The good things in Goal Setting

You should think about Goal Setting

So you want to learn all about goal setting, but let us look, in more depth, at the various reasons for goal setting.  It is very important for you to understand that like many other things, goal setting is something you need to believe in, and that it also helps if you are consciously aware of the great advantages it has before practicing it. If you are not firmly convinced that this process will help you in your life, you are likely to abandon it within a short period of time.  So, we want to convince you of the importance of goals setting before we teach you how to set your goals! First, consider that if you know exactly what you want to achieve, when you want to achieve your goal and how you are going to get there, you are more likely to succeed, right? Here is a simple example, which should help you clarify things a bit more: Your goal is take your wife on a cruise for your 25th wedding anniversary.  To achieve this goal, you’ll need to know the date (when is your 25th wedding anniversary and how much time do you have to prepare, save money, etc.), and you will have to figure out the details.  These are the basics of goal setting. For instance, where do you want the cruise to go (Alaska, the Caribbean), and what KIND of cruise do you want?  You might choose a cruise with lots of physical activity like rock climbing and aerobics, or you might choose a cruise for the onboard entertainment or the fancy cuisine.  Then you will need to figure out how to pay for the cruise and how far in advance you have to book it.  If your wife works, you will have figure out when and how to tell her or how to approach her boss and arrange for vacation time without your wife finding out.

“The benefits of goal setting are clear, if you commit to those goals there is a good probability you will reach them.”

You’ll need to know what clothes to bring, whether to bring sunscreen or warm clothes, whether to bring a video camera, a 35MM or a digital camera to capture your event. Those are just some of the planning items you would have to consider in order to meet your goal. Our example is merely to give you a simple illustration of a goal and how mapping out that goal can help you achieve it without glitches or surprises. If you have a good plan to achieve your goals you are more likely to be motivated to keep going, and more likely to have the confidence to achieve the goal, because you know exactly how you want to get there and what steps you will have to take to succeed. When you begin to set your goals, you will join the ranks of top athletes and sporting teams, successful business people and artists and politicians.  By thinking through your goal, you are likely to discover questions you hadn’t considered before – questions that might have been obstacles if you had a surprise encounter.  By KNOWING the potential obstacles and planning for them, you exponentially increase your chances of achieving your goals. When something is THIS important, you don’t want to leave it to chance! When you set clearly defined goals, you can measure your progress and make changes along the way if you find that you are not on schedule or that things are not going as planned.  If you don’t HAVE a plan, you are ‘playing it by ear’, ‘making decisions by the seat of your pants’, and ‘pulling ideas out of thin air’.  All of these techniques sound colorful, but they are NOT the way to achieve your goals – not if your goals are important to you!

What about the raise you wanted at work a few years ago?  Did you plan how to talk to your boss, Did you think about what examples of your performance you would use to convince him that you deserved the raise? Did you pick the best day to have the chat when he would not be busy or distracted?  Did you KNOW how much of a raise you wanted and how that compared to other raises in your department or company or in the economy at large? You had a goal and you figured out the steps to achieve it.   You may not have written everything down, but you DID plan.   So, goal setting is not as foreign as it may seem.  Remember that all goals are not as short-term or inconsequential as making it to McDonald’s before they close to get that hamburger you are craving.  If you really give it some thought, you probably have some pretty important goals and dreams in your life.  You owe it to yourself to figure out how to achieve them and get yourself on the path to that success as soon as you can.