Are you setting goals in the right way?

2025 marks the 30th anniversary of the development of Brian Mayne’s Goal Mapping system. It’s a system for which Brian has won numerous global awards, reaching over six million people worldwide, and which now has more than 1,600 people certified to teach it. It’s a system that Brian will be sharing in his Vistage workshop on November 26th.

Brian’s career history demonstrates the success of the Goal Mapping system. “I was born into the two oldest UK circus families”, he says. “I travelled constantly with the funfairs as a child, I left school when I was 13, and I didn’t learn to read or write – partly because of the travelling, partly because of my dyslexia.”

At the age of 18, Brian became the youngest disco licensee in the UK. At 19, he opened a disco on the Isle of Wight that was incredibly successful for 13 years. 

By the age of 29, however, life had taken a very different turn. Brian’s house had been repossessed, his marriage had fallen apart, and he was a million pounds in debt. “It was all down to the start of English people taking their holidays in the Mediterranean”, he says. “The price of air travel had dropped, and people wanted to go to Europe instead of the Isle of Wight. It was terrifying: I’d only ever worked for my dad, I had no qualifications or work experience, and I couldn’t read or write.”

Brian pursued a career in direct sales. “It was one of the only things open to me on commission”, he recalls. “The company I’d joined were running workshops to boost sales performance, and I confessed my situation to the sales trainer. He took a liking to me and showed me how I could use positive thinking not only to boost my sales, but also to overcome my learning problems with dyslexia.”

Within a year, Brian had taught himself to read and write. He began applying the personal development techniques he’d learned to every area of his life, and his sales performance rose from the lowest to the highest. 

“A lot of people wanted to know how I’d done it”, he says. “So I started creating my own workshops, and within a year, I was recruited by a large training company. That taught me about personal development and corporate training – and I set up on my own in 1995 after developing the Goal Mapping concept.”

“Commanding your subconscious mind”

Brian’s Goal Mapping system uses words and pictures to activate both sides of the brain. “The pictures stimulate the creative mind and subconscious mind, and the words stimulate the conscious mind”, explains Brian. “We encourage people to write the words in the form of affirmation – personal, positive and present tense – with the imagery acting a little like a vision board, but more so in that the subconscious really responds to visual imagery.”

It’s a system favoured by major global companies including Microsoft, Siemens, Disney, Coca-Cola and more. 

“It’s a very simple but effective way of commanding your subconscious mind to work with you and support you in whatever you want to achieve”, explains Brian. “So it will work with business goals, but equally it works with personal goals with people wanting to make lifestyle changes.”

Brian’s Vistage workshops are divided into two parts. “They begin with a mindset workshop”, he says. “It teaches attendees how all of us can choose our thoughts – and how choosing positive thoughts creates positive feelings. It’s about creating winning attitudes and empowering beliefs, getting people into the right headspace to choose their goal.”

The workshop then dives into the Goal Mapping technique in more detail. “I encourage attendees to define their goal, why they are aiming for it, and the things they need to do to move towards it”, he explains. “The way businesses tend to use the technique is to create a team goal map which everyone contributes to, with each team member creating their own individual map for their responsibilities, targets and KPIs that contribute to the overall team goal.”

Register for Brian’s workshop

Brian’s Vistage workshop on November 26th will help business leaders to understand the simple science of positive thinking – which forms the basis for understanding why goal-setting is so important. 

“Most people don’t know how to set goals in the correct way”, say Brian. “What I see a lot with Vistage members is that they are quite natural goal setters. The people they employ, however, are not. Because they’re natural goal setters, business leaders often haven’t studied the science behind goal-setting as it’s something that’s intuitive to them.”

By using Brian’s techniques, SME leaders will leave with a framework that helps both them and their teams to not only set goals, but to follow through and achieve them, even when challenges arise. 

Learn more and register for Brian’s Vistage session here.

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