In module number four you focus on Employee Psychology with a lesson on goal setting, something we were just speaking to. Can you walk us through an example of how an HR professional would help an employee set of HARD goal?

OK, so the HARD goals that we talked about, the definition being slightly different from a SMART goal. The H part of the HARD goal is that it's heart-felt because we are psychological, emotional beings. Again there's different personality types, there's different leadership styles, but most people want to have some sort of emotional or value-based connection to their work. That generally generally comes from the heart and not the head. It helps if people are connected to some grander mission or vision.

Let's say you're making widgets. There's not a lot of passion in our heart in the creation of widgets, but there is heart in doing a good job. There is heart on being on a team of people who care about what they're doing, so it really helps again, in the corporate culture to create a heart-felt environment.

And then animated, it's when the project comes to life, you know, you can visualize what it's going to be. It's not just a widget, it's a widget that's going to make kids tricycle. You know, it's that old story when a tourist is passing by a quarry and there's three stone cutters. And he asks the first one "what are you doing?" and he's like "I'm just chipping away at stone", and he asks the second one "what are you doing?" "Well, I'm creating a block of stone to go into a wall" and he asks the third stone cutter "what are you doing?" and he goes "I'm building a cathedral".

So knowing, you know, what it is you're contributing to, and then the R of HARD goals is required and this is kind of what I was talking about before, it's a sense of urgency. That this is required. We need you to do this. You have the talent to do it. It's essential. If people don't feel that they're essential they're not going to show up like what they do matters. And that's very important. And it should be difficult.

Goals should be challenging. That's what motivates us to draw on our strengths. To see if we can meet those challenges. It makes it exciting, it helps us build our skills. And then it makes us feel accomplished when we're when we're done. This is another way to approach goal setting.

Again would I walk into the VP of finance and tell him that he needs to have heart-felt goals? Probably not. But I would maybe question, again, the coaching skill of questioning, say, you know, "Why does this matter? Money is very important. Why is that money, you know, very important?". We have these goals you know, to achieve this financial timeline, things like that, and for someone who's motivated by those sorts of metrics that is a heart-felt goal, that challenge of meeting this expectation is what, you know, why they entered business in the first-place.