Goal Setting

Goal Setting is the first stage in achieving the life you desire, rather than what most people do, which is wait for life to deal your cards, and take a chance that life might not pass you by, but without goals, it often does.

By setting goals in a specific way (read on and we’ll show you how) we push the button that starts the process that allows you to deal your own life cards, and metaphorically walk the dog, take control and stop letting the dog walk you.

The great thing about goal setting is the whole process, from the moment you start to think about where you want to be, what you want to do, right through to the completion and realization of your goals is a very stimulating and motivational process. Just the pr5ocess of thinking about your goals will leave you feeling more likely to succeed, than if you just continue treading water, goal-less.

Goal setting has many advantages to your life including helping you to increase your levels of confidence as you achieve the stages of development, you will become more organized and you will find that time spent working towards your goal is time well spent, allowing you to begin to discard time-wasteful activities.

There literally are no disadvantages to goal setting, everyone should have goals and establishing them is easy.

Setting your Personal Goals
No matter how big your goal, it can be achieved by completing the stages that need to be fulfilled along the journey. As with problems, if you break a seemingly huge mountain of a task into much smaller molehills, then the end goal will seem much more manageable.

1) Decide on your ultimate goal: Stage 1 involves deciding what your ultimate goal is. When you die, what will you have wanted to achieve, what is your lifetime goal? By setting a lifetime goal you will be able to see more easily the various aspects of yourself that you may wish to design goals for.

To more easily set your lifetime goals it can be useful to break your life down into categories and write your goals within each category, the categories may include your wealth (how much money do you want to have), your family (will you have children, how many times will you marry etc), Academia (are there any courses you would like to have completed), Work (where will you have worked, what level will you have obtained), Health (will you have achieved a particular fitness level, will you die young or old).

These are all possible examples, there will be more.

Once you have a good long healthy list you need to prioritise each goal in order of importance to you, and also in order of the time it will take to achieve (or the time you would like to achieve) them in.

You can use our Discover Your Life Purpose exercise to help you try to discover what your lifetime goal might be.

2) Write down your ultimate goal: Stage 2 is critical to the success of your goal. Failure to write the goal down in a way that you can easily follow may result in a loss of motivation and the failure to take the goal setting process seriously. Goals should always be written down, this helps you to focus and ensures your goals consistency.

Goals should be written in a SMART way, which stands for, Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Temporal.

Specific: Specific is the words that you use within your goal. You must be accurate and straight to the point, exactly WHAT will you achieve.

Measurable: You need to be able to know when you have achieved your goal, HOW will you know, what will you have achieved.

Achievable: The goal you set must be within your own boundaries and is something that you have always thought possible.

Relevant: The goal must be appropriate for you, it is no good setting a goal that you are not interested in achieving, because if you do you probably won’t succeed.

Temporal: You must set a time-limit within your goal, this effectively sets your deadline to work towards, without it you would carry on indefinitely and may never achieve your goal in your lifetime.

A good example of a goal written using the SMART guidelines is,

“On the 1st January 2050 my husband, my 3 children and I will own a 6 bed-roomed house worth £1million”

This goal is very specific, it is measurable because it is specific, it is achievable because the person in question has excellent prospects, it is relevant because they life luxury and it is temporal because a date was included.

It is now important to apply this to each of your goals as identified in stage 1, so for each one right the goal down in a specific way, ensure it is measurable and achievable, is it relevant to you and ensure you add a time constraint to it.

You will now have a list of goal statements that should be in order or the length of time you will complete them in, each goal should go either support a higher goal (a longer term goal) or support a lower goal (a shorter term goal) or both.

3) Maintaining your focus: There are certain things that you can do to stay focussed on your goals, preparing a daily ‘to-do’ list will help you to maintain your focus and also helps you to become more familiar with the smaller parts that go to make up your goals.

Start with your shorter term goals, these will typically be goals that you will achieve between now and 1 months time. If you don’t have any, start with goals that you will achieve between 1 and 3 months.

Now, for each goal write down all of the things that you need to do on a daily and weekly basis to help you to achieve your goals, what specific actions must be completed.

Everyday review your checklist and feel more motivated each item you complete something off the list, and then set a new list of goals for the next day. By ensuring this is done daily your focus will be maintained.

If you are still struggling with your goal setting, why not try our goalsetter™ software and let us help you to manage your life goals.

4) Achieving your goals

When you do achieve your goals, no matter how significant they are in relation to your overall life goals, take the time to enjoy the satisfaction you feel and consider how the achievement of this particular goal sits in the grand scheme of your life goal.

Once you have achieved a goal it is important to review the rest of the goals ahead of you, and try to be as critical as possible. What has the achievement taught you about your own abilities, where you surprised at how easily your goal was achieved, was it harder than you thought, do you need to make changes to future goals? Use this information to then tweak the goals you have ahead of you, try to make them more achievable or harder, depending on your recent success.

It is important to always have goals to work towards, so when your short term goals are achieved, work out what else you need to do to continue moving towards your life goal. Deciding what is important in your life and separating this from what is not important helps you to become more motivated and self-confident, there is no downside to setting goals and by following them you will get what you want in life.

Some important information.

• Goals should always be written down to ensure focus, prioritise and maintain consistency.

• Your goals should always be stated in the positive tense, that is you are trying to achieve something, not discard something.

• Your goals should always be personally achievable, without any reliance on other people or circumstances, this way you can maintain control.

• Aim high, ensure your lifetime goal is a mountain that when achieved will make you feel like you have climbed dizzy heights to get there.

• Follow the rules of SMART, it is a formula that works an that is used by Training and Development companies globally.

If you have dreams and desires and you want to give yourself a chance of realistically achieving them, you need to set goals.

Grow Personal Developments goalsetter™ program helps you to set your goals and keep on top of them, on your way to achieving all you want in life.