Hey everybody, hope you are well.

Sharing some thoughts from my work that could be useful to some of us here.

I'm working with leaders & teams in Cobblestone, essentially elevating the overall performance.

And I saw the team planning for a work sprint & their quarterly goals, I had an idea.

What if in addition to planning for tangible goals, we also plan for intangible ones?

So I tried.

Each person plans & declares two things:

A tangible goal (the usual stuff. Launch X, complete Y, hit Z revenue).

But this time we do it differently.

We start from the Intangible. An aspirational quality they embody today.

Not tomorrow. Today.

"I aspire to be more organized" becomes "I am organized."

"I want to be more refreshed" becomes "I am refreshed."

Here's the twist: You don't work toward becoming organized.

You declare "I AM organized."

Then you set your goals from that identity.

"I am organized, therefore I will achieve goals 1, 2, and 3."

Not "When I achieve these goals, I'll become organized."

The becoming happens first. The doing follows.

We practice this declaration in front of each other.

Social pressure becomes social support.

You own your quality publicly. You become that person through the eyes of others.

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Here is a sketch of the instruction I made for the team.

You make an angel with the body (intangible quality) and wings (tangible goals)

Most goal-setting focuses on having and doing.

We added being.

Because identity work creates the deepest change.

You have to see yourself that way first.

Your goals become expressions of who you already are, not conditions for who you might become.

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Started adopting useful beliefs about who I am today.

There's no "true" identity anyway. Just beliefs that serve you or beliefs that don't.

So you might as well program yourself as the person you want to be.

Right now.

Experiment: (I'm trying with you too)

Pick one quality you've been trying to earn through your next goal.

"successful" or "calm" or "free"

Declare you already are that way.

Set your goals from that place.

What if your future self is already available today?

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with all my love,

Khuyen

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ps: my word is "glad". I am glad I sent this to you all!

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