Aligning Actions With Goals

I was building a presentation for a speaking gig the other day and asked my supervisor for advice. He asked me a simple question: “How would you sum up the presentation in one sentence?”

I struggled to answer him, which told me pretty much everything I needed to know. I had a lot of information I wanted to share, but I hadn’t gotten clear on what I wanted people to take away. There were too many ideas competing for attention and too little story connecting them.

Every slide made sense on its own. Together, they were pulling the presentation in different directions.

I think we do this more often than we realize. We put effort into something, make a series of individually reasonable decisions, and assume they add up to the outcome we want. We can usually explain our choices afterward, which makes it easy to convince ourselves we had a clear direction all along.

Relationships are a good example. You might want your partner to feel supported, but walk through the door talking about everything that went wrong at work. You might want your kids to feel comfortable coming to you, but spend most of your interactions correcting them. You might want a collaborative workplace, but respond to every suggestion by explaining why it won’t work.

There are understandable reasons for all of those behaviors. Having a reason for what you did can make it harder to notice whether it served what you wanted.

Try naming the outcome before you begin. Make it specific enough to guide what you do next:

• Before you walk into the house: “I want my wife to feel that I’m happy to see her.” That might mean putting your phone away, giving her a hug, and asking about her day before unloading yours.
• Before a difficult conversation: “I want us to understand what happened and agree on what changes.” That gives you something to come back to when you feel the urge to bring up everything else the person has ever done.
• Before a presentation: “I want the audience to understand ___ and leave able to ___.” Then build the stories, examples, and information around that sentence.

You can ask the same question about meeting someone for the first time, leading a team, or deciding how to spend your weekend. What do you want someone to leave with? What kind of environment are you trying to create? What would make this time well spent?

You won’t control exactly how people feel or what they remember. But getting clear beforehand gives you a way to judge your own choices while you can still change them.