How to Set Powerful Goals in your Professional and Personal Life

How to Set Powerful Goals in your Professional and Personal Life

Goal setting is the essential if you want to be successful. After all, how will you get where you want to go if you don’t know where that is? There’s a lot of information out there on goals, and the only consensus seems to be that you need to have powerful goals if you want to succeed.

But creating powerful goals isn’t as easy as it might seem. So much gets in the way, so many expectations and demands on our time and inner beliefs about our abilities. Sometimes, it can be hard to know what we want around everything else. But getting clear about what we really want in our lives is the only way that we can set the right goals. And to do that, we need clear guidelines and a little time to think.

What do you really want for your life? And how are you going to get there?

Know where you are

If you want to aim at something, you need to know where you are first. This is an important, but often overlooked step to powerful goal setting.

Spend some time by yourself, with no distractions, and write down exactly where you are right now. This means thinking about every aspect of your life and writing a tangible description of how they factor into your life. Make sure you’re specific. For example, if you’re talking about your health, you might write down your weight, what your diet is like, and how often you exercise. Think about the following aspects of your life when writing this description:

  • finances
  • love life
  • your family
  • your relationships (friends, work relationships and love relationships)
  • work
  • education
  • fun
  • spiritual

Once you have this list organized, you can move onto the next step with a clear idea of where you’re starting from.

Brainstorm

An essential step in any powerful goal setting is a brainstorming session. You need to write down everything you want. And this means everything, with no censoring and no judgment. This is the time to learn what you really want when there are no limits and no outside influences.

Make sure, when you’re doing this process, that you think about every aspect of your life. People tend to focus on the reason why they’re making goals, what they want to change immediately. This can leave gaps in your process. Try to think of at least one goal for every part of your life, even if you just work on one to start with.

Ask why

This may be a laborious process, but it will help you to understand what your goals really are. Evaluate each goal and ask yourself why you want to achieve it, and what specifically you hope to achieve. This will help you to set truly powerful goals that are honest and specific just to you.

For example, you might think about setting a goal to quit smoking. You know you should, everyone keeps telling you that you should. So, you set the goal. And the next day you get up and smoke like a chimney. The problem with your goal wasn’t that you didn’t really want to do it. It was the motivation you were using. You don’t really care what others think of your habit. What you care about is the smell of smoke in your hair and on your clothes, it’s the yellowish stains on your fingers. This is your real motivation, but you pushed it aside because it seemed too shallow to worry about.

Well, nothing is too shallow if it pushes you forward.

Think about each goal carefully. Decide why you want it, and whether this changes the goal itself, or the steps you should be taking towards it. If you really want to be able to keep up with your kids at the park, there’s no real point in setting a goal to spend hours in the gym doing weights every day, is there?

Set long term goals

This is an obvious one. You need to have long term goals in your life. They’ll give you something to work towards and something to look forward to. They should excite you and scare you when you think about them. Long term goals will also help you to make decisions in the short terms, because they will drive a lot of your behaviors and achievements.

Setting long term goals may require a bit of flexible thinking because it can be hard to know what you will want ten or even twenty years down the track. But you don’t have to be a mind reader, you just must know yourself well. And don’t worry, if you make a mistake and decide you don’t want something, you can always change your goals.

Set daily goals

Life is busy & we all have a lot to do. How many times have you come to the end of a busy day and realized that you didn’t accomplish a thing and can’t really remember what you did? Setting daily goals is a way to overcome this problem. They’re small goals that keep you on track to your larger goals.

You can do this every day as part of your morning routine. It’s a good way to start your day right. Sit down and look at what you need to get done for the day and create your daily goals from there. Make sure you consider your long-term goals as well, to make sure you’re doing the things you need to do to achieve them. Establishing this morning habit will also focus your mind on what’s important to you, which is vital if you want to be successful at anything.

Set up accountability

If your goals remain written on a piece of paper in your drawer there will be no incentive for you to achieve them. You need to set up accountability if you want to give yourself some extra motivation.

Tell your friends, family or coworkers about your new goals. Tell them that you want them to hold you accountable, to ask about your progress and comment on any changes they notice. This is a powerful tool for making behavioral changes, because people have a strong tendency to change their behavior if others are watching them. So, if you know that your friends are waiting for you to achieve your goals, you’re much more likely to keep your promise and work towards them.

The number one thing you can be take away from this

Setting powerful goals isn’t as difficult as you might think. In fact, it’s probably the easiest part of any self-improvement journey you take. The real trick is to follow through on the goals you set. Setting goals without acting on them is completely useless. So, if you’re going to set powerful goals, make sure you follow through on them.

How to Set Powerful Goals in your Professional and Personal Life

Know where you are

You must know where you’re starting from it you’re going to map out your journey. Spend some time working out what you have now, before you work out what you want in the future.

Brainstorm

Write down what you want in your life. This isn’t the time to be timid, write down everything! You can always consider reality later.

Know your why

Knowing why can help motivate you, and let you know what you really want to achieve.

Set long term goals

Long term goals give us something to look forward to and work towards. They can be great motivation when, in the short term, you just don’t want to.

Set daily goals

You need to set daily goals if you want to achieve your long-term goals. They will help you to focus in the present, on what you want in the future.

Set up accountability

Ask others to hold you accountable. It’s one of the best ways to ensure that you do what you say you’re going to do.

About the author:

Kevin Abdulrahman is a world authority in personal development, a motivational speaker, the author of books on business and life strategies, a public speaking coach, and a world-renowned expert in business and life success. An expert in business development and strategist, Kevin works with Fortune 500 organizations, leading government agencies, and forward-thinking companies. He designs work strategies, workshops and conferences that push them to make changes based on the ideas of fast growth and proven techniques for business success.

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