Focus On Your Future!

Mind Tools Showcase #3 - 27th March 2007 This newsletter is published by Mind Tools Ltd of 2nd Floor, 145-157 St John Street, London, EC1V 4PY, UK. You have received it because you have subscribed to our double opt-in newsletter. To subscribe or unsubscribe, just click the links at the bottom of this email.

Contents: Who Sets Your Direction - You... or Fate? Personal Goal Setting New Season Offer A Final Note

IThis issue of the showcase newsletter focuses on one of the most powerful tools we cover: Goal setting. It’s a great time of year, as the season changes, to take a fresh look at where you’re heading and what you want to achieve, and this is what goal setting helps you do.

More than this, goal setting is the core technique used by the most successful people in business, in sport and in many other arenas to motivate themselves and focus their efforts in the way they need to achieve success.

Supporting this, we have our regular feature, "Thought of the Day" from Dianna Podmoroff, asking aptly “Who sets your direction, you or fate?”

And, in our new season special offer, we have a great bonus for people who join the Career Excellence Club in the next 7 days: A complementary copy of our new Personal Development Plan Workbook worth US$19.95. This helps you dig deeper into your career goals, and identify and build the skills you'll need to achieve these. This is so important if you're to achieve them!

Enjoy this edition of the Mind Tools showcase!

  

James & Rachel

James Manktelow and Rachel Thompson
MindTools.com
Mind Tools – Essential skills for an excellent career!

To find out about new tools on the Mind Tools site the moment they’re uploaded, click here to subscribe to the Mind Tools RSS feed (you'll need an RSS newsreader installed), or here to find out more about RSS.

Thought for the Day
Who Sets Your Direction - You... or Fate?

From the “Thought for the Day” series, a regular feature at the Mind Tools Career Excellence Club.

How do you get where you are going in your career? Do you carefully plan each step of the way? Do you grab every opportunity that presents itself? Do you make choices because you feel you should make them, and rely on ideas that other people push your way? Or do you sit back and let fate guide your way?

I am always surprised to learn how many people never set career objectives. And yet, I am never surprised to find that the most successful people I know have clear, and regularly reviewed, objectives. Fate may add some interesting twists and turns, for better or worse, in all of our lives and careers. But if we simply allow fate to determine our direction, will we ever find true fulfilment, or a deep sense of achievement? The chances are that we will not.

Tip: Plan and review your goals regularly and take control of your personal development. Make the choices that are right for you, rather than for other people. By all means, be open to the opportunities that fate may throw your way, but choose carefully from among them, rather than let fate lead you astray.

What Members Say About theCareer Excellence Club: "Mind Tools provides a resource that extends beyond what is currently available in text book format. It is a resource, training course and discussion group all in one, with trained facilitators and people with loads of experience. It's a place I try to visit every day, in my role as a Manager." Linda Hall, Auckland New Zealand

Showcase Article
Personal Goal Setting
Find direction. Live your life your way.

Goal setting is a powerful process for personal planning.

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 would otherwise lure you from your course.

More than this, properly-set goals can be incredibly motivating, and as you get into the habit of setting and achieving goals, you'll find that your self-confidence builds fast.

Achieving More With Focus

Goal setting techniques are used by top-level athletes, successful business people and achievers in all fields. They give you long-term vision and short-term motivation. They focus your acquisition of knowledge and help 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. You can see forward progress in what might previously have seemed a long pointless grind. By setting goals, you also raise your self-confidence, as you recognize your ability and competence in achieving the goals that you have set.

Starting to Set Personal Goals

Goals are set on a number of different levels: First you create your "big picture" of what you want to do with your life, and what large-scale goals you want to achieve. Second, you break these down into the smaller and smaller targets that you must hit so that you reach your lifetime goals. Finally, once you have your plan, you start working to achieve it.

We start this process with your Lifetime Goals, and work down to the things you can do today to start moving towards them.

Your 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) as 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 these categories (or in categories of your own, where these are important to you):

• Artistic:
  Do you want to achieve any artistic goals? If so, what?
• 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.
  
• Career:
  What level do you want to reach in your career?
  
• Education:
  Is there any knowledge you want to acquire in particular? What information and skills will you need 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?
  
• Financial:
  How much do you want to earn by what stage?
  
• Physical:
  Are there any athletic goals 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, and then select one goal in each category that most reflects what you want to do. Then consider trimming again so that you have a small number of really significant goals on which you can focus.

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 you also remain true to yourself!)

Starting to Achieve Your Lifetime Goals

Once you have set your lifetime goals, set a 25 year plan of smaller goals that you should complete if you are to reach your lifetime plan. Then set a 5 year plan, 1 year plan, 6 month plan, and 1 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 these goals may be to read books and gather information on the achievement of your 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 have decided your first set of plans, keep the process going by reviewing and updating your action program or to-do list on a daily basis. Periodically review the longer term plans, and modify them to reflect your changing priorities and experience.

Goal Setting Tips

The following broad guidelines will help you to set effective 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 a precise goal, putting in dates, times and amounts so that you can measure achievement. If you do this, you will 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 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 you are 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. Derive today's goals from larger ones.
  
  
• Set performance goals, not outcome goals: You should take care to set goals over which you have as much control as possible. There is nothing more dispiriting than failing to achieve a personal goal for reasons beyond your control. These could be bad business environments, other people's poor performance, 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, even if outcomes aren't good.
  
  
• Set realistic goals: It is important to set goals that you can achieve. All sorts of people (employers, parents, media, society) can set unrealistic goals for you. They will often do this in ignorance of your own desires and ambitions. Alternatively you may set goals that are too high, because you may 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.

SMART Goals: A useful way of making goals more powerful is to use the SMART mnemonic. While there are plenty of variants, SMART usually stands for: S Specific M Measurable A Attainable R Relevant T Time-bound For example, instead of having “to sail around the world” as a goal, it is more powerful to say “To have completed my trip around the world by December 31, 2015.” Obviously, this will only be attainable if a lot of preparation has been completed beforehand!

Achieving Goals

When you have 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 you have 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 goals harder;
  
• If the goal took a dispiriting length of time to achieve, make the next goals 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.

Failure to meet goals often does not matter much, as long as you learn from it. Feed lessons learned back into your goal setting program.

Remember too that your goals will change as you get older. Adjust them regularly to reflect growth in your knowledge and experience, and if goals do not hold any attraction any longer, then let them go.

Key Points

Goal setting is an important method of:

• Deciding what you want to achieve in your life;
  
• Separating what is important from what is irrelevant, or a distraction;
  
• Motivating yourself; and
  
• Building your self-confidence, based on successful achievement of goals.

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!

Career Excellence Club Spring Offer

Goal setting is just one of the subjects covered in the Mind Tools members area, the Career Excellence Club. In it, get the training, coaching and support you need to have a happy, successful and highly satisfying career. Solve career issues in our member-only discussion forums. Use the many powerful new tools in the Mind Tools Extended Toolkit. Learn from our MP3-based Book Insights and Expert Interviews, join in our Coaching Clinics and Bite-Sized Training lessons, and much, much more.

PLUS: For the next 7 days only, you'll get an extra bonus “Personal Development Plan Workbook” (worth US$19.95) when you join. This helps you think about where you want to go in your career – and plan how you’ll get there. You’ll look at your strengths and weakness, define your career objectives, assess gaps in your skills and experience, and then build a practical action plan to achieve your career goals. Here’s a great opportunity to build your plan, AND get support for it in the club! 

Find Out More >>

A Final Note From James

I hope you enjoyed this article! For even the most experienced and dedicated goal setters, there are always new tips and encouragement to be found! And if you are ready to take your goals and career to the next level, why not join us at the Career Excellence Club, and take advantage of our current Personal Development Plan Workbook offer?

Next week we’re back with the regular newsletter, and a new Mind Tool article for you entitled “Thinking on Your Feet.” This is a must for anyone who has to give presentations, and then cope with those dreaded questions afterwards!

So until then, enjoy your goal setting, and have an excellent week!

James

James Manktelow

Click here to email
Mind Tools
Essential Skills for an Excellent Career!

Privacy Policy:
Mind Tools will treat your email address with complete respect and will not circulate it to any third party.

To unsubscribe, please click the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email we sent you.

IIf you are not already a member and you would like to subscribe, please visit the mindtools.com site and subscribe using the form on the right hand side bar.

© Mind Tools Ltd, 2007.
If you have enjoyed this issue, please feel free to email it on to your friends and co-workers. If you think they would benefit from the skills we teach, please pass this newsletter on!

Also, you are very welcome to post this issue of the newsletter to your own web site. If you do, you must leave it completely intact, include copyright information, and include both the URL of the mindtools site (http://www.mindtools.com) and the subscription email address for the newsletter (http://www.mindtools.com/subscribe.htm).

---

Where to go from here: