Simple Effective Goal Setting Programs Work Best
Goal setting is a powerful process. It helps you to clearly set out what you want for your life, and starts a process that sets you thinking about the kind of future that you would like to have.
It puts you in an state of expectation, and gives you a belief and a positive attitude that it is achievable.
The simple process of goal setting itself can be an energizing experience. We tend to complicate matters with our emotions, but here it is in a nutshell and how easy it can be.
Set a goal. Write it down. Take action. Maintain work flow until completed. Done.
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Generally speaking, setting goals let you decide the where or who you want to be in your life. This in turn leads you to understand what you need to achieve so that you reach that place or become the person you want to be.
This will also direct you to stay away from things that do not help you achieve your goals and are just distracting or time consuming.
When you set yourself well-defined goals, you will find that you are more energized and more motivated than ever before. Further, once you achieve one or more of your set goals, your confidence gets a well-deserved boost as you now feel that you are capable of reaching the goals.
Goals give you a vision for a long term while having the ability to motivate you repeatedly over the short term. They help you focus on what you need most to help achieve your goals, thereby letting you organize your time and all your resources so that you can derive the maximum benefit from them.
For all these reasons, most successful people like top businessmen, athletes use techniques of goal setting to drive themselves harder and go further.
You can set your goals at different levels. To begin with, you have to decide what the major goals are that you want to achieve on different fronts – on the professional front, personal front, for your family and so on. Then each goal is broken down into smaller and smaller goals with a working plan on how you go about getting to each one of these smaller goals.
How does one start setting goals?
Begin the process by deciding on the major goals of your life – these are then slowly broken down into smaller goals till there are a series of steps outlined for each one of them, which we can start working on each and every day.
Having these major goals will give you a perspective in deciding what you would like to do with other aspects of your life as well.
There need not be just one or two major goals. In fact, try and give yourself the freedom to determine what areas in your life are important to you and where you would like to be in each one of them.
For example,
1. Professional Goals: You may want to reach a certain position in your company and you have to decide what the reasonable time is, within which you can expect to get there.
2. Personal: You may have not been spending much time with your family. How do you plan to rectify that? Are you about to enter a long-term relationship? How do you plan to make it work?
3. Education: You may be stuck in a middle management job because you could never get that college degree. If you would like to get it now, what skills and information are you going to need?
4. Personality: Are there any traits in your personality that you think need changing? Do you think you need to be more disciplined or perhaps learn to be more focused? What techniques will help you with that?
5. Financial: What would you ideally like to earn at what stages and how much savings would you like to have?
6. Physical: Are there any habits you would like to kick like smoking, for instance? How fit do you want to be?
7. Other Interests: How do you plan to make your breaks and vacation count? Do you plan them well? What about your hobbies? Were you once a budding painter and maybe would like to get back to painting? Or perhaps you want to take up bird watching again?
There are many such areas in your life that make you the complete person that you are. Give some thought to the ones mentioned above, maybe you will think up some more of your own.
Draw a list of goals that you feel you would like to achieve in each one of these areas. Carefully go through your list and trim it down to a select few that you feel really motivated and driven to achieve.
This will give you a smaller but important set of goals that you can focus on.
You have to make sure that the goals you have set out for yourself are ones that you want to achieve for yourself and not because your parents, partner or employer want you to do it. Only then will you feel sufficiently motivated to want to achieve them.
When you are setting your major goals, you usually should decide where you want to be one month from now, six months from now, one year, five years and even 10 years from now if you can see that far off.
Thus starting from the big goals, you now have a series of smaller goals that will help you reach your bigger ones. With the smaller goals, take each small goal, work backwards and create a plan to achieve it within your timed deadline.
The plan should then be broken down into systematic steps that you can take everyday so that you are continuously progressing towards your goals. Further, being able to strike off one thing from the list everyday, will give you more self-confidence and help you feel motivated in reaching your final goals.
These small tasks could be something as simple as reading up a few books to get information or making a few phone calls. Nevertheless these are important parts of your overall plan and will help you stay on course to getting to your goals.
Once you have the first set of plans, form a daily to do list which you can keep updating and also reviewing as you keep making progress.
You also have to keep reviewing the long term plans just to make sure that they reflect exactly what you want to in your life at that stage.
As a person grows, things change and priorities change. While your education may have been important to you at one point, maybe with marriage and kids, a job and career are more important.
Review your long term goals periodically and make sure that they are in tune with your changing priorities and lifestyle. Life changes…