Personal Goal Setting
Planning
to Live Your Life Your Way
Set powerful goals with James
Manktelow & Amy Carlson.
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?
Goal setting is used by top-level
athletes, successful business-people and achievers in all fields. 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 with your life (or over, say, the next 10 years), 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
goal setting by looking at your lifetime goals. Then, we work down to the
things that you can do in, say, the next five years, then 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
behavior 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 brainstorming
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. (If you have a partner, you
probably want to consider what he or she wants – however, make sure that you
also remain true to yourself!)
Tip:
You may also want to read our article
on Personal Mission Statements . 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.
Tip:
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 using a computer-based
diary.)
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
Goal Setting Tips
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.
Tip
1:
Tip
2:
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 learned back into your
goal setting. 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.
Goal
Setting Example
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.
Tip:
A good way of getting going with
this is to use the Mind Tools Life Plan Workbook. Supported by worksheets and advice, this guides you
through a simple 5-step process for setting your life goals, and for organizing
yourself for success.
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!
