” Do you want to get out of
the inlet to a destination or is circling the same waters OK with you?
What are the steps to get there?
It was Christopher Columbus who said, “You can never cross the
ocean unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.” Pick
up your oars and start now!
Follow Mary Lee on Twitter at StartingOverNow.
For the FREE Worksheets: “Change – Here’s How!” and “Overcoming
Adversity is an Every Day Slice of Life?” go to Mary Lee's web site at:
http://www.startingovernow.com/Articles-and-Tip-Sheets.html
Mary Lee Gannon is a cultural turnaround and leadership expert who
went from being a stay-at-home mother with four children living in an
unpalatable marriage behind the facade of a country club life to the
reality of divorce, homelessness, and welfare. As a national guest
speaker she demonstrates turn-around strategies that transform
corporate cultures and took her from an earning capacity of $27,000 to
the president and CEO of a hospital foundation. Her book “Starting
Over – 25 Rules When You’ve Bottomed Out” is available in
bookstores and on Amazon.com.
Remember back to when you were in elementary school and high
school and you weren’t exactly sure what you wanted to do with your
life? Then once you decided on a dream you had to decide the
specifics of how to get there such as where you would go to college
and what you would major in? Did you discover after you began
pursuing a line of study or even after you graduated with a degree and
were working in a job that you might have made the wrong choice?
Forty-four percent of all college graduates change their major between
the second semester of their freshman year and graduation day.
Five years after graduation, 83 percent of the 2001 graduating class of
Duke University was working for a different organization and 43
percent had changed careers at least once.
So chances are, many of you have set goals and have had to readjust
those goals over time. And that is OK.
Inherently we don’t like to set goals. Why? Because if you set a goal
and miss it you’ve failed. Or have you?
If you remember nothing else regarding goals, remember two things:
#1. Begin with the end in mind
#2. It is important to fail early
College, your job, your relationships with people, your outside
activities – they are like a boat at the dock. You will get one. You will
get in it. And your boat will start to take off from the pier. If you have a
set of oars, you will drive the boat. If you don’t the boat will drive you.
You probably won’t sink. But you might find yourself circling the same
inlet for a very long time heading nowhere.
How many of you have heard people complain, “I hate my job.” “I don’t
like so and so.” “I hate having to work on this report.”
Setting goals are like grabbing hold of the oars. Who’s driving the
boat?
Goals are not only about school or your career. They also revolve
around asking yourself questions such as, “In my next job do I
ultimately want to live around the people I love - my family? Do I like to
sail or ski and want to live in a climate that allows that? Do I want to
take classes that will broaden my skills so that I can be hired in many
different fields?
If you set goals, you will succeed. And goals are not notions. They are
specific, measurable and have a time line. “I am going to finish that
project early” is a notion. “I am going to do the research on Monday,
write the abstract by Tuesday and complete the detail by Wednesday”
are goals.
When I graduated from high school I went off to college in Michigan
where I majored in an allied health profession and took a job in the
Houston Medical Center upon graduation. In my first month living in
Texas I knew I had made a mistake. Houston, though lovely, was not
where I wanted to live the rest of my life, but I could gain valuable work
experience there that I couldn’t get in any other part of the world. I
hadn’t anticipated how much I would miss my family and the familiarity
of a town I loved. I really didn’t want to fall in love and marry someone
and have to live there the rest of my life so I set a goal - I would work in
Houston for two years (personal goal with a timeframe) and then move
to a place where my professional experience would stand out
(professional goal with the end in mind). Two years to the day I moved
back to Pittsburgh. Sure while in Houston I had to focus on smaller
goals like where I wanted to live, what kind of furniture I’d buy, how
long I wanted my commute to work to be. But the ultimate place I
wanted to be was back in Pittsburgh with great work experience
behind me.
Then I got back to Pittsburgh and set another goal. In two years I
would buy a house. Well I hadn’t figured on falling in love so that goal
got tossed out the window when I married and bought a house with
my husband. We had four children. I continued to work in my
profession before my first child was born but I was beginning to see
that while I was very fulfilled in an allied health profession at 25, there
really wasn’t a lot of room for advancement and I couldn’t imagine
doing this work at 45 or even 26 for that matter. I have an
entrepreneurial spirit and that personality type breeds restlessness
and achievement.
I was at a crossroads: I could continue doing allied health work
forever. (Remember the people that say they hate their job?) Or I could
work at something new - which was risky. I decided to fail early at my
first career choice and regroup.
So I started building a corporate gift business and an antiques
business on the side while I was working in a large physician’s office
so that when we started a family in two years, I’d have something in
place for home. (Calculated risk with a time frame that gave me the
luxury of a paying job while building a business on the side.) I had
always loved writing and after my first child was born I began writing
on a volunteer basis for organizations for which I was volunteering.
What happened was that the corporate gift business and antique
business were getting too large to manage from home and I did not
want to work outside of the home while my children were young so
one day I saw an ad that said the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette was looking
for freelance writers and I sent clips of my writing in to the PG for
consideration. (The goal of staying at home with my children was
‘keeping the end in mind’ and being a reporter held a calculate risk of
rejection.) I didn’t have a degree in journalism but that didn’t stop me.
I’ll never forget what the PG editor said when he hired me. “Mary Lee,
you can write like you are having a conversation around the dining
room table. We can’t always find that.” So by now I had pretty much
realized that I was not going back to the profession in which I had a
degree. I was writing five stories a week for the PG. I had picked up a
lot of freelance work such as being the public relations director of a
public school district, the executive director of a trade association,
freelance business writing and graphic design and more - all work I
did from home.
I taught myself to write grant proposals when the public school district
asked me to help them secure a grant for a summer program for
special needs children. This work was not in my contract but that didn’
t matter to me. I saw this as an opportunity to learn a new skill for
which there was a need in society. I went to the Foundation Center of
the Carnegie Library and looked up everything I could on grant
proposals and then started calling funders all over the city to see if
they would read my proposal. We succeed and the district was
awarded $68,000 for the program. Next we pursued a grant to put
Astroturf on the athletic field. I then started to see that raising money
was not just about the written proposal but more about the
relationships between those asking for money and those giving away
the money. I mentored under a keen school board member and we
secured that grant as well - $450,000. I never got paid for working on
that grant either. And I wouldn’t be where I am today without having
volunteered to learn how to do this work. The school district awarded
me a citation from the Pennsylvania House of Representatives for my
efforts in securing these grants. Shortly after this and when my
youngest child was in school full time I took that citation on an
interview which resulted in me being offered a full time executive
director position at a hospital foundation in charge of all of the hospital’
s fundraising. Now remember, I had never worked as a professional
fundraiser. They were not offering me the job of major gifts officer,
event planner, vice president of operations or any of the other myriad of
jobs in the fundraising profession. They were offering me the lead job
because of measurably what I had accomplished in a short period of
time - $518,000 in grants on my first two attempts to fundraise.
I was with that hospital for less than two years and was then offered
the position at a much larger hospital as president of their foundation
where our capital campaign goal was $5 million over two years and
we raised more than $10 million. That led to a bigger position at a
hospital foundation where I was just recently recruited.
“I will do it by taking these steps it in this amount of time” is a goal.
Again: If you only remember two things about goals remember this:
#1. Begin with the end in mind
#2. It is important to fail early – don’t be afraid to take calculated risks
and adjust your goals.
So ask yourself, “Who is driving your boat?” Do you want to get out of
the inlet to a destination or is circling the same waters OK with you?
What are the steps to get there?
It was Christopher Columbus who said, “You can never cross the
ocean unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.” Pick
up your oars and start now!
Follow Mary Lee on Twitter at StartingOverNow.
For the FREE Worksheets: “Change – Here’s How!” and “Overcoming
Adversity is an Every Day Slice of Life?” go to Mary Lee's web site at:
http://www.startingovernow.com/Articles-and-Tip-Sheets.html
Mary Lee Gannon is a cultural turnaround and leadership expert who
went from being a stay-at-home mother with four children living in an
unpalatable marriage behind the facade of a country club life to the
reality of divorce, homelessness, and welfare. As a national guest
speaker she demonstrates turn-around strategies that transform
corporate cultures and took her from an earning capacity of $27,000 to
the president and CEO of a hospital foundation. Her book “Starting
Over – 25 Rules When You’ve Bottomed Out” is available in
bookstores and on Amazon.com.
StartingOverNow.com
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* Starting over in
their career or
personal life
* Empty nesters
* Entrepreneurs
* Networking
* Job Seekers
* Starting all over
again
* Going through a
divorce
* Looking for career
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* Seeking FREE
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* Finding mentors
* Setting new life
goals
To chart your road
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click here for FREE
"Worksheets and
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can be ordered from
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FREE Resources
to help you:
1. United States of America's
primary source on career
information:
www.onetcenter.org
2. Wage Estimates
www.salary.com and Bureau of
Labor and Statistics
3. Organize Your Job Search -
Post a Question etc.:
www.cvtips.com
4. Starting Over After Divorce:
www.womansdivorce.com
5. Starting Over for Women:
www.makingbreadmagazine.co
m
6. Self Improvement:
www.selfgrowth.com.
7. Job Postings, Resume
Advice and Resources:
www.careerbuiler.com
8. Templates for: business
plans, competitive analysis,
start up costs and more:
www.score.org/business_toolbox
.html
9. Federal/Sate/Local
Government jobs:
www.USAJOBS.com
10. U.S. Government's Free
online courses, webinars and
podcasts for workforce
development:
www.onetacademy.com.
11. Occupational Outlook
Handbok 2008-09 by Bureau of
Labor and Statistics:
http://www.bls.gov/oco/home.ht
m
to help you:
1. United States of America's
primary source on career
information:
www.onetcenter.org
2. Wage Estimates
www.salary.com and Bureau of
Labor and Statistics
3. Organize Your Job Search -
Post a Question etc.:
www.cvtips.com
4. Starting Over After Divorce:
www.womansdivorce.com
5. Starting Over for Women:
www.makingbreadmagazine.co
m
6. Self Improvement:
www.selfgrowth.com.
7. Job Postings, Resume
Advice and Resources:
www.careerbuiler.com
8. Templates for: business
plans, competitive analysis,
start up costs and more:
www.score.org/business_toolbox
.html
9. Federal/Sate/Local
Government jobs:
www.USAJOBS.com
10. U.S. Government's Free
online courses, webinars and
podcasts for workforce
development:
www.onetacademy.com.
11. Occupational Outlook
Handbok 2008-09 by Bureau of
Labor and Statistics:
http://www.bls.gov/oco/home.ht
m
| Mary Lee Gannon is interviewed on Mind Your BIZness |
Listen to Mary
Lee's interview
"From Welfare
to CEO" on the
Renee Bobb
Show on
BlogTalk
Radio.com.
Lee's interview
"From Welfare
to CEO" on the
Renee Bobb
Show on
BlogTalk
Radio.com.
Gannon Group/StartingOverNow.com
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