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How goal setting helped this legal counsel succeed
Overcoming both personal and professional challenges, Peter Muzariri emphasises, necessarily involves effective goal setting as a cornerstone for a prosperous career.
Grace Robbie
Speaking on a recent episode of The Protégé Podcast, Peter Muzariri, a legal counsel for Melbourne-based law firm Costa Asset Management, underscored the significance of strategic goal setting for lawyers due to its role in providing clarity and direction within the dynamic and ever-changing legal landscape. Additionally, he highlighted the importance of setting tangible goals that feel realistic and achievable and offered guidance on how to do so.
“Fundamentally, direction is always important. To me, I see goals as being about direction. It’s about where you want to go,” he said.
Reflecting on his personal journey, Muzariri highlighted the challenges he encountered when making significant life decisions, wherein a multitude of possibilities exist, rendering it challenging to commit to a single path.
“One thing that I, at least in my view, [think] that’s difficult about growing up and trying to make big life decisions is because you’ve got so much information and options and stuff coming towards you.
“I’ve even experienced that it’s hard to decide which road you want to go down or which opportunity to pursue and everything,” he said.
A strategy that Muzariri has found to be effective in navigating challenging decisions involves establishing broad goals.
“What has helped me is thinking about goal setting in the sense [that], you don’t have to know exactly where you want to be at the time and in the exact circumstance. But I think having some broad goal that you’re pursuing helps you because it cuts out a lot of the noise,” he said.
He articulated how this approach is beneficial as it simplifies the decision-making process by providing a clear trajectory, allowing individuals to filter out irrelevant options and focus on what aligns with their goals.
“It makes it easier to make choices because when you at least know which direction you want to go in, it helps you to ignore the things that aren’t relevant to what you’re pursuing. Then that makes it easy because you’re not overwhelmed with all the information coming towards you and everything,” he said.
Muzariri expressed some of the thought-provoking questions he employs to create goals that are in harmony with what he envisions for his future.
“At a broad life level, it’s always about asking myself: where do I see myself being later on in life? Then you look at, where am I now? Where do I see myself being in the next couple of years? Where do I see myself in the long term?
“Then it ties back into being what do you actually want to do with your life, and what you want to contribute or how you want to live it?” he said.
While establishing career-oriented goals holds significant importance, Muzariri stressed the equal importance of formulating objectives that encompass broader life aspirations.
“It’s not just from a career perspective. It’s also [about] personal life perspective, or maybe some people might have specific financial goals they want to achieve,” he said.
Muzariri acknowledges how maintaining long-term goals can, at times, feel daunting or distant, ultimately leaving individuals disheartened. To address this, he recommends that individuals set shorter-term goals as achieving smaller milestones can make the process more manageable and less intimidating.
“What I find difficult is if you just think about [goals] long term without paying attention to the steps immediately in front of you, it feels a bit too far away. I personally find it’s much more difficult to engage with that because it seems so far away.
“So what has helped me is trying to think about, well, in the next 12 months, what do I want to do in the next five years, what does this look like?”
However, Muzariri emphasised the importance of maintaining flexibility and being adaptable while pursuing established goals due to the dynamic nature of the legal system.
“But it’s sort of tough because, at the same time, I’ve learned that circumstances change. So you might start out with a specific goal or a specific aim, and then through whatever circumstances, things just sort of change,” he said.
