Your Goals — 3 Tips for Making Them Meaningful and Achievable for You

your goals steps

Make your goals truly yours to achieve them.

Your goals are important for achieving success, but lots and lots of people set goals that they never attain.

Why is that?

The question is especially important at this time of year, as many people start to struggle, right about now, with the New Year’s Resolutions they made just a few weeks ago.

The key is in the two small words at the beginning of this post: your goals.

Goals are aspirational, so they are going to be a stretch. And in order to follow through on that stretch, those goals need to be yours.

Setting Goals-Start with Your Heart

Setting goals is not a requirement for being an effective and successful person. If you feel driven to do this because you ‘should,’ then two things happen:

  • You are likely to set goals that aren’t connected to your values and your heart — goals that you don’t fully own; and
  • You undermine and diminish your view of yourself as an effective and successful person each time you don’t achieve what you’d set out to.

So, I’d like to recommend that you view goal-setting as a highly self-referenced process that starts from your heart.

Your Goals-3 Tips to Help

Then, take these 3 Tips and incorporate them into your goal-setting process:

  1. Setting goals helps you define what you want in your life.  It does so in clear, concrete, and simple language.  Nothing is as useful in determining exactly what you want and creating a picture of the outcomes in your mind, as the technique of setting goals.
  2. Once you have defined the outcomes you want, it’s much easier to design relevant action steps, through the technique of setting goals, to achieve those outcomes. Setting goals helps you clearly define your destination. It also enables you to design action steps that point you in the right direction. You can look at your desired outcomes and measure exactly how well each action step you devise moves you closer to what you want to accomplish.
  3. Setting goals introduces two states of mind that can improve your life, whether you achieve your objectives or not.  These two states of mind are “awareness” and “flexibility”. We’ll explore “awareness”  today.

Your Framework is Important

Too many people seem to go through life never fully aware of what they want or could have achieved until it’s too late.  Setting goals provides a framework that encourages awareness. Daily, you can look at your goals and consider how you are living your life.

This process helps you become aware of whether or not your life choices are bringing you closer to your objectives.  Without that awareness, it is easy to settle for routine rather than choice.  As you see, if you think of setting goals as a heart-based process rather than an obligation, the entire process changes.

Have you considered setting goals as a way of setting your course?  How is it clarifying for you?

Let’s explore time together …

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