Personal Goal Setting
Planning to Live Your Life Your
Way
Learn
how to set effective
personal goals.
Many
people feel as if they're adrift in the world. They work hard, but they don't
seem to get anywhere worthwhile.
A
key reason that they feel this way is that they haven't spent enough time
thinking about what they want from life, and haven't set themselves formal
goals. After all, would you set out on a major journey with no real idea of
your destination? Probably not!
Goal
setting is a powerful process for thinking about your ideal future, and for
motivating yourself to turn your vision of this future into reality.
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 can,
so easily, lead you astray.
Why Set Goals?
Top-level
athletes, successful business-people and achievers in all fields all set goals.
Setting goals gives you long-term vision and short-term motivation. It focuses
your acquisition of knowledge, and helps 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, and you'll see forward progress in what might previously have
seemed a long pointless grind. You will also raise your self-confidence, as you
recognize your own ability and competence in achieving the goals that you've
set.
Starting to Set Personal Goals
You
set your goals on a number of levels:
- First you create your
"big picture" of what you want to do or achieve (short term or
long term), and identify the large-scale goals that you want to achieve.
- Then, you break these down
into the smaller and smaller targets that you must hit to reach your
lifetime goals.
- Finally, once you have your
plan, you start working on it to achieve these goals.
This
is why we start the process of setting goals by looking at your lifetime goals.
Then, we work down to the things that you can do in achievable time frames,
next year, next month, next week, and today, to start moving towards them.
Step 1: Setting 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).
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 of the following categories (or in other categories of your own,
where these are important to you):
- Career –
What level do you want to reach in your career, or what do you want to
achieve?
- Financial
– How much do you want to earn, by what stage? How is this related to your
career goals?
- Education
– Is there any knowledge you want to acquire in particular? What
information and skills will you need to have in order 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?
- Artistic –
Do you want to achieve any artistic goals?
- 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
behaviour or find a solution to the problem.)
- Physical –
Are there any athletic goals that 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 thought storming these things, and then select one or more goals in
each category that best reflect what you want to do. Then consider trimming
again so that you have a small number of really significant goals that you can
focus on.
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.
Crafting
a personal mission statement can help bring your most important goals into
sharp focus.
Step 2: Setting Smaller Goals
Once
you have set your lifetime goals, set a five-year plan of smaller goals that
you need to complete if you are to reach your lifetime plan.
Then
create a one-year plan, six-month plan, and a one-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, your smaller goals might be to read books and gather
information on the achievement of your higher-level 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've decided on your first set of goals, 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. (A good way of doing this is to schedule regular,
repeating reviews.)
SMART Goals
A
useful way of making goals more powerful is to use the SMART mnemonic. While
there are plenty of variants (some of which we've included in parenthesis),
SMART usually stands for:
- S –
Specific (or Significant).
- M –
Measurable (or Meaningful).
- A –
Attainable (or Action-Oriented).
- R –
Relevant (or Rewarding).
- T –
Time-bound (or Trackable).
For
example, instead of having "to sail around the world" as a goal, it's
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!
Further Tips for Setting Your
Goals
The
following broad guidelines will help you to set effective, achievable 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 precise goals, putting in dates, times and amounts so that you can
measure achievement. If you do this, you'll 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 having 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 that you're 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.
·
Set
performance goals, not outcome goals – You should take care to set goals over which you have as
much control as possible. It can be quite dispiriting to fail to achieve a
personal goal for reasons beyond your control!
In
business, these reasons could be bad business environments or unexpected
effects of government policy. In sport, they could include 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's
important to set goals that you can achieve. All sorts of people (for example,
employers, parents, media, or society) can set unrealistic goals for you. They
will often do this in ignorance of your own desires and ambitions.
It's
also possible to set goals that are too difficult because you might 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.
Achieving Goals
When
you've 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
that you've 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 goal harder.
- If the goal took a
dispiriting length of time to achieve, make the next goal 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.
It's
important to remember that failing to meet goals does not matter much, just as
long as you learn from the experience.
Feed
lessons you have learned back into the process of setting your next goals.
Remember too that your goals will change as time goes on. Adjust them regularly
to reflect growth in your knowledge and experience, and if goals do not hold
any attraction any longer, consider letting them go.
Example Personal Goals
For
her New Year's Resolution, Susan has decided to think about what she really
wants to do with her life.
Her
lifetime goals are as follows:
- Career –
"To be managing editor of the magazine that I work for."
- Artistic –
"To keep working on my illustration skills. Ultimately I want to have
my own show in our downtown gallery."
- Physical –
"To run a marathon."
Now
that Susan has listed her lifetime goals, she then breaks down each one into
smaller, more manageable goals.
Let's
take a closer look at how she might break down her lifetime career goal –
becoming managing editor of her magazine:
- Five-year goal:
"Become deputy editor."
- One-year goal: "Volunteer
for projects that the current Managing Editor is heading up."
- Six-month goal:
"Go back to school and finish my journalism degree."
- One-month goal:
"Talk to the current managing editor to determine what skills are
needed to do the job."
- One-week goal:
"Book the meeting with the Managing Editor."
As
you can see from this example, breaking big goals down into smaller, more
manageable goals makes it far easier to see how the goal will get accomplished.
Key Points
Goal
setting is an important method of:
- Deciding what you want to
achieve in your life.
- Separating what's important
from what's irrelevant, or a distraction.
- Motivating yourself.
- Building your
self-confidence, based on successful achievement of goals.
Set
your lifetime goals first. Then, set a five-year plan of smaller goals that you
need to complete if you are to reach your lifetime plan. Keep the process going
by regularly reviewing and updating your goals. And remember to take time to
enjoy the satisfaction of achieving your goals when you do so.
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!
Vision Frame
"Great thoughts come from the heart", when the heart is enthused, motivation becomes effortless. KcP
Giving ourselves the opportunity to write down our goal plan can help us to visualize our chosen
active waves.
Reflecting our goals with images through the creation of a personal vision frame,
increases the focus and assists in the flow of our set goals, which can produce fabulous results.
The frame represents five irreducible questions
of clarity. Therefore the ability to answer five questions in a clear concise
and compelling way is the litmus test of clarity.
Using pictures, words, affirmation, images, within the vision frame, enhances the emotional and physical senses of the goal within its completion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F21sPmnc96c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTf4ejMpXAQ
The
frame represents five irreducible questions of clarity. Therefore the
ability to answer five questions in a clear concise and compelling way
is the litmus test of clarity - See more at:
http://www.willmancini.com/the-vision-frame-the-core-tool-for-visionary-church-leaders#sthash.n84HWKWQ.dpuf
he
frame represents five irreducible questions of clarity. Therefore the
ability to answer five questions in a clear concise and compelling way
is the litmus test of clarity - See more at:
http://www.willmancini.com/the-vision-frame-the-core-tool-for-visionary-church-leaders#sthash.n84HWKWQ.dpuf
The
frame represents five irreducible questions of clarity. Therefore the
ability to answer five questions in a clear concise and compelling way
is the litmus test of clarity - See more at:
http://www.willmancini.com/the-vision-frame-the-core-tool-for-visionary-church-leaders#sthash.n84HWKWQ.dpuf
http://maximcoaching.com/
http://www.therelaxationroom.co.uk/
http://www.holisticinsights.co.uk/
would you like support with Goal Setting and Vision framing with an experienced coach, please do not hesitate contact
freedafurn@gmail.com
Time for You Holistic Practitioners.
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