TAG: SMART goals

The SPIRE of Career Planning: How to Build Happiness and Optimism with Meaningful Career Goals

My first post on the SPIRE of career planning explained how to embrace a positive mindset around your career planning and then conduct a personal assessment of your purpose, values, passions, and strengths. In this post, we will explore how to incorporate those elements to set meaningful career goals and create an action plan.  The result will help you to …

Authentic Personal Leadership for Arts Leaders: Goal-setting for Leadership Development

Once again, I had the privilege and pleasure to train the mid-career leaders selected for Opera America’s Leadership Intensive 2020. Our work together centers on authentic personal leadership to prepare the participants to step into larger leadership roles. Authentic Personal Leadership Development Curriculum My curriculum focused on how to develop the necessary qualities and skills for taking on larger leadership roles …

Share Your Big Goals: How SMART Goals Set You Up for Success

One of the highlights of my summer is teaching the Art of Career Planning at the So Percussion Summer Institute, the wonderful program for budding percussionists founded by my buddies at So Percussion.  In our session, I help these aspiring musicians to gain greater clarity on their career goals. And this year, one of our students surprised everyone by sharing …

SMART Goals for SMART Music Entrepreneurs: How to Make Your Dreams Come True

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Musicians abound with passion and creative ideas. For many, however, this abundance of ideas can be paralyzing since they find it hard to figure out which ones to harness, let alone how to make them happen. Here are two ways to help take those great ideas and make them happen: 1. Write down your goals 2. Set a SMART Goal …

Career Planning for Music Entrepreneurs: Tapping Into Vision and Going for Plan A

The past two weeks, I have had a great time working with the future stars of concert music and talking a lot about how to create a successful career as a musician. First, I spent two days with the Fellows at the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, located in the picture-perfect hills of Northwest Connecticut on a beautiful estate where the …

Career Planning 101: Why You Need to Plan and and Why The Result Isn’t Important!

The first month of my class at Yale has been great!  From our first few classes where my students learned how to think like entrepreneurs, got excited about their dreams and tapped into their personal values, strengths and passions, we then drilled down to translate those lofty dreams into manageable bite-sized goals and action steps.  The past 3 weeks, we have focused on planning-career planning, project planning, and financial planning.  Planning is a TOOL, not a GOAL:  the point of a plan is to get you motivated to take action so that your plan will actually happen.  Let’s see what happens when you engage in the process of planning and what that teaches you about moving forward in the direction that you want to go.

Hope Springs Eternal: How to Change Your Perspective of Your Difficult Situation

Last week, I had the privilege of conducting a class on life balance for the medical residents at Mount Sinai School of Medicine.  The class is part of a wonderful program that the medical school runs called “Advancing Idealism in Medicine”.  The goal of the class is to prevent residents from “burning out” on the job.  I was asked to …

Play to Your Strengths: How to Find and Use Your Strengths to Create Success

Our culture is rampant with negativity.  From report cards to annual reviews at work to billboard advertising, we tend to hear what’s wrong with us, where we are weak and what we need to do in order to improve.  Wouldn’t it be nice to live in a society where everyone’s talents were recognized, validated, encouraged and admired? That’s why strengths are such a positive factor in creating success:  they tell you what is right with you.
Strengths are the tendencies and skills at which you naturally excel.  Strengths can be developed, deepened and even resuscitated after lying dormant for many years. 

My message to clients is to play to your strengths.  It is one of the keys to creating success in your life.

Goal Achievement – Get Unstuck and Figure Out Your Challenges

You have set a goal that feels authentic and inspirational. You have refined it down to your short-term SMART Goal so that your goal feels manageable. You are taking your weekly actions. And then something happens. You get stuck. 

This is extremely common! If goal-achievement were merely a matter of setting the right goals, we would all get what we wanted all the time. Now we need one to go one step further and figure out the challenges that might be getting in the way of your accomplishing your big goal? This is a critical step to successful goal achievement and one that you need to master so that your goals do not get sabotaged by those obstacles!