I’m good at setting goals.

I’m reflective.

I’m disciplined.

I genuinely enjoy thinking about growth and improvement.

And yet, despite the best of intentions, things don’t always go as planned.

It’s not that I don’t care or that I lack follow-through.

But leadership has a way of pulling us sideways.

Urgent emails.

Unexpected conversations.

A school day that demands more than you manage before you’ve finished your first coffee.

If you’re a school leader, this probably sounds familiar.

You’re thoughtful.

You’re committed.

You want to get better — for your students, your staff, and yourself.

And yet, even with discipline and structure, some goals seem to silently slip off course.

Lately, I’ve been wondering if the issue isn’t effort or motivation at all, but how we think about goals in the first place.

Most goal-setting frameworks ask us to focus on outcomes:

Raise achievement.

Improve culture.

Support staff well-being.

Those aren’t bad goals.

But they’re often too broad, too abstract, and too disconnected from daily behavior.

They live on vision boards and planning documents, while real life unfolds somewhere down the hall in the Kindergarten classroom.

For school leaders especially, goals can become performative.

We set them publicly, track them formally, and then feel frustrated when progress feels uneven or hard to sustain.

Maybe the problem isn’t that we’re aiming too high, but that we’re skipping over who we need to become in order to get there.

Danny Bauer recently introduced me to the Harada Method. It's a Japanese approach to goal-setting grounded in long-term daily practice.

He talked about Shohei Ohtani and the daily habits he used to become an amazing athlete. (As a Canadian, I’m still a little bitter about the Dodgers beating our one MLB team… but stick with me, because the lesson lands.)

What stood out was the patience.

The long view.

The emphasis on behaviors over hype, and identity over checklists.

The Harada Method is about clarifying who you are practicing being, and aligning your daily actions accordingly.

What surprised me most was that my goals became more discrete.

More focused.

More intentional.

More honest.

Instead of carrying a vague sense of “I should be better at this,” I found myself naming specific qualities and behaviors I wanted to practice consistently.

Not everything all at once, but only what moves me toward the person I want to become.

That shift has changed how I think about personal goals in particular.

Professional goals tend to take care of themselves in leadership roles, because we’re surrounded by accountability.

Personal goals are quieter.

Easier to postpone.

Easier to rationalize away.

The Harada Method brings those back into view.

It asks you to slow down, clarify, and commit — not to perfection, but to practice.

I’m still early in my exploration, but already it feels less like goal-setting and more like alignment.

If traditional goal-setting has felt frustrating, brittle, or oddly unsatisfying, this approach might be worth exploring.

Not as another system to manage, but as a different way of relating to growth.

The Harada Method reminds us that growth is about practicing who you’re becoming.

So this week, skip the goal and choose one word.

It might be:

Write it somewhere you’ll see it.

Then practice it deliberately — in meetings, hallway conversations, emails, and moments of tension.

You won’t practice it perfectly.

That’s not the point.

One word. Practiced daily.