Ahh, the beginning of the year, also known as New Year’s Resolution time. The time of year to reflect and question all your life decisions. It’s a golden opportunity to go to the gym that you forgot you had a membership for, organize the closet you’ve been stuffing full, and have a cozy, fireplace-lit existential crisis while you’re at it. But it doesn’t have to be this way. As a Birkman Certified Professional, when you help your clients or employees build goals around their strengths, they can leverage their perceptions to enable true, lasting growth and build a positive self-image, instead of one centered on their faults. Birkman is a great tool to help others create life-affirming, realistic goals focused on the unique gifts they already have. So, before your clients or employees decide to change everything about themselves and fall into the inevitable self-despair pit, help them consider how to be even more of who they are–for the better. Enter Birkman-based goals.
For demonstration purposes, we’re going to offer suggestions to a completely hypothetical, totally fictional 33-year-old woman named Brittany who has decided to stop living in her dumpster fire messy home and finally get it organized in 2025.
Build on Their Strengths: Usual Behavior
When considering how to help others tailor their goals to suit their personality, start by considering what strengths they naturally bring to the goal. What elements of their personality can you help them draw from to reach this goal? Or even, how can they tailor the goal to their strengths?
Exemplar Brittany has high Thought, low Physical Energy, and low Insistence Usual Behavior. It’s not in her wheelhouse necessarily to create a systematic and organized routine for cleaning and organizing. So, how can you guide her in using her personality to meet her personal goal for 2025? You may help her see that if she breaks the goal down into chunks and starts with creating a mind map or drawing of how she wants to organize a specific area of her house, she can approach the goal in a way that feels more natural to her than just jumping into action. Maybe she starts with the disastrous toy room and brainstorms the categories she would like to sort the toys into. While that might be it for the first day or two, there is movement toward the goal, and that counts! But the task isn’t as overwhelming because she’s harnessing her mental power and preference for thought before action. It’s those consistent baby steps that align with her natural approach that will get her to the finish line.
Watch Out: Needs
Another benefit to a Birkman-based goal is the insight gained from Needs. When someone’s Needs go unmet, it will eventually lead them to Stress Behavior. This has the double consequence of not meeting their goal, but also their brain begins to associate negative feelings with the goal, which makes it even harder to feel motivated. So, think about what relevant Needs are not getting met in relation to their goal and then work on ways they can get this Need met to move forward.
For Brittany, she doesn’t get a lot of time with her family. Her husband works long hours, so she doesn’t get to spend much time with him. By the time they’ve had dinner and put their daughter down to sleep, she is exhausted and not interested in a toy room take-down. Looking at her Birkman, she has a high Emotional Energy Need. Her husband is her best friend, so instead of focusing on organizing at the end of the day, she needs that time to be together. To keep this in mind, Brittany and her husband could create a game of toy organizing, so they get to ask each other one deep question for every organized toy bin. Or they could set a ten-minute timer and work together to clean as much as possible in that time and then spend the rest of the evening catching up and really talking through their day. Recognizing the balance between time cleaning and quality time together is what’s important, because without that emotional recharge, Brittany won’t have the energy or motivation to organize.
Make it Interesting: Interests and Motivation
Top Interests are the things that motivate and drive people. When included in goal setting, people are far more likely to succeed. Think about how to harness the power of Interests to make goal-meeting more exciting for those you work with.
Brittany has a high Literary Interest, so story is important to her. To motivate her to clean, maybe you encourage her to find a book on tape that she can only listen to while she is organizing. Or it might be that for every minute she cleans the house, she gives herself that same amount of time to work on her novel at the end of the night. The more you can ger her to associate her goal with getting to engage in her Interests, the more likely she is to continue to strive toward that goal.
Flex, Don’t Strain: Building Perception Muscles
Birkman provides insights into how people naturally view the world, and why that perspective is important and necessary. But it also allows us to peek out and see the opposite style. Even more, it helps us understand why there’s benefit to one way of doing things, and the benefits of doing things in the opposite way, too. Growth often requires people to build a little bit more muscle into the opposite of their Usual style. That doesn’t mean they should strive to be the opposite style or become someone different. Instead, it means encouraging them to have a better understanding of how and when to flex into the benefits of that other style. So, when creating a personalized goal, consider what strength they will benefit from flexing into, and how that can be a benefit to their growth overall.
Our girl Brittany, as mentioned previously, has low Insistence Usual Behavior and this goal is a stretch for her. But right now, her lack of organization stands in the way of her achievement. Oftentimes, when her boss asks her for a file, she can’t even locate it on her computer. When she does, it’s untitled and in the wrong application. In making her goal, she knows she will most likely not become the next Marie Kondo. But being able to create some small movements toward being more structured and insistent will help her both inside and outside of work. She doesn’t have to become someone else, but she can be more aware of when building a new muscle will really accelerate her progress towards her goals.
Take a quick look into your crystal ball. It’s New Year’s Eve 2025. Because you have helped Brittany set personalized goals, it’s likely that her messy house has slowly and steadily improved through the year. It’s now a space that brings her peace. More than that, you’ve helped Brittany recognize the innate strengths she has, and she now has more confidence to apply herself to things that seemed out of reach before. You’ve changed her life for the better by building her self-awareness through Birkman. Birkman gives people the power to harness their unique strengths to tackle anything life throws our way. Because really, there’s more than one way to cook an egg. It’s about finding the method that works best for your clients and enabling them to reach their full potential. Transform New Year’s dread into joy instead.
By Brittany Taraba
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