Advisory: Keep Your Goals Away from the Trolls

An excerpt from Game Plan: Achieve Your Goals in Life, Career, and Business. Download the ebook edition for free when you subscribe to the Pregame Magazine email list.


Did you know you have an Advisory Board? Everyone does.

Your Advisory Board can be conscious – your business mentors, networking group, or even a formal organizational board. But your Board isn’t limited to the people you actively ask for advice. It is anyone you allow through your mental filter and thus allow to influence your actions, beliefs, and perspectives.

For each goal or area of life, determine your Advisory Board: who has the insight, experience, outlook, and results you want? Befriend them, observe them, and consult them when you hit a plateau.

Be picky about your Board of Advisors. Get clear on which people you ask for which advice. In addition, be proactive about filtering out information that’s not actually going to serve your goals.

Make sure the person who’s weighing in actually has good and accurate information on the topic. If your friend has been in the same mid-level job for 10 years, she’s probably not the person to ask about entrepreneurship. Your financially illiterate cousin is not the person to consult on Traditional vs. Roth IRAs. See where I’m going with this?

Here are three simple questions I ask before I embrace someone else’s point of view:

  1. Does this person have the results I want in this area? Don’t ask your every-day-is-casual-Friday friend what to wear to a black-tie affair.
  2. Has this person actually gone through it or been part of a similar process? Don’t ask a serial employee how to start your side business.
  3. Is this person happy and healthy? Don’t ask a miserable person how to have a fulfilling experience. Also, life is too short to deal with miserable people.

That last one is key, because your goal is just the destination. Since the path toward your goal is where you’ll spend the bulk of your time and energy, it should be full of people who make the journey easier, better, and more inspired.