How often do you have a strategy for the year and a plan for the day, but end up helping everyone else reach their goals and fulfil their strategies, rather than achieve your own?

It’s a really common problem with KMers. Our work helps all kinds of different aspects of law firms, so we can be helping individual practitioners one minute being a go-to subject matter expert or helping to streamline practice efficiency, and we can be helping marketing the next minute, with knowledge-based content marketing.

For this reason, our first session of 2017 Knowledge Network UK’s “year of getting more done” focused on goal setting and prioritising.

Enter Clare Davis of Nova Associates, who specialises in training and business coaching for law firms, with a particular interest in understanding people’s behaviour and improving relationship-building, for sessions in Birmingham and Bristol.

They were both very practical sessions: no slides, no fancy videos, just a flip chart, a booklet and Clare challenging us to do lots of thinking and focussing (and committing to things….).

Firstly we chose a few personal and work goals. I’m not usually one for visualising stuff with my eyes closed, I tend to be rather sceptical of things like that, but the exercise where we imagined we were one year on and sharing our work and personal achievements with our wider families was an excellent way for me to work out which goals were the “should haves” imposed on me from outside and which were heartfelt and meaningful for me.

I won’t share all Clare’s ideas (have her in to talk to your firm) but we covered all kinds of things:

• key ways to ensure that we achieve goals
• creating vision boards
• making our goals “smarter”
• breaking big goals into milestones
• ideas for saying “No” clearly, firmly but respectfully
• avoiding procrastination (Pomodoro method anyone? Got me through my MBA accounts revision!)
• how to hold ourselves to account (for those of us without the budget for coaching at work).

They were simple sessions really, but the best ones often are and everyone left inspired to focus on their own goals, with the tools to do it.

If you need training in your firm on behaviours, leadership or goal setting, or coaching, speak to Clare at Nova Associates.

Our next KN-UK sessions in April are:

• Bristol – Process management for law firms, by Duncan Ogilvy of 3 Kites
• Birmingham – KM Strategies, by Duncan Ogilvy of 3 Kites
• Manchester  – Conversation and the RCT, by moi, Helene Russell of TheKnowledgeBusiness (email me for details)

Hope to see you there!