Today’s Strategic Alignment Journal Post in two sentences:

Our goals describe the future we hope to create, but that future is ultimately built through the ordinary choices we make every day. Six Seconds’ idea of pursuing a Noble Goal invites us to keep that larger purpose in view, because misalignment can occur when the way we live each day loses connection with the future we say we want.

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We all have goals, written or not. We know what we want to achieve, where we want to be, even who we hope to become. Yet many of our days bear surprisingly little resemblance to those ambitions. We move from meeting to meeting, email to email, interruption to interruption, and at the end of the day we wonder why the future feels no closer than it did yesterday.

I have spent quite some time researching and looking for ways to help my clients connect with their vision and goals daily. The seed of that idea was planted when years ago, I discovered that The Ritz-Carlton holds a Daily Line-Up at its hotels around the world, where employees regularly focus on one of the company’s Service Values, discussing what it means and what living it looks like in practice. What I loved about this was its simplicity. Their values are not left sitting in a document somewhere, waiting to be remembered. They are deliberately brought into the day.

Earlier this year I discovered Six Seconds, a global nonprofit focused on emotional intelligence, at a workshop on Emotional Intelligence. The organisation has spent more than 25 years researching and teaching emotional intelligence and has developed a practical model intended to move emotional intelligence beyond something we understand intellectually into something we actually practice in everyday life. Their work is used in more than 150 countries, and their emotional intelligence assessment has been taken by more than 500,000 people.

Their model is built around three deceptively simple pursuits: Know Yourself, Choose Yourself and Give Yourself.

Know Yourself is about awareness.

What am I feeling? What patterns are operating here? Choose Yourself is about intentionality. Given what I now understand, what am I going to do? Give Yourself moves beyond the self and asks about purpose. What am I doing all of this for? Together, the three are intended to move us from awareness, through intentional choice, into purposeful action.

It is within Give Yourself that Six Seconds places a competency they call Pursue Noble Goals.

A Noble Goal is different from the goals we ordinarily set. Six Seconds describes it as a larger statement of purpose, something enduring, directed outward toward contribution, capable of crossing the different areas of our lives and sufficiently meaningful to continue guiding us over time. It is not something we simply accomplish and cross off a list.

At first, I struggled with that distinction.

If I already have goals, why do I need a Noble Goal?

Then I realised that perhaps I was looking at it from the wrong end.

A conventional goal tells me something I want to accomplish. A Noble Goal tells me something about the future I want to help create. And pursuing that Noble Goal asks me to consider how my choices today contribute to creating that future.

Six Seconds puts this beautifully: the idea is to bring the future you want into the present through even the smallest actions.

That matters because we don’t actually live our lives in five-year plans, annual objectives or quarterly targets.

We live them on Monday morning. We live them in the conversation we are about to have. In the decision we have to make. In how we respond when someone irritates us. In whether we listen or merely wait to speak. In what gets our attention and what doesn’t. In the choices we make when nobody is measuring them.

And this is where I think the idea becomes particularly interesting from the perspective of strategic alignment.

We can have beautifully articulated goals and spend our days behaving in ways that have very little relationship to them.

We can say that relationships matter while continually being unavailable to the people we love. We can say that developing people matters while solving every problem ourselves. We can say that health matters while constructing days that make taking care of ourselves almost impossible. We can say that we want to build a thoughtful business while allowing urgency to determine almost everything we do.

There may be nothing wrong with the goal.

The misalignment may be found in the choices we make on any given day.

Perhaps that is what I find so useful about Six Seconds’ idea of pursuing a Noble Goal. It brings the future into the present. It gives us something against which to test the hundreds of small choices that will never appear in a strategic plan but will eventually determine whether the future we say we want bears any resemblance to the life we are actually creating.

So perhaps alongside asking, What am I trying to accomplish?, there is another question worth asking at the beginning of the day:

What would it look like to live in service of that larger purpose today?

We build the future, one ordinary day at a time, and prepare for that future now.

Six Seconds: Pursue Noble Goals

Strategic Reflection Prompt

What future are you trying to create, and what would it look like to live in service of that future today?

About Giselle

Most costly decisions begin with an inaccurate understanding of the situation.

I’m Giselle Hudson. As a writer and Pre-Decision Diagnostic Advisor, I illuminate understanding so leaders can see more clearly, make wiser decisions, and build better businesses.

Through my daily Strategic Alignment Journal, I explore leadership, decision-making, and the patterns that shape organizations, helping leaders make sense of complexity before committing significant time, money, or resources.

If you could better understand one thing about your business right now, what would it be?