Goal Setting

How to Effectively Set and Achieve Your Personal Goals

Pick up any success book, read posts from success blogs like this one, or talk to anyone that has become successful in anything, and a common theme that you will read and hear is that you need to set goals! You should set short term, medium, and long term goals to help you achieve the success that you want. There are essential pieces of the goal-setting puzzle that many people miss. I will explain what these pieces of the puzzle are and they can help you to set and achieve your personal goals. In addition, I will explain how a critical question or self observation can direct you on whether or not your goal is a solid one.

The goals that you set for yourself to achieve any level of success should comprise of at least three types: A short term, medium, and long term goal. Short term goals are the daily goals that you set for yourself. These are the goals that you should be thinking of when you first wake up in the morning and as your head hits the pillow at night. These goals are the daily habits that you do in your life on a consistent, everyday basis. Each day that you go out into the world, you should be expecting to achieve that one daily goal.

Medium sized goals are those goals that you have where you can track them on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis. They are the goals that you will accomplish by continuing to meet your short term or daily goals. The daily goals will lead to your weekly, monthly or quarterly goal.

Finally, long term goals are those goals that you can evaluate yearly. Again, the short term and medium goals consistently attained will lead to your overall long term goal for your life. For example, perhaps you are looking to retire early; within the next 1-2 years. You have a business vehicle that will allow you to accomplish that with the right amount of work and effort. Your daily goals may be to network with people on a daily basis and ask or show them how they can be a part of your business team. Maybe it is selling some products on a daily basis. By being consistent and networking or selling a product everyday, you will then be able to meet your medium goal which may be to have a certain amount of people in your business network or a particular monthly sales goal. If you are consistently hitting your medium goals, then over a period of a year or two, you will achieve your long term goal of retiring early! Do you see how this all falls into place? That is why goal setting is crucial to your success. Setting goals helps to steer all of your thoughts and activities into productivity. It is like having GPS for your life. You can follow your daily, weekly/monthly, and yearly goals to direct you where you want to be.

One of the pieces of the puzzle that most people miss are setting proper goals. When I say proper goals, I am not saying that one goal is better than the other, you have to decide that for yourself. What I am saying is that the goals that you set for yourself (short, medium, long) should be attainable with some good effort. There is nothing that will throw you off track quicker in goal setting than to set goals that are just too unrealistic. From the previous example, if you have never networked or sold a product for your business, but you set your goal to meet 10 people per day, you will probably become very frustrated a couple of days into the pursuit of your goal. If you don’t hit your daily goal for 3-4 days, you end up not even trying anymore because it just is not realistic for you to meet that many people right away. So make sure that your goals are far enough out that you need to put in some good, honest work to hit them, but that they are attainable. If you find that the goals that you set are too easy or too hard, you can always go back and adjust them. Just set the goals!!

The second piece of the puzzle is a question or observation that you should make about yourself, and that is: Are your goals forcing you to change? A goal is effective only if it forces you to change. Goals should cause you to stretch and get out of your comfort zones. It will be difficult for you to hit goals without some kind of change on your end. Let the goals help you to become more than you thought that you could be and change for the better! Setting goals and changing can both be scary. However, both are necessary for you to move forward in your life and achieve your personal goals.

Set your goals now! Develop short, medium and long term goals for your life and begin to consistently work toward achieving each of them. You may not hit your goals the first time you set them, but that is okay. For me personally, there are many goals in which I did not accomplish on my first attempt. However, I simply re-set them again and worked hard and consistently until I achieved them. In fact, there are still some goals that I am working on as I write this, but isn’t that what makes life exciting?

Let me know what you did to set and work towards achieving your goals…

To Your Goal Setting!

Ken Cloutier

 

 

photocredit