Setting Working For And Achieving Your Personal Goals
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A beginner's guide to planning for success Setting and achieving personal goals is a powerful tool for making positive changes in your life. Achieving goals can increase your optimism and give... |
A beginner’s guide to planning for success
Setting and achieving personal goals is a powerful tool for making positive changes in your life. Achieving goals can increase your optimism and give you the courage to try greater challenges.
Setting a goal sounds easy. You simply pick something you want and decide to go for it, right? Wrong. There are several things you need to think about when you set a goal. First of all, your goal must be measurable. How else will you know whether or not you’ve succeeded? So instead of saying, “I want to make a lot of money next year,” say, “I want to increase my income by 25% next year.”
Second, your goal should be challenging, but achievable. It isn’t any fun to fail at achieving goals, and if you set your sights too high, you’ll soon become discouraged and forget about your goals altogether. So if you’re working in the mail room, don’t set a goal to become the CEO of your company by the end of the business year.
Third, your goal should be something you have at least some control over. If you’re a writer, for instance, you can’t completely control an editor’s decision about whether or not to publish a piece you’ve written. You can make the piece as appealing as possible, of course, but the final decision about publication will be up to the editor. Instead of setting a goal to have a certain number of pieces published by a certain time, then, consider setting a goal of submitting a certain number of pieces to editors, or writing a certain number of query letters. These are things that you can control, and the more pieces you submit and query letters you write, the greater your chance of being published.
Finally, your personal goals should be something you really want and something you are willing to work hard and sacrifice for. For instance, if you think it would be nice to make extra money, but you aren’t willing to increase your work hours or get a second job, there’s no point in setting a goal to earn extra income. Similarly, if you’d like to take off five pounds, but aren’t willing to change your exercise or eating habits, your weight loss goal is likely to go unmet.
Once you have set a goal that is measurable, achievable, controllable, and important to you, it is time to decide how to achieve that goal. Most goals can be broken into smaller sub-goals. For instance, if you’ve decided you want to lose ten pounds over the next two months, you’re looking at losing an average of one pound per week. Now it’s up to you to decide how you’re going to cut 3500 calories out of your diet each week. Ideally, you should be able to make daily progress towards meeting your goal.
Once you’ve set your goals and your sub-goals, evaluate your progress frequently. Are you making progress towards achieving your goals? If so, great! If not, stop and ask yourself why. Perhaps you’ve chosen a goal that is too lofty, or perhaps you’ve set a goal that you think you “should” achieve, but not one you really want to achieve. If so, it may be time to go back to square one and set another goal.
Once you’ve met a goal, remember to celebrate. Setting and achieving personal goals is a really big deal, so treat yourself to something that will have special meaning to you-a new wardrobe, for instance, if you’ve lost weight, or a piece of jewelry to wear to commemorate your successful job performance. The idea is to make achieving goals fun, so you’ll want to do it again and again.
- How To Set Goals For Myself
- Goal Setting In Four Easy Steps
- Goal Setting Process
- Recording Your Private Goals
- Time Management Working To Succeed
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