Mindful Academy

3.18: MAP Challenge #4

• Jennifer Drake Askey • Season 3 • Episode 18

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Episode 4 of the Mindful Action Pyramid Planning Challenge focuses on goal setting. Rather than traditional SMART goals, the episode introduces "PACT" goals: Purposeful, Actionable, Continuous, and Trackable. 

The emphasis is on creating goals aligned with personal values and long-term objectives, focusing on consistent actions rather than immediate outcomes. 

The episode encourages listeners to break down large projects into smaller, manageable goals and track progress to build momentum and achieve success.

If you like to track things on your smart phone, here are the apps mentioned in the episode: 


 You can access Josh's substack & podcast here:
https://joshuadolezal.substack.com/

Episode Details

Hello, hello, and welcome back to the mindful Academy. I am Jennifer Askey, your academic coach. And this is episode four of the mindful action pyramid planning challenge. And I think I've called it the mindful action planning pyramid challenge. And I keep switching around planning and pyramid in their order. And that's okay, because it's a map, it is an exercise and being mindful about the actions you take, and planning that out in a pyramid shape. So I'm not going to be super fussy about the name, I want to invite you into the process. And so if you are in the middle of the process, you have started off with the foundation of the pyramid and gotten clear on your values, you've used perhaps Brene, browns values list to narrow your search down to five and sort of hold on to them. You've come up with a press statement, using the Mad Libs format. And you've really tried to anchor yourself into like, who is it that you are, when you're doing the work that's meaningful to you? Then we've gone to the tippity, top of the pyramid and talked about what success feels like? What is that inner motivation that drives you? How do you want to feel about your career? When when you're in a place of success, because we can have successes where we feel hollow? What will it feel like when your success feels rich, then we've moved down one layer and looked at the big objectives, the big outcomes that are building blocks that are big pieces of what moves you in the direction of that success. 

And now in the fourth episode of this challenge, we are finally getting to setting goals. And you may be saying or may have said to yourself or mumbled to me in your earbuds. I thought this was a planning exercise when we get to set goals. And we don't set goals right away in the way that I do this. Because if you set goals, I want to write a book, I want to learn Chinese, I want to run a marathon, I want to become Dean. A few things happen. The road is Rocky, right? As every new year's resolution will tell you, we often bite off more than we can chew. And the goal itself is made up of a lot of different things. It's made up of action steps, it's made up of habits, it takes place on a playing field that might be shifting, right. So just starting out with the goal in also invites us into the headspace of sort of, I'm gonna get this thing done, achieved in the bag, and then I will be successful. And one of the one of the biggest things that I have noticed in coaching academics over the last eight years is the academic version of what I think is a very human tendency to say I will be happy when I will be successful when I will be happy when I'm successful, which looks like this according to conventional wisdom, right? And in the academy. And in coaching, a lot of what people are working on is how do I decide what's going to make me happy and do that, instead of pursuing what my environment says should make me happy. And finding that that doesn't quite scratch the itch, right? So we start with values, we start with the feeling of success, so that you get tapped into you. And then you create the big objectives and the values that are reflective of you and personalized to you. And not just sort of the next thing on a career checklist. Okay. And what this does is it taps you into your bigger why? So that when you set a goal, and you don't hit it, because that happens a lot. You hit a stumbling block, you lose momentum, you feel like you need to shift course, you have something to come back to that isn't sort of square one, you come back to well, I've done all this work articulating who I am and what's important to me about this work, what my success looks and feels like. So if I'm if I am tapping back into my motivation, or if I'm course correcting them I'm gonna do that based on the values that I've already articulated. And to do that based on the feelings of success that I'm going for, right? So we never completely erase the board, because you're the board, right? You are the the owner of the system and the plan. And so we do this in a way that hopefully connects you to your internal motivation, right, your internal validation, and not just external validation. And I think most people thrive with external validation. And I think that Careers in Education have certainly offered us have offered you over and over and over again, the model of do a thing, get a gold star feel good for a second, then go do the next thing to get the next gold star. And what I notice in working with a lot of academics is at some point that cumulating gold stars isn't enough, if it isn't connected to your own sense of internal validation, right? So I get to goals pretty late in the system, because I want you to define the contours of your internal compass and your internal validation system. 

And now that I hope that I hope you're there, we're gonna get into goals. Okay. And goals, you may have heard, when I conduct workshops based on this for sort of open enrollment, most people have heard of SMART goals. And smart goals are fine. But SMART goals are sort of project managing. And because we are working with maybe bigger things, things that are going to stretch out over months, maybe years, right, your big up your big objectives, the big rocks, I want your goal system to reflect not just checklist de things, but habits. So I'm going to invite you instead of SMART goals to make a pact with yourself. P A, C, T. Okay. So, packed goals are about continuous growth, rather than just checking things off a list. So I think it is a pretty good alternative to a SMART goal. And I think it works well for what I'm asking you to do here. So if you are looking at the mindful action pyramid workbook, this is page five says Now you set goals. Okay? So we're in the third wedge down of our pyramid. And we're thinking about this big outcomes that you noted for the second wedge, maybe it's writing a book, maybe it's getting a certain kind of promotion, maybe it's grants collaborations, acquiring a skill that's going to take time to integrate, right, those big things that are year plus projects. Now you want to break those down into goals. And these goals are, I think of them when I think at the academic calendar, I think of them as semester long, or quarter long, depending on what your system is. So maybe you're dealing with, you know, the January to May, the summer and the September to December, sort of three big chunks of the year. So I think of setting goals chunk by chunk for your year. In most businesses, we use quarterly goals, right q 1234. This is your version of whatever a quarter is makes sense for the way your job is set up. 

So what is a pact with yourself? All right, the P stands for purposeful. So what the the way you're breaking down the large project is alright, I need something that is aligned to purpose. Well, that fits right in with how we're thinking about the map. Hopefully whatever goal you're creating from those big outcomes is aligned with that success purpose and aligned with your values, okay. And when you break things down into goals, and you can see their purpose that again, taps into your inner motivation, and not just while I got to do it. 

The A stands for actionable. Okay. So this is can you do it? it now. And can you do it? Do you have control over it? Oftentimes we say, I need to publish an article, well, you don't have full control over that you need to submit an article for publication, right? You have control over the submission. And then we see what happens. Maybe your next step is revise and resubmit, right? So we're not focusing on what needs what's going to happen in the future, we're focused on what you can control right now. So that's another example of or another hallmark of making a pact with yourself, what do I have control over? What are the outputs that I can create? Right, the little output, so if we're going to use the example of writing a book, we know why it's aligned to purpose. Because when we did our big outcomes and talked about the book for ourselves, like, Okay, this is aligned with success for these reasons, it's aligned with my academic mission and my trading unit, my, my thought leadership and academia for these reasons, has institutional value for these reasons, you know, its purpose. And then the actionable part is okay, semester, maybe it's 13 weeks, maybe it's 15 weeks, depending on where you are. If you're teaching, if you're not teaching, look at that, and say, Well, what, what are the outputs that I know I can create in 14 weeks random number, while I'm teaching while I'm serving on committees while I'm commuting while I'm living my life, okay, and then you say, I think I can write a chapter or I think I can revise a chapter, or maybe I can outline a chapter or two, right, depending on what your other commitments are. So you're controlling your outputs in a way that you can predict. Because you've done this before you've taught a semester, and you know, how much room that takes up, or how much room you're willing to give it. And so here's how much room you're willing to give another project. 

The C impact stands for continuous. So it's important that when you set your goals for the semester, that you might have some one and done things, but a lot of them if they're part of that big project are going to be continuous and repeatable. It's like, okay, I'm gonna have to do this again, and again and again. Right. So I'm going to have to schedule writing blocks again, and again, and again, I'm going to have to have lab meetings again, and again, and again and again. But doing these things means that you're, you're creating a plan where the big rocks it moved, right? So again, for the book project, the continuous part of the goal is, I'm going to do it every week. Right? I'm going to do it every Monday or I'm going to do it this many times. And, you know, if you're running if you're doing a fitness thing, and you're adding to mileage, right, we start with slow miles, we add more miles, but we don't just randomly say, Okay, I run 10k. So now I'm ready. There's a continuous element of training so that we stay honed. So this is the way I think about creating goals for your big projects is what are the habits you're creating that you do over and over again, that once they are natural and come naturally to you, you can just trust that you're going to hit the goal. And that goal is going to feed into the big objective, right? So these packed goals really are like how can I set in place habits and systems and repeatable things? Where if I do them, I have my own back, I'm making good on the on the deal that I have made with myself. 

And the T impact stands for trackable. And that is the trackable is one of the reasons that I've moved to talking about pact goals over smart goals. Because measurable seems arbitrary in when we're talking about knowledge work. Stats are what most of my clients anyway are looking at. They're looking at maybe success rate, like how many times how many grant applications do I put out in order to get an acceptance right so that might be a set success rate. A trackable thing. Other things to track is word count hours Start, like there are all sorts of things that we can count. And counting is tracking more than it is measuring in my own mind anyway, so trackable is have I done it yes or no? Right? That habit, that continuous action that I said I was going to do have identity today, yes or no. 

There are a gazillion different ways to do this. There is a oh my goodness, it's been around forever. It's called habit. RPG. And it's a habit tracker, that allows and the RPG part is you pick an avatar and you collect rewards. And I think you can go on party on raids together with people in a party, I don't know, I know people who use it and love it, because it gives them the Okay, every Wednesday, I'm supposed to do X Did I do it this week, click Write an author who I follow on social media. In addition to tracking writing, she tracks a couple other things like musical practice, and maybe exercise is the third thing. And she uses a bullet journal and creates just a page of tiny little boxes to fill in with pretty colors around these activities that she's tracking. This reminds me of the owl probably quite dated story about Jerry Seinfeld who practice writing jokes every single day. And he talked about not breaking the chain, just don't ever stop doing it. It doesn't always have to be brilliant. You just have to commit to it. And there is an app, I believe called don't break the chain. And there are other kinds of tracking apps. If you're just tracking, have I done the thing, yes or no. And I will say that for a lot of people I work with that this track ability of your actions really sort of tickles people's fancies, right. I know a lot of people who bullet journal, I know a lot of people who may be sort of live according to their phone. And so you know, maybe you're looking at your step count. And right next to your fitness app is the the other activity tracking apps, you can check your step count, and then you can check your word count, for example. But the yes, no element of tracking your actions, also does this great thing where it isn't always about quality. Right, at some point, you have to worry about quality. But on a day to day basis, if you're keeping a deal with yourself to do a certain kind of work, then getting it done is more important than making it perfect. And then at some point, you're like, Okay, I have enough here that now it's time to refine, but not breaking the chain or not breaking your commitment with yourself if you say you're going to write three days a week, or you're going to if you have a ton of grading, like you're going to schedule microbursts of grading X number of times a week, right and you put this in a tracker and you track it, it doesn't always have to be perfect. But when it's done, there's a tab you can close in your mind, and you can move on to the next task. 

So packed goals are purposeful, actionable, continuous, and trackable. So I'll give a few more examples before I close before I end this episode of the challenge. So a SMART goal might be submit three articles this year, I'm pulling numbers out of hat right submit three articles this get three articles published this year, there's a smart version of a goal, right? Get three articles published this year, I would say that a packed version of that goal is commit to writing. So let's say each article is 1000 words, commit to writing 24,000 words over the course of 12 months. For example, in order to have material for three articles. I'm again I'm sort of pulling this out of my sleeve. This isn't super refined, but the semester length packed goal would be okay. I am working on an article that has purpose. I would like to submit it by x date. My packed goal is to put X number of hours into that article project each week, or that number of hours total. Maybe another packed goal instead of a time based would be word count based. So if I want to submit If that by the end of the semester or by March 30, I would commit to writing 1000 words a week, and then spending two weeks revising. So the notion of published three articles like that, for some people cranks up their anxiety because I don't know if it's gonna get published. long that takes, I don't know if it'll be good enough. And that sort of worry about outcome can be paralyzing. And so much of that isn't something that you directly in that you directly control. So if you control your inputs, if you control the work that you do, and say, Okay, I commit to doing the work, then we'll see what happens with the outcome on the other end. So packed goals aren't goals for necessarily today. Right? Go run errands, that's not going to be a packed type of goal. But if you're biting off really ambitious things, than breaking down your big ambitious thing into smaller things, and creating a pact around those allows you to control for your time and for your inputs, in a way that if you do it, if you make the plan and follow it, you can sort of trust Okay, I will have done my best. So that is the goal setting part of the pyramid. And this is sort of high level. So think about, you know, what are your big projects, those big outcomes, we talked about? What are the smaller semester long quarter long chunks of those things that you can do? And how can you make them about your action and your input? Rather than when it's done? It looks like that? It's published, it's submitted it it's granted, it's done and perfect, right? What are the input goals that are continuous and trackable that gets you there. And when we in the next episode, when we arrive at the, the bottom layer of the pyramid, we're going to talk about what some of those things might be. And we're going to talk a little bit more about habits and about time, which is where for a lot of people, the rubber hits the road. So thank you again, so so much for being here of the mindful action planning challenge. I'm coming back soon with day five, which is all about tactics, the bottom line, what your calendar looks like, see you there soon and get in touch with questions and comments about the map workbook or what you are experiencing as you go through this process. Thanks so much. Talk to you soon. Bye.