How to Set Goals for Success

The first step in setting personal goals is to consider what you want to achieve in your lifetime, as 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 or all of the following categories:

Artistic:
Do you want to achieve any artistic goals? If so, what?

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.

Career:
What level do you want to reach in your career?

Education:
Is there any knowledge you want to acquire in particular? What information and skills will you need 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?

Financial:
How much do you want to earn by what stage?

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 for you!

Public 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, assign a priority to them from 1 to 5. 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 ensure that the goals that you have set are the goals that you want to achieve, not what your parents, spouse, family, or employers want them to be.

Once you have set your lifetime goals, set a 20 year plan of smaller goals that you should complete if you are to reach your lifetime plan. Then 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.

Finally set a daily 'To Do' list of things that you should do for the day, 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.

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

The following broad guidelines will help you to set effective goals:

State each goal as a positive statement: Express your goals positively - 'Execute this technique well' is a much better goal than 'Don't make this stupid mistake'

Be precise: Set a precise goal, putting in dates, times and amounts so that you can measure achievement. If you do this, you will know exactly when you have achieved the goal, and can take complete satisfaction from having achieved it.

Set priorities: When you have several goals, give each a priority. This helps you to avoid feeling overwhelmed by too many goals, and helps to direct your attention to the most important ones.

Write goals down: this crystallizes them and gives them more focus.

Keep operational goals small: Keep the low-level goals you are working towards small and achievable. If a goal is too large, then it can seem that you are not making progress towards it. Keeping goals small and incremental gives more opportunities for reward. Derive today's goals from larger ones.

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 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 performance, then you can keep control over the achievement of your goals and draw satisfaction from them.

Set realistic goals: It is important to set goals that you can achieve. All sorts of people (parents, friends, society) can set unrealistic goals for you. They will often do this in ignorance of your own desires and ambitions. Alternatively you may be naïve in setting very high goals. You might not take into account, either the obstacles in the way, or understand quite how many skills you must master to achieve a particular level of performance.

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 are lazy! 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 unrealistic. 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.

When you have achieved a goal, 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, reward yourself appropriately.

With the experience of having achieved this goal, review the rest of your goal plans:

- If you achieved the goal too easily, make your next goals harder

- If the goal took a long 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 deficit in your skills, decide whether to set goals to fix this.

- Failure to meet goals does not matter as long as you learn from it. Take lessons learned, back into your goal-setting program.

Remember that your goals too will change as you mature. Adjust them regularly to reflect this growth in your personality. If goals do not hold any attraction any longer, then let them go. Goal setting is your servant, not your master. It should bring you real pleasure, satisfaction and a sense of achievement.

Key points:

Goal setting is an important method of:

Deciding what is important for you to achieve in your life
Separating what is important from what is irrelevant
Motivating yourself to achievement
Building your self-confidence based on measured achievement of goals
You should allow yourself to enjoy the achievement of goals and reward yourself appropriately. Draw lessons where appropriate, and feed these back into future performance.

Wish you the very best!

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