Goal setting is a great way to help you realise your ideal future, whether short or long term. It is also very powerful in motivating yourself to turn those goals of your ideal future into a reality.
By realising your ideal future and setting it as a goal, you’ll have a very effective means of determining where you need to concentrate your efforts, and if anything your doing is preventing you from getting what you want.
Effectively setting goals and achieving them is a great way to build confidence and motivation in other goals you set for yourself, and may inspire others to set goals for themselves.
WRITING DOWN YOUR GOALS
When writing down your goals you don’t have to have the perfect list the first time, you can do up several drafts, add on goals whenever you like, but is it usually is not very helpful to be crossing out or being flexible with goals you haven’t achieved. Instead re-think the goal, work out why you didn’t achieve it and then set goals to make up for your shortcomings.
There many different levels of goal setting. First there are the major goals you want to achieve in life, and then there are the minor goals which may be the required steps to achieve your major goals.
SETTING YOUR MAJOR LIFE GOALS
Major life goals are usually those which are what you ultimately want in life, such as getting your dream home, having a family, getting your dream job, or maybe not having to work at all. They can usually fall under these broad categories below:
• Personality:
• Career:
• Education:
• Family/Friends:
• Financial:
• Physical/Health:
• Pleasure/Lifestyle:
• Public Service/Charity:
If you’re having trouble coming up with some goals, try and think of and write down at least one thing for each of these categories above. For example for Public Service/Charity your goal might be “I will donate $50,000 to Children’s Hospitals by 10th September 2010.”
Now with this new list of your goals select the ones that you really feel strongly about and create a more exclusive list of significant goals. This should now be a list of your major goals, give them dates, elaborate on them, and revise them regularly.
Additional tips for ensuring more effective goal setting are:
• State each goal as a positive statement: For example “I will be happy” as opposed to “I won’t be miserable”.
• Be precise: To ensure you achieve your goal how you want it when you want it, you need to be precise. For example your goal might be “Finish Uni” now this could mean anything doesn’t say when, how, what course, what grades you’ll get, etc. If you where to set the goal as “I will graduate from University with a GPA of 6.0 in Bachelor of Engineering by November 2007” then your setting a much more effective goal and I’ve spoken how this has worked for me in
The Power of Thought.
• Set priorities: Prioritising is quite important in setting goals, especially if you have a lot of them. It will help you focus on the most and important and relevant ones at that time, and prevent you from getting overwhelmed by all the others.
• Write goals down: Carve them in stone if you have to, do what ever you can to enforce them into your head. Writing them down reading them, rewriting them again can be very effective in impressing your goals into your subconscious.
• Set goals you have control over: You don’t really want to dishearten yourself by setting goals you don’t achieve and this can happen with goals that you have no real control over. For example you may want a new car, it would be much more effective for you to set the goal that you’ll save enough money to buy your car by the end of the year, but wouldn’t be very effective if your goal was to have your parents save enough money to buy you a car as you most probably won’t have much control over what they save.
• Set realistic goals: There is nothing wrong with dreaming big, however you need to be able to appreciate the potential obstacles that you may face. For someone with no job no money and no career, that wants to be rich an unrealistic goal may be to make 1 million dollars in 24 hours, although I’m not doubting the possibilities a more realistic goal would maybe to make 1 million dollars in 5 years. And provided that the person acted towards that goal I have no doubt that they would achieve there goal in 5 years if not sooner.
If you’re not already setting goals I suggest you start, you will come to realise the power of them and find that with goal setting, belief and action you’ll be getting exactly what you want in life.
