Three Words -Touch, Quiet, Gift

The idea of setting three words to help guide you and keep you on track in achieving your goals comes from Chris Brogan, who outlines in his blog how you can cut through all the mission statements, visions and strategic planning by selecting three essential words.

Quoting from his own article at the beginning of 2009, he wrote:  “If you’re not familiar with the exercise, the object is to come up with three words that you use as compass points for your efforts over the year to come. They’re not resolutions. They’re ways of framing what you plan to do in the coming year.”

Rather than being hard and fast objectives, the words you choose should be multifunctional and provide a number of different ways of being applied to your path of achieving your goals. They can highlight when you are on track, provide a warning when you stray from your objective and give you cause to celebrate when you achieve a milestone along the way.  Setting goals is essential in our lives, personally and professionally.

Achieving goals is not so easy,  and often we make it too hard for ourselves to get the positive outcomes we want – by being too rigid.  By setting deadlines that are unrealistic; by not having a simple and clear way of measuring how we are progressing; by not knowing how to get back on track when we stray and thus, too often, abandoning our goals and subsequently lowering our own sense of self worth.

In his blog, Chris writes: In using this method, here’s how I set about wiring my goals to the way I accomplish what I do.

• Determine 3 guiding words for my efforts in 2010.
• List 1-3 paths to accomplishing those goals (aka strategies).
• List distractions that might possibly scuttle my efforts.
• List the steps for each path (these are the projects that map to the goals).
• List what the “finish line” looks like.
• List what comes next, should I actually accomplish something major along those paths.

Chris sets out his three words at the beginning of every year: My Three Words for 2011 and with his blog post in mind, in January 2011 I wrote:

My primary resolution is to build my business, Stories My Nana Tells Stories My Nana Tells, to be a worldwide family membership site. My second resolution is to improve my personal levels of fitness, after a year of being waylaid by accidental health issues.

For 2011, these three star point words will guide me towards my personal goals: Touch, Quiet, Gift. Combined, these three words are a powerful light to illuminate my path to my goals.

Touch

My first star point is to “touch” the lives of others. Touching the lives of others in a positive way will be through writing and personal contact. Writing will not be just the stories themselves, but meeting the expectations of my readers. Reaching out to touch others and helping them achieve their goals too. To touch positively with no expectation of personal profit.

Quiet

My second star point word is “quiet.”  To be quiet, to create a place of quiet, to enjoy the companionship that quiet brings. “Quiet” because it brings patience, a sense of listening first, of making space for others to speak. We cannot truly reach out to others until we have heard what it is they need of us. Quiet is an absence of noise.

Gift

My third word for 2011 is “gift”. Giving others of your time is a priceless gift, so I will be less busy and live more in the moment. It has multiple interpretations – including recognizing and lauding the gifts of others. It conveys the noun (the object) and the verb (the act). To “gift” is done without expectation of return.

Using the three guiding words is akin to using a series of lighthouses to ensure that you sail towards your destination without being wrecked or foundering by straying off course. Not only do you need to chart your course, you need to have points along the way against which you can measure your journey and check that you are still on track for your ultimate destination.

Time for review

It is now almost September 2011 and certainly time for a review of the star words I set in January to help guide me toward my goals for the year and check if I am on course. It is also time to begin planning for 2012 and deciding on how to  build on goals achieved, set new ones in place and determining the three words that will guide my path to success, again.

Three highlights have been

•  the way we touched many lives through the  Global Women’s Summit in Perth, for which I was the Australian Director, meeting wonderful women online and onland.  An outcome is that one of our Summit Attendees is the President of The WIN ( The Women’s Information Network  ) - a Global Organization and I am delighted to see Mynoo Blackbyn step up into this role to support Paula Fellingham and her WIN team.

• Rachel Green featured my own story in Celebrating Tall Poppies and that retelling brought me an unexpected sense of quiet. To be able to share my own story and find support and encouragement from new friends has given me a new peace and opened doors of understanding between former strangers.

• During my six week trip to the US and Canada, I received the gift of personal friendship from many of my online friends in Twitter and LinkedIn – and lived very much “in the moment” while I was away. Photographed at dinner in Cleveland and Burlington NC, at the Zoo, the baseball and a helicopter in New York – Facebook has allowed me to share these precious “gifts” of time and “time out”  with family and friends. Walking down the streets of Toronto with my son and his wife, getting lost in New York, experiencing a Texas Tornado, watching the Polar Bears in the San Diego Zoo or walking with my daughter in law’s sister in Vancouver, I reflected that life is indeed a gift in its own right.

Looking back in review at my idea of the highlights of the year so far, I see that my interpretation of the three words has been quite different from the original intention. I can say that I am working on building my business (with better strategic planning) and have started using NLP to revise my eating patterns to be more healthy than they were in the past.

Right now, I am happy to quietly touch the lives of others and share their gifts and mine, while I acknowledge (with deference to the illustrious Chris Brogan) that a resolution is not a goal and I will give my goals for 2012 a more definite structure and degree of accountability.

Certainly Target 26 ( a 26 inch waistline by March 26, 2012) is one of them and accountability on Facebook is a bit of a giggle but helps keep me on track. Photographing food for Twitter and Facebook  is one way for me to reach out and touch them, for me to keep them (mostly) quiet while they encourage me to achieve my goal and to share our gift of friendship.