Your Personal Super Bowl
Do you know those people who don’t follow football 364 days a year but who wouldn’t miss a Super Bowl party? I do, because I’m one of them, and I know I’m not alone.
We’re quick to make plans when it comes to the Big Game but what about our Big Goals?
As an executive coach, I know that many of us drag our feet on those for weeks, months or even years. Again, I know, because I’m guilty of having done this myself.
Let’s be honest—goals are hard. Making a plan to get wings, beer, and chips and dip with friends is a lot easier than making a plan for our biggest goals.
Here’s the thing: Your goals are your personal Super Bowl. So let’s start treating them that way. Here are three moves you can add to your Big Goals playbook to make them a win:
1. Treat your goals like a contact sport: Our goals are very personal by nature. That’s why we often hold ourselves back from sharing details about them until we have a fully-developed plan to achieve them. By keeping them to ourselves we often fool ourselves into thinking we’re making moves toward them—doing research, making lists and developing elaborate plans—and that’s a mistake.
Like football, the best thing we can do is treat our goals like a contact sport: by getting off the bench and stepping onto the field through sharing our ideas, questions, and concerns with our connections in the ideation phase. I know it can feel counterintuitive to be so open about our dreams or our nascent ideas. However, your network’s feedback, insights, encouragement, and introductions can be essential to moving you forward in achieving your goals. As you think about your goals, consider who in your network can support you, answer questions, be a sounding board, make an introduction, or connect you with somebody in their network who can help.
2. Put on your helmet because you will get sacked: Let me be clear: Goals are hard. As I frequently remind my clients, if goals weren’t difficult, we’d call them things you did last year. Part of the reason that goals are hard is that putting ourselves out there is hard, putting our ideas out there is hard, and change is hard. That’s why I need you to grab your helmet and pads, because there will be moments when you get emotionally sacked by the process. That doesn’t make you deficient; it means you’re fully engaged, and it means you’re playing big and running your ideas down the field. So get back up when you get sacked because it’s only second down. When you do get sacked, if you’ve shared your goals with people you trust, they’ll be there to help pick you back up.
3. You will also score some touchdowns: Have you ever seen a grown man do the chicken dance in the end zone after a touchdown? Just like you will get sacked, you will also have the opportunity to do the chicken dance—and that’s because you have to score touchdowns before you win the big game. It’s not my opinion—it’s how football works.
That’s also why it’s so critical to break our big goals down into micro goals and celebrate those mini touchdowns and field goals when we achieve them. Here’s how it works: Take a goal you have. Now determine what small action you can say “yes” to and say “no” to this week to move toward your goal (remember: per number one, this is a contact sport, so internet research doesn’t count but a real-live conversation with somebody who knows about the topic you were going to research does). At the end of the week, celebrate your success for following through on your “yes” and “no” (chicken-dancing is encouraged, but not required).
Skeptical about the impact small moves make? Last spring, one of my clients had a goal of running more. Her micro “saying yes” goal was to set her alarm 15 minutes early the following morning so she could get up and run before her day got away from her. Her micro “saying no” goal was making sure she didn’t hit the snooze button. Making her goals a contact sport, she asked her partner if they would lovingly kick her out of the bed if she did. She got up and ran that day for thirty minutes.
She went on to complete her first marathon six months later: one “saying yes” and “saying no” decision, one touchdown, one chicken dance at a time.
Let’s treat our goals more like football—a contact sport where we brace for tackles and score touchdowns along the way.
After the Big Game on Sunday, after the wings, beer, chips and cheering, why not give these three moves a try? Let’s treat our goals more like football—a contact sport where we brace for tackles and score touchdowns along the way. No team wins the Super Bowl without a playbook. While I can’t give the teams playing Sunday any advice for the Big Game, I hope this playbook is a start for your Big Goals. I’m rooting for you.
Randi Braun is a certified executive coach and the author of Something Major: The New Playbook for Women at Work. Get in touch with Randi via email or social (below). Copyright 2023. All rights reserved.