“If the plan doesn’t work, change the plan not the goal”
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Setting goals and learning how to achieve them to triumph should be one of the number one life skills to learn. If you can master setting smart and achievable goals you will begin to create the changes you want to see with an increased motivation towards your final destination. Whether you are wanting to work on personal goals or professional goals, so many of us do not understand the benefits of setting goals in our lives.
What is a goal?
A goal is a setting or an ambition of what one intends to accomplish or attain. Life goals tend to have a lasting impact on your life and usually encourage you to be “better” than you are today.
The importance of setting goals:
Setting goals gives you the opportunity to work towards something for the better. Working towards a goal gives you guidance and security and helps you to make life changing choices each day. Without something to work towards, we can often feel lost, stressed and even somewhat depressed.
Why we need goals to succeed.
Setting goals does not have to be a boring task. The benefits to setting goals really does outweigh the cons. Setting goals encourages new behavior’s and promotes momentum in our lives to move forward. The best goals to set and follow are SMART goals, which stands for: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timebound. Setting SMART goals have been proven to be achieved at a higher rate than a standard, vague goal.
For example: Grow my blog into a profitable blog
Specific – I want to grow my blog traffic by 80%
Measurable – I want to write for 2 hours a day
Achievable – Make $100/month from my blog
Relevance – Increasing my blog traffic will increase my revenue
Timebound – I give myself 3 month to have this in place.
It is important to allocate time to reassess your goals and time frames. From the example above, if you realise after one or two months you are making no progress you should re define your goals to still succeed instead of failing all together. This might be changing your goal to make $50/ month instead of $100, writing for 1 and a half hours a day and giving yourself a total of four months to achieve.
It has been proven through studies that including friends and or family into your goals leads to a higher success rate. Telling a friend a goal you want to achieve and checking in with them each week has proven progress towards the goal and the achievement of the goal over 50% higher than people who just wrote down a goal in a book. So get your friends and family involved! If you are daunted by this start by telling them a smaller goal and build up your confidence.
You can download my free SMART goal planner below and begin setting out your goals!
Smart-Goals-Planner-SheetDownload
A goal with no plan is just a wish
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
The 5 main benefits to setting SMART goals and how to achieve them to triumph.
1.Provides Direction
When you have a goal to work towards you know what you are working for. Whether this be personal growth or career growth, without and end goal you are working for nothing. Having a clear goal gives you full control of your life. We are given so many chances to make choices each day and when we have a goal to work towards we make better choices.
Goals help to set priorities. Prioritizing comes with good time management skills. All these skills are beneficial for personal growth as well as career growth.
2. Motivates better Performance
Whether your goals are personal goals or career driven, having goals motivates you to perform better. Without having these goals to work towards you may feel like you have no reason to get out of bed in the mornings or your just going to do another day at work. When setting goals we ultimately want the end goal to benefit us for the future. It may be a certain amount of money in our bank accounts at the end of the year, on a level of your career that you enjoy, in a house that you love!
The end goal is ultimately a dream, and a SMART goal is putting the steps in place to make that dream a reality. Each goal you set will drive you to make the right choice to accomplish it.
The goal setting theory by Locke and Latham describes that by setting clear, specific and measurable goals, it is proven that people perform better. The more difficult a goal is the harder people will work to achieve it. When we accomplish a harder goal we get a larger sense of achievement.
Working towards a goal is a source of motivation which drives performance up.
Locke and Latham’s 5 principles in goal setting for success include:
- Clarity
- Challenge
- Commitment
- Feedback
- Task Complexity
Creating goals that include these 5 principles lead to successful goal achievements, higher performance and great sense of self. Locke and Latham’s principals create an emotional bond to the goal which strives to generate motivation from the goal. SMART goals do not express the connection to the goal, they set the goal. Once your goal is defined you can connect the 5 principals and build the motivation to success.
3. Focus on what is important
When you have a specific goal to work towards you are more likely to stay focused and on track.
If your goal is to “lose weight this year” you have no real direction on how much weight you want to lose or how you will lose it.
If your goal is to “Lose 5kg of body fat and feel confident in a bikini by summer this year by attending the gym 3 times a week” you have a specific goal to work towards and a time frame.
Setting a clear goal encourages us to focus on the task at hand and to make the right choices when the options are put in front of us. When you know what you want and what is important to you at the time you may choose the chicken and salad wrap down the road over a donut and coffee. These choices put our end goals into perspective as we know what the benefits will be when we achieve them.
Setting goals helps us to focus on the important and not waste time on the not so important stuff. Setting goals increases and strengthens our focus.
4. Sense of personal satisfaction and Self confidence boosting
Setting goals will help you to create a positive attitude and empower you with a sense of purpose. Throughout setting big goals we set smaller goals to help us achieve that bigger goal. Each time we complete a goal it raises our self confidence. “YAY” If you can complete this goal you can definitely complete the next goal and so on. You start to feel so good that you are achieving these goals and working your way to the big goal. You have full control of your life and your decisions knowing everything you do right now will impact your end goal.
Feeling confident in any area of life will encourage confidence in other areas. Being confident will improve your performance and can make life experiences more enjoyable and fulfilling. Each time you achieve a goal, you essentially level up and can handle the next goal.
5. A purpose in life, Self discipline and personal growth
Setting clear goals gives us a purpose in life. We have something to work towards and we know where we want to be in a certain amount of time. Setting goals and sticking to the objectives to complete them encourages self discipline. We make choices each day to work towards the goal.
When we can clearly see what we are working towards we reduce procrastination. When you feel motivated, excited and confident in something you make the time and effort to be around it. You aren’t going to be looking for other things to stimulate yourself and avoid the task. Each time you achieve a goal you generate a sense of achievement in yourself. This leads you to feeling fulfilled and increases happiness.
Conclusion
This all may seem like a lot of information to take in. And you may still wonder if setting goals is necessary. Setting goals brings us clarity and helps us focus our minds on the good. Without having goals our brains tend to spend more time focusing on what is wrong. We put our energy into worrying about other people and situations we cannot handle. Without setting SMART and achievable goals we tend to repeat the past, which can include a lot of failures and self doubt. We create unnecessary stress and anxiety about what each day will encounter and where our lives will be in the near future.
There are many factors that contribute to setting goals and how to benefit from them. Setting up SMART goals, including the principles of success will help you and encourage you to reach higher places, mentally, physically and emotionally.
Writing down your goals and working towards them isnt something that needs to wait until Monday or next month, start TODAY!
If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much.
Jim Rohn
