Personal
Goal Setting - Planning to Live Your Life Your Way How to Use Tool: Goal setting is a formal process for personal planning. By setting
goals on a routine basis you decide what you want to achieve, and
then move step-by-step towards the achievement of these goals.
The
process of setting goals and targets allows you to choose where
you want to go in life. By knowing precisely what you want to achieve,
you know what you have to concentrate on to do it. You also know
what is merely a distraction. Goal setting is a standard technique used by top-level athletes,
successful business-people and achievers in all fields. It gives
you long-term
vision and short-term motivation. It focuses your acquisition of
knowledge and helps you to organize your resources. 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 will also raise your self-confidence, as you
recognize your ability and competence in achieving the goals that
you have set. The process of achieving goals and seeing this achievement
gives you confidence that you will be able to achieve higher and
more difficult goals. Goals are set on a number of different levels: First you decide
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 towards
achieving it.
Starting to Set Personal Goals
This section explains how to set personal goals. It starts with
your lifetime goals, and then works through a series of lower level
plans culminating in a daily to-do list. By setting up this structure
of plans you can break even the biggest life goal down into a number
of small tasks that you need to do each day to reach the lifetime
goals.
Your Lifetime Goals
The first step in setting personal goals is to consider what you
want to achieve in your lifetime, 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 or all of the following categories: - 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 by your existence?
If so, how?
Once you have decided your goals in these categories, assign a
priority to them from A to F. Then review the goals and re-prioritize
until you are satisfied that they reflect the shape of the life
that you want to lead. Also ensure that the goals that you have
set are the goals that you want to achieve, not what your parents,
spouse, family, or employers want them to be. How to Start 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. Finally set 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 to-do list on a daily basis.
Periodically review the longer term plans, and modify them to reflect
your changing priorities and experience. An easy way of doing this is to use the goal-setting software
like GoalPro
6 on a daily basis
- we review GoalPro on the left-hand sidebar, alternatively you
can download GoalPro from Success
Studios web site. GoalPro uses a similar set of categories
to ones we recommend - either use theirs, or adapt the software
to use ours. Setting Goals Effectively
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, 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 is important to set goals that
you can achieve. All sorts of people (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 be naïve in setting very high goals. You might not appreciate
either the obstacles in the way, or understand quite how many
skills you must master to achieve a particular level of performance.
- Do not set goals too low: Just as it is important not
to set goals unrealistically high, do not set them too low. People
tend to do this where they are afraid of failure or where they
are lazy! You should set goals so that they are slightly out
of
your immediate grasp, but not so far that there is no hope of
achieving them. No one will put serious effort into achieving
a goal that they believe is unrealistic. However, remember that
your belief that a goal is unrealistic may be incorrect. If this
could be the case, you can to change this belief by using imagery
effectively.
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. With the experience of having achieved this goal, review the rest
of your goal plans: - f 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 while achieving the goal you noticed a deficit in your skills,
decide whether to set goals to fix this.
Failure to meet goals does not matter 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 mature. Adjust
them regularly to reflect this growth in your personality. If goals
do not hold any attraction any longer, then let them go. Goal setting
is your servant, not your master. It should bring you real pleasure,
satisfaction and a sense of achievement.
Example:
The best example of goal setting that you can have is to try setting
your own goals. Set aside two hours to think through your lifetime
goals in each of the categories. Then work back through the 25-year
plan, 5-year plan, 1-year plan, 6-month plan, a 1-month plan. Finally
draw up a To Do List of jobs to do tomorrow to move towards your
goals. Tomorrow, do those jobs, and start to use goal-setting routinely!
Key points:
Goal setting is an important method of: - Deciding what is important for you to achieve in your life
- Separating what is important from what is irrelevant
- Motivating yourself to achievement
- Building your self-confidence based on measured achievement
of goals
You should allow yourself to enjoy the achievement of goals and
reward yourself appropriately. Draw lessons where appropriate, and
feed these back into future performance. If you do not already set goals now is a great time to start
- as we said earlier, a good way of doing this is to download
the 30 day free trial version of Success Studios' GoalPro6
software and see whether you like it. This tool is one of many explained in Make
Time For Success!, our newest downloadable e-book. It contains
more than 100 pages of time tested tips, tricks and secrets that
can help you work better and get the most that life has to offer.
You will learn how to set realistic goals, generate a life plan
and leverage all of the opportunities that life has to offer.
Many of the lessons include workbook exercises so that you really
understand how to put these invaluable skills to work in your
life. Click here
to learn
more. | | | | Articles: | Click here to
submit an article... | | | | Directory: | GoalPro6
- GoalPro is a useful software package that helps
you to set personal goals and to monitor your achievement
of them. | | | Managing
Stress for
Career Success - This practical
course shows you how to win control of your job
and career, build positive relationships with
powerful people and co-workers and thrive under
intense pressure. Click here to
make a directory entry... | | | | | Links: | Confidence
World - Your confidence will no longer
be an issue with our free resources. Improve your
self
confidence with our confidence building exercises
and tools. | | | Being
A Success - Be a success in
every area of your life. Being a success has never
been easier. | | | Click here to
exchange links with Mind Tools... | | | | | Download
this section of
Mind Tools in PDF format to read and print at your
leisure | | Download
the Mind Tools EBook -
the Mind Tools site in PDF format for easy reading | | Subscribe
to our newsletter - so
we can tell you about new mind tools |
|
The books on
the right-hand sidebar are Amazon.com's best sellers in the Time
Management area - if you found this article useful, these books
will take your knowledge even further, ensuring that you are up-to-date
with the latest thinking in the field. Alternatively,
have a look at one of our partner-sites on the left. These
are sites we have checked out and think you will find useful. To see the next
article in this series, click the right navigation arrow below.
This article is one of a series on Time Management Techniques -
click here for other good Time
Management tools. Click here to visit
our home page showing the whole range of Mind Tools career development
skills.
Goals - Ice Climber
12 in x 36 in
Buy This Art Print At AllPosters.com Page navigation: | 
