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l setting is a powerful process for holding yourself accountable for your future. By setting goals, you concentrate your efforts on a specific objective. Without goals, you lack focus and are unable to track your progress. A lack of focus maximizes distractions that can derail you from reaching your ultimate destination. Here are four simple steps to point you in the right direction
Goal setting is a process that starts with careful consideration of what you want to achieve, and ends with a lot of hard work to actually do it. In between, there are some very well-defined steps that transcend the specifics of each goal. Knowing these steps will allow you to formulate goals that you can accomplish.
Set Priorities
The first step in setting personal goals is to set priorities. Goal achievement requires willingness to commit. Consider what you want to achieve in your life and approach the each goal with a sense of urgency. It is difficult to approach too many things at once with a sense of urgency. Prioritizing your goals helps you avoid feeling overwhelmed and burned out. Setting priorities allows you to maximize your time, remain motivated and directs your attention to the most important ones.
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Set SMART Goals
SMART is an acronym that you can use to guide your goal setting. There are many variations of what SMART stands for, but the essence is this – goals should be:
- Specific-Your goals must be clear, precise and well defined.
- Measurable- By setting benchmarks, you will be able to identify how far you’ve come and how much further you have to go before reaching your destination.
- Attainable- Assess where you are along the journey. Identify what skills you already possess or will need to attain to achieve this goal. Make sure your goals are realistic for you.
- Relevant- Goals should be relevant to the direction you want your life and career to take. By keeping goals aligned with this, you’ll develop the focus you need to get ahead and do what you want.
- Time Bound- You must set deadlines to accomplish your goals. When you are working on a deadline, your sense of urgency increases and you’ll know when you can celebrate success.
Make an Action Plan in Writing
This is a very important step in the process of goal setting. Determine what steps are necessary for you to reach your goal and write them all out, crossing each one off as you complete it. List as many avenues as possible to achieve your objective, and create a schedule to devote time specifically to working on your goal. Tell someone about your goal, who can help keep you accountable. This is especially important if your goal is big and demanding, or long-term. Periodically review your action plan and modify them to reflect your changing priorities and experience.
Follow Through and Stay the course!
Remember, goal setting is an ongoing activity, not just a means to an end. Build in reminders to keep yourself on track, and make regular time-slots available to review your goals. Your end destination may remain quite similar over the long term, but the action plan you set for yourself along the way can change significantly. Make sure the relevance, value, and necessity remain high.
Goal setting is much more than simply saying you want something to happen. Unless you clearly define exactly what you want and understand why you want it the first place, your odds of success are considerably reduced. It’s about understanding how the outcome will affect your life overall. By creating a plan and sticking to it, you can set goals with confidence and enjoy the satisfaction that comes along with knowing you achieved what you set out to do.
