What would you secretly do for free — and other questions star CEO coach Mark Thompson uses to help people define and nail their goals

On LinkedIn’s video series, This is Working, I sit down with top figures from the world of business and beyond to surface what they've learned about solving particular problems. We’re kicking off 2024 with top CEO coach Mark C. Thompson. 

I am pretty bad at setting annual goals.

Every few years, I’ll commit to one of exactly three New Year's Resolutions: Go to sleep earlier, keep a journal, or quit some social media site. The fact that I keep making the same resolutions tells you all you need to know: I've never once followed through.

I know I'm not alone. Only half of us will stick to our New Year’s resolutions, according to a 2020 study in PLOS One. So if so many people fail at resolutions, I feel like the problem is the concept, not humanity in general. 

My guest this week confirms it: most of us go about defining and implementing our goals wrong. Resolution collapse is a process problem, not a people problem. And that's true whether you're setting productivity, family, or career goals.

Mark Thompson's solution is to be realistic about what drives you and what can you can accomplish in the near- and long-term. He's worth listening to, since so many leaders already do. Mark is one of the world’s most sought after executive coaches in the world. He’s a four-time CEO who has counseled people like Venus Williams, Lyft co-founder Logan Green, self-help author Tony Robbins, and Virgin Group founder Richard Branson. Mark's also a New York Times bestselling author, a Tony Award-winning Broadway producer, and an early investor in tech giants like Netflix and Facebook. In other words, he doesn't just coach on goals, he hits them himself.

Mark’s belief is you treat goals almost like a stock portfolio: What positions are you going to add on to? What new ones are you going to try out that might not work? And then how are you going to measure short-term and long-term success?

“You start the year in a burst and want to set these goals — and the goal-setting piece is really important,” Mark told me. “We're comfy, we're dreaming, we're thinking about what's possible. But, that person who's going to do that stuff isn't the person making up the goals. In other words, the person who's imagining what's happening next isn't really thinking about what it's going to require to do that."

That's where the portfolio idea comes in: You have to think about which goals are additions and which are entirely new — and then start adding. "What have you put in so far that you could build on?" he says people should ask themselves. "What are the building blocks that you want to create? How can you think about ways that you could develop those extra skills that you need to put on that next layer of skills and ability? How about trying some things that you haven't tried before and adding that in?"

Mark's approach makes resolutions less daunting. The PLOS One study highlighted two other necessary components for following-through: Having a support system and creating “positive” goals — that is, goals that are about achieving something vs  avoiding something.

Mark coaches his clients to do both. On the people part, you absolutely need a team around you. “We suck at achieving the goals that we set for ourselves unless we know someone else is going to talk to us about them,” Mark says. “Absolutely find a partner.” 

That’s true even if your goals are around the job search — and our data shows big spikes in job hunting in January — which can feel like a particularly solo activity. I think all of us fear that talking to friends about who we’re interviewing with or which companies ghosted us is about as gripping as talking to them about the dream we had last night. It’s not true. Those who care for you care about your economic outcome as much as your personal ones, so bring them in.

Then there’s the part about staying positive. Mark's spin on that is that for any of us to achieve our goals, we need to make sure we're hitting the 3 P's: Passion, purpose, and performance.

• Passion is “that thing that you’d secretly do for free, some element of the work that you're doing needs to be the thing that you just find yourself getting lost in,” he says.
• Purpose is being “connected to something that is bigger … than you are, it could be a community, it could be a customer, it could be a faith, it could be something about your life that feels larger than you but includes you.”
• Performance is “something that you wouldn't mind to keep score at that kind of gets your competitive or winning spirit going.”

If you can find a job or achievement that meets those P's, you're unstoppable. I can see how someone could easily create a chart of those areas to make sure they're focusing on the right areas. What do they care about enough that they’d do it for free, that they’d share their joy with others, and that they’d be driven to do better? 

For me, I prefer to go solo and apply the building block technique. Instead of New Year's Resolutions, I set micro-goals and small deadlines throughout the year and see how success builds. And I don’t beat myself up if they don’t take. Last spring, I decided to try working out three days a week for a month — and that’s now been a habit for nearly a year. I also set a goal to plan my upcoming week every Sunday; that worked for a month and but hasn’t yet become a regular part of my life.

But that’s ok: I can try again or just find other things I want to accomplish. 

But I’m curious about what works for you. What are your goals in 2024? How do you stay on top of your New Year’s resolutions — if you partake in them. Let me know in the comments.

Be sure to tune into our latest "This is Working" podcast with my co-host, Nina Melendez Ibarra to learn more about how passion can play a crucial role in executing your goals. 

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