Personal Goal Setting: How to Set a Goal

“If you want to be happy, set a goal that commands your thoughts, liberates your energy and inspires your hopes.” —Andrew Carnegie Many people want to achieve something in their life. But only a few can achieve what they want. Also, Everyone dreams of something and it is ok to dream for something you want. But it is not that much easy to achieve. For instance, many people never achieve that and the personal goal setting is important to achieve something. People work hard their entire life but at last, they don’t seem to get anywhere and they feel adrift in the world. It is because they don’t actually have their goals to achieve them.

So, The personal goal setting process is a technical process. We should know how to set a goal so that we can get what we want in our life. Also, Here we are going to talk about the process of goal setting and discuss some of the ideas about goal setting suggested by professional and successful people themselves.

WHAT’S IN IT

1. Difference between goals and Vision

So, People often get confused about their goals and visions. They think about their vision and their goals and misunderstand the concept of personal goal setting. But, Vision is something like dreams.

It is an imaginative form. If we wish for something then it is vision. But the goal is something different and Hence, The goal is a more concrete form. So, We can see progress and achievement in goals but we can’t on vision. For example: if you think you want to earn $1 the millions of dollar then it becomes your vision because you haven’t specified how you’re gonna make it. But, if you think you want to make $50000 this year from your business or whatever you do then it will become your goal.

So, What I meant to say is that the goal is specific and concrete that you can see the progress of achievement but the vision is not specific and we can’t evaluate the process of achieving the vision. Hence, We should have our vision but we should also know the difference between vision and goals.

So, Most of the time, people think of their vision as their goals and end up achieving nothing great.

2.Why we need personal goal setting

Personal goals setting is the way to think about plans and ideas needed to make your imaginary future vision into reality. Also, Many successful businessmen, actors, artists, athletes and other successful people make their goals. So, The main reason for personal goal setting is to get the direction where you want to go in future.Hence, If we look into the interviews and read about famous and successful people, we can find that what they have achieved is all because of their personal goal setting. So, we need a personal goal setting because of these benefits.

1. Goals make us focus on our dreams.

2. They give ideas about the actions we need to take for the future.

3. Goals help us to improve in new skills and learn new things.

4. They give momentum and energy to get our work done.

5. Goals make our mind stable and give the proper path and direction to the brain.

3. How to set a goal

Goal setting gives a long term vision and short term motivation to achieve something. So, It is important to set a goal which helps you to get what you want.Also, In the personal goal setting, the main thing you need is a technique to set a goal.

So, Here I am going to share some of the ideas which help you in your personal goal setting. These points are also suggested by most of the successful people in the world.

1.Unlock potential:

Let’s start with an example. suppose you put a pigeon in the case and pack it in the box, take it long away and release it. What do you think a pigeon does? Obviously, it flies over the sky for some time and it manages to find its nest anyhow. This is the potential of that pigeon.

Similarly, we humans have way more potential than pigeons for our goal seeking. But often we can’t find out our potential. Hence, We think that we don’t have the potential to achieve something and often we neglect to select a particular goal. We are not aware of our success in achieving potential. so before you make any goal you should know about the potential in us, which is obviously very high. So, That means we can achieve anything, just we need a proper goal. So, never underestimate setting a goal.

2. Take charge:

Emotions play a vital role in our personal goal setting. Especially, negative emotions are never going to make our goals achievable. People often blame others for what they haven’t achieved, which is not something you should do. In Fact, you should take a 100% charge of anything so that you can set a personal goal for yourself to improve yourself.

We can think from two perspectives. If we blame others for everything then we actually never find out our potential to grow but if we stop justify our negative emotions we can focus on ourselves and make goals more feasible.

So, the main idea of this point is negative emotions can affect your good goal-setting so we should avoid them. In fact, we have to avoid all these negative emotions so we can clearly set our goals.

3. True Goals:

If you set the goals, you have to achieve them. The main reason for setting goals is to achieve them. But many times we can’t get what actually our true goal is. Many people don’t know what they actually want but set goals in which they are not really interested. This happened with us also. for eg. maybe you have a passion for creative writing but you don’t know your passion and set a goal to be an engineer. This type of goal cannot be achieved. So you should make true goals.

BLUE SKY THINKING Technique

The best technique to find a true goal is BLUE SKY THINKING technique. In this technique, you set your goals looking to the sky, not in the land. I mean to say that you set your goals limitlessly. In this technique you make a note of all the goals you want to achieve in your life and think that you have all the abilities, money, support to achieve your goal then you can choose what will be the best goal for you.

For this, you have to ask some questions to yourself and give a genuine answer to those questions. This exercise helps you to find your true goals:

you should have a clear answer to these questions:

• Write down your three most important goals in life right now.
• What are your three most pressing problems or worries right now?
• If you won a million dollars in cash, tax-free, tomorrow, what changes in your life would you make immediately?
• What do you really love to do? What gives you the greatest feelings of value, importance and satisfaction?
• If you could wave a magic wand over your life and have anything you wanted, what would you wish for?
• What would you do, how would you spend your time, if you only had six months left to live?
• What would you really want to do with your life, especially if you had no limitations?

If you have answers to these questions then I hope you will get your true goal. You should focus on your true goal and beside true goal you can also work for your side goals. But remember the true goal is important for your happy and peaceful life.

4. Planning for your goals:

Planning is important for personal goal setting as well as to achieve them. If you got your clear goals then the next step is to make a plan to achieve them. It’s ok to not have a clear plan but you should always have a plan for how you’re gonna make your goal achievable. So the next question is how to make a plan?

There is a proverb that if you want to eat an elephant then the best way is one bite at a time. The same thing applies here also. If you want to achieve some big goals then you have to make a plan by separating your goal into the year, months, weeks and days and you have to complete it at that specific time.

● First, understand your big goal and estimate how many years it will take to complete.

● secondly, you separate that goal into the littler and littler makes a speciality of which you need to hit to reach your lifetime objective.

● Finally, you have your plan and now you can work into your personal goal setting to achieve them.

So manage your every morning to make a plan for that day, what you are going to do to achieve your goal.

5. Measure Progress:

I already mentioned above that goal is measurable. You have to measure your progress on your goal frequently. If we complete our goal in time then our brain releases endorphins which give us happiness and also it motivates us to improve our skills also. So It is necessary to measure the progress of achievement of your goal.

To measure the progress, examine whether you are doing good or not and give a score. Also, you can give a proper deadline for your goal. This helps to activate the subconscious brain and help to achieve your goals subconsciously.

6. Focus on one goal at one time and don’t wait for anything to start:

Most people focus on multiple goals at once and want to achieve them at once. But this idea is not worthy. Yes, you can make multiple personal goal settings but you have to give the most preference to one important goal only.

The other thing that people often do is that they wait for something for their personal goal setting. For eg; Many people wait for new years and take a goal that day often those goals were never continued by them.

What I want to say is that we should not wait for anything to take a goal. If you want to achieve something big then start from now, take a goal and start working

4. SMART personal goal setting

SMART goal setting is one of the ways to make your goal more powerful. It has various meaning but it usually stands for

• S – Specific (or Significant).
• M – Measurable (or Meaningful).
• A – Attainable (or Action-Oriented).
• R – Relevant (or Rewarding).
• T – Time-bound (or Trackable).

Using this mnemonic, our goal becomes more concrete and specific. For example instead of putting the goal as “I want to visit the world” you can put your goal using a SMART technique as “I will finish my world tour on 22 March 2030.” Check out goal-setting theory to learn more about the goal-setting process.

5. Achievement of Goal

Personal goal setting is one thing but achieves your goal is another. So, you manage to achieve your goal then take a time and enjoy the moment of your achievement and If the goal is very significant then don’t hesitate to give yourself a deserving reward. It will help you to set further goals and it also helps to increase confidence in you.

● Evaluate the process of achievement. if you have achieved them easily then set your next goal harder

● If you have achieved that goal very hard then you should have your next personal goal setting quite easy.

● During the process, if you learned new skills which help to change other goals then do so.

Conclusion

Personal goal setting means motivating yourself to turn your future dreams into reality. Every

successful person has their own goal setting techniques. Here we have discussed

some of the professional ways of your personal goal setting. Remember that you should

have specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound goals.

Also you can read our blog on How to Start a Day -Manage Morning When You’re Not a “Morning Person”

FAQ’s