Many people feel as if they're
adrift in the world. They work hard, but they don't seem to get anywhere
worthwhile.
A key reason that they feel this
way is that they haven't spent enough time thinking about what they want from
life, and haven't set themselves formal goals. After all, would you set out on
a major journey with no real idea of your destination? Probably not!
Goal setting is a powerful
process for thinking about your ideal future, and for motivating yourself to
turn your vision of this future into reality.
The process of setting goals
helps you choose where you want to go in life. By knowing precisely what you
want to achieve, you know where you have to concentrate your efforts. You'll
also quickly spot the distractions that can, so easily, lead you astray.
Why
Set Goals?
Top-level athletes, successful
business-people and achievers in all fields all set goals. Setting goals gives
you long-term vision and short-term motivation. It focuses your acquisition of
knowledge, and helps you to organize your time and your resources so that you
can make the very most of your life.
By setting sharp, clearly defined
goals, you can measure and take pride in the achievement of those goals, and
you'll see forward progress in what might previously have seemed a long
pointless grind. You will also raise your self confidence, as you recognize your own ability
and competence in achieving the goals that you've set.
Starting
to Set Personal Goals
You set your goals on a number of
levels:
- First you create your "big picture" of what
you want to do with your life (or over, say, the next 10 years), and
identify the large-scale goals that you want to achieve.
- Then, you break these down into the smaller and
smaller targets that you must hit to reach your lifetime goals.
- Finally, once you have your plan, you start working
on it to achieve these goals.
This is why we start the process
of setting goals by looking at your lifetime goals. Then, we work down to the
things that you can do in, say, the next five years, then next year, next
month, next week, and today, to start moving towards them.
Step
1: Setting Lifetime Goals
The first step in setting
personal goals is to consider what you want to achieve in your lifetime
(or at least, by a significant and distant age in the future). Setting lifetime
goals gives you the overall perspective that shapes all other aspects of your decision
making.
To give a broad, balanced
coverage of all important areas in your life, try to set goals in some of the
following categories (or in other categories of your own, where these are
important to you):
- Career – What level do you want to reach
in your career, or what do you want to achieve?
- Financial – How much do you want to earn,
by what stage? How is this related to your career goals?
- Education – Is there any knowledge you
want to acquire in particular? What information and skills will you need
to have in order to achieve other goals?
- Family – Do you want to be a parent? If
so, how are you going to be a good parent? How do you want to be seen by a
partner or by members of your extended family?
- Artistic – Do you want to achieve any
artistic goals?
- Attitude – Is any part of your mindset
holding you back? Is there any part of the way that you behave that upsets
you? (If so, set a goal to improve your behavior or find a solution to the
problem.)
- Physical – Are there any athletic goals
that you want to achieve, or do you want good health deep into old age?
What steps are you going to take to achieve this?
- Pleasure – How do you want to enjoy
yourself? (You should ensure that some of your life is for you!)
- Public Service – Do you want to make the
world a better place? If so, how?
Spend some time brainstorming these things, and then select
one or more goals in each category that best reflect what you want to do. Then
consider trimming again so that you have a small number of really significant
goals that you can focus on.
As you do this, make sure that
the goals that you have set are ones that you genuinely want to achieve, not
ones that your parents, family, or employers might want. (If you have a partner,
you probably want to consider what he or she wants – however, make sure that
you also remain true to yourself!)
Step
2: Setting Smaller Goals
Once you have set your lifetime
goals, set a five-year plan of smaller goals that you need to complete if you
are to reach your lifetime plan.
Then create a one-year plan,
six-month plan, and a one-month plan of progressively smaller goals that you
should reach to achieve your lifetime goals. Each of these should be based on
the previous plan.
Then create a daily To-Do-List of things that you should do
today to work towards your lifetime goals.
At an early stage, your smaller
goals might be to read books and gather information on the achievement of your
higher level goals. This will help you to improve the quality and realism of
your goal setting.
Finally review your plans, and
make sure that they fit the way in which you want to live your life.
Staying on Course
Once you've decided on your first
set of goals, keep the process going by reviewing and updating your To-Do List
on a daily basis.
Periodically review the longer
term plans, and modify them to reflect your changing priorities and experience.
(A good way of doing this is to schedule regular, repeating reviews using a
computer-based diary.)
SMART Goals
A useful way of making goals more
powerful is to use the SMART mnemonic. While there are plenty of variants (some
of which we've included in parenthesis), SMART usually stands for:
- S –
Specific (or Significant).
- M –
Measurable (or Meaningful).
- A –
Attainable (or Action-Oriented).
- R –
Relevant (or Rewarding).
- T –
Time-bound (or Trackable).
Further Tips for Setting Your
Goals
The following broad guidelines
will help you to set effective, achievable goals:
- State each goal as a
positive statement – Express your goals positively –
"Execute this technique well" is a much better goal than
"Don't make this stupid mistake."
- Be precise: Set
precise goals, putting in dates, times and amounts so that you can measure
achievement. If you do this, you'll know exactly when you have achieved
the goal, and can take complete satisfaction from having achieved it.
- Set priorities
– When you have several goals, give each a priority. This helps
you to avoid feeling overwhelmed by having too many goals, and helps to
direct your attention to the most important ones.
- Write goals down – This
crystallizes them and gives them more force.
- Keep operational goals
small – Keep the low-level goals that you're working
towards small and achievable. If a goal is too large, then it can seem
that you are not making progress towards it. Keeping goals small and
incremental gives more opportunities for reward.
- Set performance goals,
not outcome goals – You
should take care to set goals over which you have as much control as
possible. It can be quite dispiriting to fail to achieve a personal goal
for reasons beyond your control!
In business, these reasons could
be bad business environments or unexpected effects of government policy. In
sport, they could include poor judging, bad weather, injury, or just plain bad
luck.
If you base your goals on
personal performance, then you can keep control over the achievement of your
goals, and draw satisfaction from them.
- Set realistic goals – It's
important to set goals that you can achieve. All sorts of people (for
example, employers, parents, media, or society) can set unrealistic goals
for you. They will often do this in ignorance of your own desires and
ambitions.
It's also possible to set goals
that are too difficult because you might not appreciate either the obstacles in
the way, or understand quite how much skill you need to develop to achieve a
particular level of performance.
Achieving
Goals
When you've achieved a goal, take
the time to enjoy the satisfaction of having done so. Absorb the implications
of the goal achievement, and observe the progress that you've made towards
other goals.
If the goal was a significant
one, reward yourself appropriately. All of this helps you build the
self-confidence you deserve.
With the experience of having
achieved this goal, review the rest of your goal plans:
- If you achieved the goal too easily, make your next
goal harder.
- If the goal took a dispiriting length of time to
achieve, make the next goal a little easier.
- If you learned something that would lead you to
change other goals, do so.
- If you noticed a deficit in your skills despite
achieving the goal, decide whether to set goals to fix this.
Example Personal Goals
For her New Year's Resolution,
Susan has decided to think about what she really wants to do with her life.
Her lifetime goals are as
follows:
- Career – "To be managing editor of the
magazine that I work for."
- Artistic –
"To keep working on my illustration skills. Ultimately I want to have
my own show in our downtown gallery."
- Physical –
"To run a marathon."
Now that Susan has listed her
lifetime goals, she then breaks down each one into smaller, more manageable
goals.
Let's take a closer look at how
she might break down her lifetime career goal – becoming managing editor of her
magazine:
- Five-year goal: "Become deputy
editor."
- One-year goal: "Volunteer for
projects that the current Managing Editor is heading up."
- Six-month goal: "Go back to school
and finish my journalism degree."
- One-month goal: "Talk to the current
managing editor to determine what skills are needed to do the job."
- One-week goal: "Book the meeting
with the Managing Editor."
As you can see from this example,
breaking big goals down into smaller, more manageable goals makes it far easier
to see how the goal will get accomplished.
Key Points
Goal setting is an important
method of:
- Deciding what you want to achieve in your life.
- Separating what's important from what's irrelevant,
or a distraction.
- Motivating yourself.
- Building your self-confidence, based on successful
achievement of goals.
Set your lifetime goals first.
Then, set a five-year plan of smaller goals that you need to complete if you
are to reach your lifetime plan. Keep the process going by regularly reviewing
and updating your goals. And remember to take time to enjoy the satisfaction of
achieving your goals when you do so.
If you don't already set goals,
do so, starting now. As you make this technique part of your life, you'll find
your career accelerating, and you'll wonder how you did without it.www.mindtools.com
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