Happy Friyay! Today marks the start of the Olympics and I’ll be paying attention to the Tennis (for some much needed pointers), along with the track and field events. This week we’ve seen Jeff Bezos take inspiration from The Fast and Furious 9 and take his travels to space. My personal highlight for the week though was the conclusion of the NBA 20/21 season. This saw Giannis Antetokounmpo win his first NBA championship. Giannis achieved his goal and he deserved it, which I love for him. So for this week’s blog I’ll take inspiration from my Nigerian counterpart on goal getting.
Goals help motivate us to develop strategies that will enable us to perform at the required goal level. This is the importance of goals, they can vary and can serve as a great motivation tool to continue to push our growth. A goal of mine was to start this blog, and in follow up to that has been to continue to post weekly for the next year. Now having reached my 10th post, it is a milestone that I’m pleased and a little relieved to have reached. I frequently get asked why do I blog? It’s in part to stretch and push myself to learn more about different topics. These include approaches to project delivery, studying the courses such as Managing Successful Programmes and Agile PM, whilst learning about the wider I.T and Tech industry (please advise me of good sources). Within my career I would also like to support with recruitment. The impact that diverse interview panels has on hiring of BAME staff is significant for a representative workforce as seen with Intel.
Prior to getting to our goals, it’s helpful to set them out well. It’s easy to be really generic when setting goals. For example, a goal could be, I want to be a better person, but by the time you revisit that goal in 3 – 6 months you may not be clear on what you meant. This is because it’s broad and there are so many aspects to simply being a better person. I want to be a better listener is a much clearer and specific goal. In the career aspect, this is why it is beneficial to have a career plan. Career plans are broken up to periods of time to allow for goals to be both broken down and also have target dates to achieve them by. A tip is to look at a position you’re aiming for down the line and note the requirements for the role, you can then include those requirements on a career plan and devise actions to build the expertise. In last week’s blog I mentioned the benefits of having an accountability partner; goal getting is a perfect opportunity for one. Telling an accountability partner of your goals can be beneficial as they can offer you support and encouragement in your journey to achieve it. We’re in July now so just over halfway through the year so this is an opportune time to check in on any existing goals. Not all goals will have been able to have been reached yet, although you may have made progress against them. For those that have been achieved or progress has been made on, embrace them! These are near wins which deserve our celebration, some goals can’t be achieved overnight, but the steps taken to getting there deserve our acknowledgement.
Giannis achieved his goal, he led the team to victory over the Phoenix Suns to bring back the first NBA championship to Milwaukee in 50 years! Giannis told everyone that his goal was to bring a Championship to Milwaukee, trusting the process and putting in the work and delivered on his promise to the city.. For followers of the NBA, you’ll know this did not come easy for him as he came up against walls in the form of the Toronto Raptors and Miami Heat. This championship has the potential to include Giannis in the top 25 players of all time. In terms of his near wins prior to this goal, Giannis had won the league Most Improved player (2017), was a back to back league MVP (2019 & 2020), Defensive Player of the Year (2020) and 5x All Star. The late legend Kobe Bryant set Giannis the goal of becoming an MVP and following Giannis achievement of that he set him the goal of becoming an NBA champion.
As I wrote this post I have finally stopped procrastinating on writing the Futureme letter to myself, I’ve recorded a few goals on there to work towards. I funnily enough recommended it for my friends to do and they all have, I’d recommend taking a few minutes to do it too as it is a fun and interesting exercise. Giannis reached his NBA goal this week and it was truly inspiring, and whilst I’m enjoying his celebratory posts. I can only imagine that from reaching this goal has set himself another of another NBA championship. Blog goals for me next week will be writing another blog, and for the following month producing a new type of post. This week has demonstrated that even the sky isn’t the limit, it goes way beyond that for us, word to Jeff Bezos shoot for the stars!
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