Become The Business Person You Were Meant To Be – Part 5: Developing Strategies

With SMART goals in hand, you are ready to build strategies around them. This is just like developing business strategies. That is to say,  you can look at your various strengths and build strategies that play to them. If you know one of your key strengths from Strengths Finder is “Relator,” you work best through people. So, you might find that you want to work on a goal through finding a group that shares the goal and working with them. Or if you are an extrovert, you might exercise more regularly if you are in a group doing the same (a class, a group training together for a race, etc.).

There are always multiple strategies for achieving any goal. These can be as personal as the goals themselves. If you want to reduce the amount of soda you drink, you might think about when you drink it now, what triggers you to drink it, and what alternatives you might create for yourself. Not having it at home could help someone who primarily drinks soda at home, for example. However, if you drink it mostly at work while on a break with colleagues, your strategy would probably be very different.

Habits and Developing Strategies

If you are trying to replace an old habit, such as interrupting others in conversation or asking multiple questions at once before you get answers, you will want to find new behaviors to replace it with. You might work on shutting off the internal dialogue that has you preparing what you want to say by listening to the other person and building a mental image of what they are saying. Take a breath in the silence before you say anything. You might have a mantra before you speak of “one question.” Practice not speaking until you have the one question you really want to ask.

Failure Can Help

A strategy is simply a decision about how to use resources to solve a problem. It is a choice about what you will do and what you will not do in order to achieve a goal. When you have given a strategy a good chance to succeed and find it ineffective, it’s time to come up with a new strategy.  Remember, experimenting is how we learn. Failures are opportunities to examine what happened with a critical eye and design a new solution that may work better.

What strategies will you come up with to reach your goals? How can you learn about strategies that have worked for others and might be useful to you? How will you leverage your innate strengths and values to make your strategies right for you?

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