Well, it’s nearly the end of March so we’re almost a quarter of the way through the year. It only seems a few weeks ago that we were celebrating Christmas! I hope the first part of the year has gone well for you.
If things haven’t gone to plan it could be because you’ve got bogged down in the Swamp of Good Intentions. Let me explain.
I’ve recently teamed up with Sarah Wilson of Perspectives on Business (www.perspectives-on-business.co.uk) to run a series of business development workshops. Last week we were working together on the content of the first workshop and we were thinking about the action plans that we’ll be encouraging the delegates to take away with them. So, we were talking about goal setting and Sarah mentioned an idea called SWAMP. Now at first I thought this was an acronym (a variation of SMART perhaps) but I was wrong. In fact it refers to the swamp of good intentions that we can be sucked into if we set our actions plans too far into the future and place too much reliance on others to complete the action. In a nutshell, if we stray too far into the swamp our chances of achieving the goal can reduce significantly. Here’s a diagram that I hope illustrates it:
It’s an interesting idea and I’ll be keeping this in mind as I plan my activities in future. I’m sure, like me, that you don’t want to get mired in the swamp.
Best wishes
Neil
neilrosesblog 