What's Stopping You?: Why Smart People Don't Always Reach Their Potential, and How You Can

Setting the Right Goals

So what do you want? As a High-FF you will need to have an acute awareness of the fact you may set inappropriate goals – at both extremes – for fear of Atkinson’s High-FF peg-hooping avoidance tactics mentioned in Part One. You may yet aim too low or too high because you secretly view yourself as incapable of achieving even moderately challenging goals.

So how can you tell if you have the right goals – other than by waiting for potentially the wrong result? Not easy. For instance, at Moorgate we often discuss with clients the need to look beneath the surface when it comes to setting objectives for our PR campaigns. The client can think we spend too much time on this, sometimes stating in irritation “it’s obvious isn’t ...