Appropriately Contextualised Goals and the Resources You Need - NLP Matters, Episode #020

The Keys to an Achievable Outcome is a powerful set of keys that ensures that our desired outcomes or goals are structured in a way that maximises our potential for success. 

Last week, we learned the importance of having a goal that is congruently desirable and making sure that our goal is self-initiated and maintained. 

In this episode, we’ll explore the 7th and 8th keys - ensuring that our goal is appropriately contextualised and that we have (or at least know) the resources we need in order to achieve our goal.

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Here are some key takeaways from this episode:

• The 7th key in the Keys to an Achievable Outcome is to ask ourselves, “Is the goal appropriately contextualised?”. This is an important question to ask because “context” has a big impact on our goals. It focuses our attention on where, when, how, and with whom do we want to achieve this result, and this in turn may well cause us to reconsider or redevelop our goal.
• Knowing that a goal is appropriately contextualised gives us the opportunity to confirm that even though we may be clear about our desired outcome, sometimes, the context in which we are present or the context within which the goal has been set is not appropriate for that goal. 
• It’s valuable to identify the issues upfront whilst you are still building and designing the goal rather than wasting time, effort, money, and energy, failing repeatedly trying to achieve the result because the context you are operating in is not appropriate. 
• Having behavioural flexibility is key. You may modify the timeline for the goal or you may tweak the goal itself. Sometimes, you may even ditch the goal. Recognising that the context you are in is not just appropriate for the goal and coming to this realisation upfront means that you can then focus your attention, time, energy, and effort onto goals that are contextually appropriate.
• Identifying the resources we will need to achieve our goals is critically important to our success. We cannot reach your ultimate destination if we’re missing some essential resources, skills, and capabilities to achieve our goal. By knowing the resources we need, we can plan to get what is missing rather than starting out blind to the gaps and then stumbling along the way. 
• You don’t need to have everything ready before you begin. You just have to begin with a comprehensive understanding of what you anticipate will be necessary for your success. You may also have some backup contingencies to call on if you need them. Pre-planning gives you the opportunity to enhance your experience of the journey towards your success.
• It is important to know where, when, how, and with whom do we want to have the goal. Without knowing these our goals can be a bit nebulous - a “pie in the sky.” Even goals that are really positive and have followed the SMART model can fall down because they don’t specify the where, when, how, and with whom. Knowing these things also maximises the experience of achieving our goals.
• The context of a goal may change over time. What may have been a perfectly appropriate goal now may not be in the context of the future. Changes in context happen all the time, and as the context changes, so must the goal.
• Resources support the structure you need to put in place to achieve the goal. It is important to know that even if a goal is self-initiated and maintained, no goal or outcome is achieved totally on our own. 

Now, you can see that having a goal or an outcome that is appropriately contextualized and has the resources outlined can be really important to the achievement of the outcome. It may mean tweaking our goal, changing our goal, postponing our goal, or even ditching our goal, because behavioural flexibility is at the heart of achieving our success.

In the next episode, we’ll explore the final step of the Keys to an Achievable Outcome - ensuring that the goal is ecological.

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