Beginning your goal setting plans

This section explains how to set personal goals. It starts with your lifetime goals, and then works through a series of lower level plans culminating in a daily to-do list.

By setting up this structure of plans you can break even the biggest life goal down into a number of small tasks that you need to do each day to reach the lifetime goals.

The first step in setting personal goals is to consider what you want to achieve in your lifetime, as setting lifetime goals that gives you the overall perspective that shapes all other aspects of your decision making process.

To help give you a broad, and balanced coverage of all important areas in your life, try to set goals in some or all of the following categories:

• Artistic: Do you want to achieve any artistic goals? If so, what is it? Do you want to write a book; paint a masterpiece, or write a song?

• Attitude: Does your own mindset hold you back from making progress? Is there any part of the way that you behave that upsets you for example, do you talk too much? If so, set a goal to improve your behavior or find a solution to the problem.

• Career: What level do you want to reach in your career? Is it your goal to be the boss or own your own company someday, or do you want to be the president of someone else’s company?

• Education: Is there any knowledge you want to acquire in particular or some area of study that you would like to pursue? What information and skills will you need to achieve these goals?

• Family: Do you want to be a parent? If so, how are you going to be a good parent? How do you want your partner or family members to see you?

• Financial: How much do you want to earn by what age in your life? What can you do to make that come about?

• Physical: Are there any athletic goals 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 geared toward making yourself happy for no reason other than being happy

• Service Do you want to make the world a better place by your existence? If so, how?

Once you have decided your goals in these categories, you have to assign a priority to them if you want to succeed.

Then review the goals and re-prioritize until you are satisfied that they reflect the shape of the life that you want to lead.

Also, you should ensure that the goals that you have set are the goals that you want to achieve, and not what your parents, spouse, family, or employers want them to be.

Success only happens when you are working for your own well being because doing it for others will ensure that you sabotage your own success.

How to begin to achieve your Goals

Once you have set your lifetime goals, the best thing that you can do is set a 25 year plan of smaller goals that you should complete if you are to reach your lifetime plan.

From there you can just shorten your overall goal spans for example, you set a 5 year plan, 1 year plan, 6 month plan, and 1 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. It is the best way to begin to achieve a lifetime that is filled with and results in a life without any failed wishes. It results in a life without regret.

You see, by starting out slowly, you are giving yourself the chance to realize and work on achieving the goals that you set out to.

Nobody ever succeeds at attaining a goal that was forced through. Those that tried never really got what they were hoping for. In rushing through and trying to achieve your goals quickly you will likely miss a few key aspects that can really change your outcome.

Think of it this way; if you were to run a 10K marathon and decided to take a cab for half of the journey; have you really achieved that goal? Would you be satisfied when you crossed the finish line?

It would be a hollow victory that could only provide a moment’s happiness.

Finally set a daily to do list of the things that you should do today to work towards your lifetime goals.

At an early stage these goals may be to read books and gather information on the achievement of your goals. This will help you to improve the quality and realism of your goal setting and in effect; make it easier to achieve them.

You also have to review your plans, and make sure that they fit the way in which you want to live your life.

Once you have decided what your first set of plans will be, keep the process going by reviewing and updating your to-do list on a daily basis.

You have to periodically review the longer term plans, and change them to reflect your changing priorities and experiences in your life.

Setting your Goals Effectively

There is a difference in setting your goals and setting them effectively. Anyone can set a goal, but doing it effectively means that it will actually get done.

There are so many things that you can do to better your life, but if you don’t know how to go about it you are stuck.

The following guidelines will help you to set effective goals and help you manage your time in an efficient manner that will cause those goals to become reality.

State each goal as a positive statement

Express your goals in a positive way. That is a key component to setting goals that you can attain.

How often have you been excited to accomplish a goal that didn’t even sound good when you brought it up? If you are not comfortable or happy with the goals that you have set, the likelihood of you succeeding is pretty low.

If you want to express your goals in a positive way, you simply have to first think of a goal that puts a smile on your face when you imagine it completed. Why would you want to set a goal that made you frown, cringe or cry?

When you are beginning to set your goals it helps when you are talking about them to others in a manner that states your actions as positives because it will have others seeing it as a positive as well.

That will garner you a great deal more support. In the end, don’t we all need a little support when we are trying to do something positive in our lives?

Be precise

Set a precise goal that includes starting dates, times and amounts so that you can properly measure your achievement.

If you do this, you will know exactly when you have achieved the goal, and can take complete satisfaction from having achieved it.

Being precise in setting your goals is no more than setting them with exact details. It is easier this way because then you can follow a step-by-step format. That’s all there is to it.

Set priorities

When you have several goals, give each a specific priority.

This helps you to avoid feeling overwhelmed by too many goals, and helps to direct your attention to the most important ones and follow each in succession. Setting priorities will force you into the step-by-step format above.

By doing the most important first and moving to the least important in succession, you are enabling each task to be easier than the last. It causes the accomplishment of each task to get easier and easier which will encourage you to complete your goal.

Write goals down

This crystallizes your goals and gives them more force.

In writing your goals down, you are better able to keep up with your scheduled tasks for each accomplishment. It also helps you to remember each task that needs to be done and allows you to check them off as they are accomplished.

Basically, you can better keep track of what you are doing so as not to repeat yourself unnecessarily.

Keep operational goals small

Keep the low-level goals you are working towards small and easy to achieve. If a goal is too large, then it can seem that you are not making progress towards it.

Keeping goals small and incremental allows you more opportunities for reward. Derive today's goals from larger ones. It is a great way to accomplish your goals.

Set performance goals, not outcome goals

You should take care to set goals over which you have as much control as possible. There is nothing more dispiriting than failing to achieve a personal goal for reasons that are beyond your control.

These could be bad business environments, poor judging, bad weather, injury, or just plain bad luck. If you base your goals on personal your performance, then you can keep control over the achievement of your goals and get satisfaction from achieving them.

Set realistic goals

It is important to set goals that you can achieve.

All sorts of people (parents, media, and society) can set unrealistic goals for you which is almost a guarantee of failure. They will often do this in ignorance of your own desires and ambitions or flat out disinterest.

Alternatively you may be naïve in setting very high goals. You might not appreciate either the obstacles in the way, or understand quite how many skills you must master to achieve a particular level of performance.

By being realistic you are increasing your chances of success.

Do not set goals too low

Just as it is important not to set goals unrealistically high; do not set them too low. People tend to do this where they are afraid of failure or where they simply don’t want to do anything.

You should set goals so that they are slightly out of your immediate grasp, but not so far that there is no hope of achieving them. No one will put serious effort into achieving a goal that they believe is unattainable.

However, remember that your belief that a goal is unrealistic may be incorrect. If this could be the case, you can to change this belief by using imagery effectively.

Achieving your Goals

When you have achieved a goal, you have to take the time to enjoy the satisfaction of having done so. Absorb the implications of the goal achievement, and observe the progress you have made towards other goals.

If the goal was a significant one, you should reward yourself appropriately. Think of it like this, why would you choose to ignore any accomplishments that you have made?

In doing that, you are downplaying your accomplishment which will convince you that it wasn’t that important in the first place.

With the experience of having achieved each goal, you should next review the rest of your goal plans and see them in the following manner:

• If you achieved the goal too easily, make your next goals harder
• If the goal took a disheartening length of time to achieve, make the next goals a little easier
• If you learned something that would lead you to change other goals, do so
• If while achieving the goal you noticed a certain lacking in your skills, decide which goals to set in order to fix this.

You should keep in mind that failure to meet goals does not matter as long as you learn from it. Feed lessons learned back into your goal-setting program.

You must also remember that your goals will change as you mature. Adjust them regularly to reflect this growth in your personality. If goals no longer hold any attraction for you let them go.

Goal setting is your servant, not your master. It should bring you real pleasure, satisfaction and a sense of achievement.

If it stops, there is no longer a point. Let’s look at an example.

The best example of goal setting that you can have is to try setting your own goals. Set aside two hours to think through your lifetime goals in each of the categories. Then work back through the 25-year plan, 5-year plan, 1-year plan, 6-month plan, and a 1-month plan.

Finally draw up a To Do List of jobs to do tomorrow to move towards your goals. When you do, you will soon realize that you will be on your way to using your goals setting on a routine basis.

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