Personal Goal Setting

Planning to Live Your Life Your Way

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?

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.

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.

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.

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