Hi, welcome to my latest podcast, whether you’re watching me or listening to me, this podcast is on my tip on how I work towards my career and life goals. There’s lots on the internet about how to achieve your goals, how to achieve what you want in life. But I find a lot of those are aspirational, not really workable. 

Look back at your achievements

So I use something that I find a lot more practical. And it’s simple as, if you want to think of yourself in 10 years’ time, write down how you look back on yourself and write down what you’ve achieved in that 10 years. And that isn’t necessarily just specifics like I’ve made a million pounds or whatever it might be.

It’s, okay, what have you achieved in life? What have you achieved in career? What have you achieved with your family? But also how have you lived it? Because that’s the other thing that I think people miss when they’re talking about achieving goals. It’s all very much career goals. But also, it’s how to achieve the goals, it isn’t necessarily the goals themselves.

Look forward to your goals

So it’s thinking a little bit deeper. Now for a 10-year thing, that can be more career orientated, and can be more family orientated, because it’s simple goals to achieve. Whereas you can also do the same exercise, as if you were in your later years, maybe in your 80s or whatever. And look back and write to your younger self on how you’ve lived your life and how proud you are of what you did.

Now, I sat down to do this, and I found it initially quite difficult because I’m not really the sort of person that can fall into, I don’t know, daydreaming, that kind of thing. So I imagine what my dad will be proud of because my dad’s no longer with me. I idolize my dad. So I thought, okay, what would make my dad proud?
How, how would he be proud how I lived my life? And that was like a light bulb moment. It made it so much easier to look back on what I’d like to achieve to make my dad proud. So that’s how I did it. So it’s simply a case of writing down – there’s some techniques where you write it as a letter, or you could just do it as a bullet point plan.

But it’s as simple as writing down what your goals are going to be, because the vast, vast majority of people don’t really have a goal. They think they have. It’s like, oh, yeah, I’d like to have my own business, or I’d like to retire at 50. And that’s it. Well, okay, it’s kind of a goal, isn’t it? But, okay, to retire at 50.

What does it look like?

What does that look like? You know, are you going to have two million pounds in the bank? Or, you know, are you going to have a business with ten people? Or are you going to have a massive pension fund? You know, there’s no specifics to a goal. So if you’re setting out on a journey, a bit like, I don’t know, if you’re going in a car and you’re going to have a deal, you need to get there.

So you need to set more specific targets of what you’re looking for. So I’ve spoken about obviously the career one now I’ve talked about the money. It can be I wanted to spend more time with my kids and take them out, you know, six weeks of every year and go and work from France or whatever it might be.
So, it’s listing all the things that you want to achieve. So, if you’re a recruiter, it’s probably difficult to think of where you want to be at the end of your life. So, maybe you want to do it in 10 years. Or you could do both, it doesn’t matter. But the point is actually writing down what you want to achieve.

Document your goals

Putting it on paper, of the goals that you want to achieve in life. And here’s the key, is almost getting a sponsor, a bit like in Alcoholics Anonymous. Or if you can afford a life coach or a non-exec whatever that might be, somebody who you give that to and you talk to somebody about it, so you’re then accountable to achieving that.

So if you’ve got a life partner, okay, it can be your partner, how are they going to hold you accountable to it? Is it going to be a best friend? Is it going to be somebody you respect? Somebody, I know maybe one of your relatives or somebody in business or wherever it might be. Or if you have the money, you want to invest in it.

And it’s only a small investment. If you think about your whole life is a life coach or a non-exec. Somebody that you’re going to talk to on a periodic basis to see how you’re getting on with the goal. Because the problem with the goals is if you hold yourself accountable, you’ll get distracted. And especially if you’re in the recruitment industry, which I imagine virtually all of you are because otherwise you wouldn’t listen to me.

Are most recruiters or people in the recruitment industry have a short attention span. And aren’t necessarily good at seeing things through. Maybe short-term things, but not long-term things. And
clearly your life goal is a long-term thing. So my, not secret, but my technique was having somebody to go accountable to.

Accountability

Now, I actually chose to have a life coach. However, I can’t say this life coach is any good, to be absolutely honest. I’m doing very well with my life goals and my plan. Now I’ve started doing this, but it isn’t necessarily because of him. Because the funny thing is when I have a session with him, I’ll run through what I’ve done and I go, well, what are we going to talk about now?

Cause you kind of done everything that we were going to talk about and you’d kind of come up with your own answers. So maybe let’s explore a few things. But I found that because I was talking to somebody and I had this person I was accountable to, it just gave me a sense of responsibility to actually tell what I’ve done.

Otherwise I look like a bit of a dick, you know, especially because I’m paying this person. So if I’d said, you know, one of my goals was, or one of my short-term changes in my lifestyle, was spend half an hour every afternoon walking the dog. Because getting outside, getting some fresh air, I work 100 mile an hour, I’m very adrenaline charged, very, very driven.

So getting that half an hour out, allowing me to sort of decompress and slow down. Reflect on certain things, have a better thinking time and then go back when those more effective. So it’s putting something like that in place. So if I’m then talking to this chap a month later and he says, how are you getting on with the dog walking?

And I go I’ve not done it. Then, you know, I look a bit of a dick, don’t I? So I’ve got somebody that I’m accountable to. So it’s having somebody that you’re accountable to achieve your life goals. But also, it’s reviewing those goals. Because as time moves on, your goals will change. And what, what I found is you can set certain aspirations and goals.

Goals change

But once you’ve achieved certain things, those goals will change. They’ll either become more ambitious, less ambitious, completely different. Because life changes. The things that you want from life change. Because that’s one of the things I talk about with the people I help set up in business. We talk about, okay, what’s your three-year plan or your five-year plan or ten-year plan?

And when I say plan, I mean, your goals, your ideals. Because, it’s a very, very difficult startup to write, you know, a detailed plan. Because you’ve got to be opportunistic and roll with the opportunities that you find. But what I say is, is that you won’t know now what you want in three years’ time, and you won’t know what you want in six years’ time or ten years’ time because it’ll change.

And I know because I’ve been there. You know, when I first set up, all I was interested was making as much money as humanly possible. That was as far as it went. And then I got to five years’ time, okay, I’m earning a good amount of money, but I want to do some personal development. I want to, I want to develop as a professional.

That’s when I spent some time at Cranfield Business School. And then I thought, right, I want to take on, when I came out, I want to be Alan Sugar or James Kahn or whatever and build a huge organization. So that was my goal. After 10 years, I thought, right, I’ve done that. I’m a bit exhausted. I want a different goal.

My goal then was self-actualization, becoming the best version of me that I could possibly be. And giving something back without sounding a bit soft or whatever, but, you know, giving something back to the recruitment industry by working with a small selection of recruiting businesses and helping those people achieve their goals.

In the easiest possible way, making their life easy, because my first five years in business were brilliant. I made a lot of mistakes, and it was quite stressful at times, and I could have done it a lot easier had I had a mentor or a coach to work with me. So that’s why I decided what I wanted to do. I’ve been doing Davidson Gray now for 13 years.

Look at the bigger picture

So now I’m starting to look at, okay, well, where do I go from here? I mean, I’m only 52. I don’t, I’ll never retire because I’ve got too much of an active brain, but it’s just, okay, yeah, I’m achieving some good things here, but what else? And then, you know, maybe because I’m getting to 52 and I’ve lost my dad, I’m looking at things I want to achieve in the much bigger picture.

You know, one of the things I want to achieve is I want to give away half of my net worth to charity because I’m thinking how proud my dad would be if he saw that I’d done that. So, you know, giving away half my net worth to charity, whatever charity it be, it doesn’t really matter to me at the moment, it’s just a case of, right, I want to put in place something where I can gradually start giving that away, because that is something I want to leave as a legacy, as a footprint, you know, again, without getting, whatever, but, you know, I know that’s something that I’d be proud of.

So, what you want and what your goals are will change, but the key to me is having somebody that is going to hold you accountable. When I say accountable, it’s somebody that is going to say, let’s have that chat and you go, oh, I’m too busy with the proof or whatever you want to do. Is it going to say, no, you said you were going to do this.

Okay, let’s do it. And somebody is going to pin you down to have these chats and sit down with you in review and say, how have you got on with this? You know, how are you doing with these things? And that sort of conversation does involve a certain degree of coaching, but it depends how coachable you are and how much of a self-manager you are.

Because I’m a good self-manager. Hence why my life coach says you’ve done it all yourself. Because I go, right, I can do this. Think I’m going to do it. I’ll just do it. But, you know, it’s choosing the person that’s going to do it. And that person might change because you might go, okay, I’m going to deal with my life partner.

And then after a few sessions, she’s not interested. He’s not interested. And he just wades off. So you have to find somebody else. But the commitment you’ve got to make is the commitment to find somebody that’s going to keep your commitment. And that’s the key, is actually getting somebody who is going to ask for these regular conversations, whether it’s monthly, you know, it’s every two months, every six months, wherever it might be, who’s going to run through that with you.

And then, what I would ask that person to do, is get you to update your plan and send it back. Okay. And certainly if you’ve got bullet points within the plan to achieve the goals, because I said before, if you want to say, I want to retire at 50, you go, okay, what does that look like? How much money will I need and how am I going to achieve that?

Go into detail

And then you start to work backwards. And then it comes into the sort of KPI thing that you do as a recruiter. It’s not necessarily KPI, but it will be to a degree because it’s the key indicators that you’re on your way to achieving what you want to achieve. So if it is, you want to retire at 50, it could be, I need to put away 50 grand a year into my pension.

It could be as simple as that. And then it’s a case of to get that 50 grand, how much have I got to earn to have 50 grand of disposable income to put in my pension. Okay, I need to earn this. Okay. How am I going to earn that? Am I going to earn it in the job I’m in now? You know, if it’s not in the job I’m in now, I’m going to change jobs.

I’ll be going to set up. If I can’t achieve the performance that I’m delivering now, how do I change my performance? It’s about looking at the end goal and working it backwards but having the discipline to actually stick to it. Because it’s so, so easy to do it a few times. Then kind of let it go.

Life achievement

But you’re talking about your life. You’re talking about you know, what you’re going to achieve in life. What is more important than what you’re going to achieve in life? There’s nothing is there because when I say what you are going to achieve, it’s, it’s achieving in the bigger picture, it’s the happiness you’re going to give to your family.

It’s the happiness you’re going to give to your friends. It’s the happiness that you’re going to give to you. It could be the happiness you give to the wider community. You know, my best friend, he’s a vacationer with his charity. You know, he works for charities, he has a full-time job as a charity, he does charity at night, he goes across Africa and helps build schools and that kind of shit.

You know, that’s his thing, he’s giving to the wider community, you know, spreading good in the world without, you know, again a bit, that kind of thing. But you know, it’s about living your life the very best you can. You know, you’ve got all the ‘life isn’t a dress rehearsal’ and that kind of thing, but you only get one life.

So, rather than just investing in the small things, invest in the big thing so you can achieve something in your life, you know, not just the small things in your life, impacting other people, you know, you owe it to yourself to live the best life you can. So how are you going to do that? Well, you’re not going to do that by literally just living day by day, week by week and just pushing, you know, you could have some level of success.

But if you do write that list of what you want to achieve in life, I guarantee you it will crystallize some things in your mind that you didn’t think of and you didn’t realize. But what it’ll also do, it’ll probably crystallize that you’re kidding yourself. Because you’ll say, I want to retire at 50, whatever it might be.
And then you go, okay, how am I going to achieve that? And you look back and you go, I’m sure as shit not going to do that the way I’m doing it now. So then you’re going to have to do something about it. You’re going to have to effect some change to try and achieve that goal and it’s been proven I think they, I forget what it was now, but they did a poll of a hundred people in the deathbeds or whatever.

And they asked them, you know, what was their biggest regrets, and the vast majority is things they didn’t do. Now, it’s all about what you didn’t do. You don’t want to look back at things you didn’t do. So give yourself the opportunity to go, right, this is my goal. This is what I’ve got to do to achieve it and try and hit them.

And okay, if you don’t hit them, at least you’ve tried. But I bet you’re guaranteed that you’re going to achieve a damn sight more than you would have done if you didn’t try in the first place. So that, that’s the end of this audio podcast or video, depending on if you’re watching it. It’s just how I achieve my goals.

Conclusion

Like I said, there’s lots of other techniques that you can find out on the internet where I might be. But what I would applore you to do is to commit to one and actually try and achieve it so you can get the most out of your life. Anyway, I hope you’ve enjoyed this. If you’re watching this on YouTube, can you subscribe?

Nice can’t be lovely. Again, if you listen to some of the audio podcasts, subscribe to that as well. And also if you are a recruiter looking to set up a business, that’s what I do for a living now. I hasten to add that I’m very choosy on who I back and who I only work with a very small number of people.

But the people I work with, I give them my heart and soul to achieve what they want to achieve. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this. I’ll try and do another one soon. I usually get sidetracked because I’m a recruiter. Something else new and shiny comes up. But anyway, I hope you enjoyed it. I’ll see you soon.

Thanks for listening or watching my latest podcast. If you did enjoy it, if you could do me one big favour, if you want to subscribe or follow the channel, that’d be superb. If you watched it or listen to it, I want to look at the opposite of either listening or watching, just look at the recruitment podcast by Rhys Jones.
If you are actually a recruitment consultant who’s looking to set up a business, check out my LinkedIn profile and send me a message.