Effective goal setting: 5 tips for achieving your goals

Category : Career and Skills Development | Sub Category : Posted on 2022-08-10 10:03:58

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Setting goals might seem easy but sticking to them and achieving them is very hard. But there is a simple way to successfully set your goals - whether personal or professional - in order to achieve them. Spoiler: You cannot do it completely without discipline. In this article, we explain why it's important to set goals and share goal setting tips to help you follow through with them

1. Set smart goals: You might have probably heard of SMART goals already. But do you always apply these simple tools when you are setting your goals? The actual fact is that for goals to be achievable, they should be designed to be SMART. You can define SMART techniques in various ways, but the essence is that your goals should be:

• Specific: Your goal must be clear and well defined. Vague or generalized goals are unhelpful because they don't provide enough direction. Remember, you need goals to show you the way. Make it as easy as you can to get where you want to go by defining precisely where you want to end up

• Measurable: What benchmarks will you use to make sure you are moving forward? How will you know if you’re successful? How will you know if you need to make adjustments? Having a goal that you can measure will help you stay on track and reach any deadlines you set for yourself

• Attainable: Make sure that you set goals that are possible to achieve. If you set a goal that you have no hope of achieving, you will end up with no results. While you don’t want things to be easy, you also want to avoid setting goals that are out of your reach

• Realistic: This goes along with attainable. Is your goal relevant to your life, and can you realistically achieve it? 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

• Timely: For a goal to be realistic it also has to be grounded within a time frame, and it needs to be real or tangible. Again, this means that you know when you can celebrate success. When you are working on a deadline, your sense of urgency increases and achievement will come that much quicker

2. List out obstacles and brainstorm solutions: Think about any obstacles that may stand in the way of achieving your goals. Keep these in mind as you set deadlines for yourself. For instance, if you spend the majority of the holiday season away from work and with family, you may not have as much time to accomplish your goals then. Readjust your schedule accordingly to feature realistic deadlines that give you enough time to finish each task

3. Make an action plan: This step is often missed in the process of goal setting. You get so focused on the outcome that you forget to plan all of the steps that are needed along the way. By writing out the individual steps, and then crossing each one off as you complete it, you'll realize that you are making progress towards your ultimate goal. This is especially important if your goal is big and demanding, or long-term

4. Check it frequently: 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

5. Celebrate achievements: Celebrating yourself after accomplishing a certain goal can motivate you to continue achieving more of them. For example, if you're working toward a challenging goal you've almost completed, tell yourself, "If I meet this goal by the end of this week, I'll go have a drink over the weekend. If I don't, I'll stay home and finish it." Giving yourself a reward gives yourself something positive to look forward to

If you want to succeed in life, you really need to set goals. Without goals you lose focus and direction. Setting goals not only allows you to have control of your life's direction but it also provides you a benchmark for determining whether you are actually succeeding. To accomplish your goals, however, you need to know how to set them

You can't simply say, "I want to have my own business" and expect it to happen. You have to start with careful consideration of what you want to achieve, and put in a lot of hard work to actually make 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.

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