How to set proper goals
If you’ve read any of my work, one thing that I enjoy writing about is goals. Goals are of course one of the many methods in understanding ourselves and I swear behind setting goals.
However over the years I have learned that there is a particular way to set goals. After all not every person will feel compelled to achieve certain goals.
So how do we set proper goals that we actually want to achieve? Below is your answer.
First, Start With Why
“One way to keep momentum going is to have constantly greater goals.” — Michael Korda
Yes. This again.
Why in the world do you have the particular goal that you set?
When you have a good reason to do it, you’ll find a variety of reasons that can motivate you into doing it. You need self motivation after all and reading inspiring articles or watching motivation porn isn’t going to do much for you long-term.
You need to find a damn good reason for doing something or else you will buy into excuse after excuse.
Second, Check On Yourself At Various Periods
“The trouble with not having a goal is that you can spend your life running up and down the field and never score.” — Bill Copeland
I do this every single week with my accountability partner.
We check ourselves and make sure that we are staying on point. We talk about our business, our plans, and our goals as well. There’s also many times where we give pep talks to one another.
But the thing is we do this consistently every single week and you need to embrace the same thing as well.
An accountability partner helps, but isn’t mandatory, so long as you check yourself on the progress you are making.
This is especially important at the beginning and doing it frequently as you learn what you value and what you don’t.
During the checkup make sure you acknowledge the progress and if there are some goals you’re ignoring, figure out why and ask if they are necessary or need changing.
Thirdly, Don’t Change Your Goals Drastically
“Success is the progressive realization of a worthy goal or ideal.” — Earl Nightingale
Goals are really things that prompt us to develop particular habits. They lift us up and change us in that respect. As such, you don’t really want to be changing your goals all that much.
I’m saying this because I know for myself in the past I had new goals that I set every single month. There were some similarities but not many.
To save yourself the heartache, only change goals if you are constantly putting it off.
You can boil it down to procrastination, but I feel procrastination is applicable if you have a deadline. Of course the goals you set do have deadlines, but in some cases with goals you don’t honestly care about them deep down.
It’s those kind of goals I’m talking about. In that case drop them, or perhaps find an alternative where you can achieve the same thing but approach it differently.
Conversely, when goals are working, up the challenge on them. Make it a bit more challenging by increasing the amount of times you need to do something.
An example is exercising for longer or more frequently or writing or reading more.
Fourthly, Have A Plan Of Action
“If you want to be happy, set a goal that commands your thoughts, liberates your energy and inspires your hopes.” — Andrew Carnegie
You have a reason to accomplish something, now is the time to have an action plan around it.
What I’m finding that’s quite helpful is devoting specific days to certain activities.
Some of them you can do over the course of the week, but some goals can be reached when we set aside a few hours or an entire day to one activity and nothing else.
There are many apps out there that can help with such a thing, but one that I’m getting into is an app called Remente. It gives you a small checklist but also you can input your mood for the goals and more. It’s nifty.
Try This
Set goals that matter to you. Give yourself a compelling reason to do something and stick to it until you have achieved your overall goal on this. No matter the large goal, it can all be boiled down to a set number of habits that we can do during the day.
To your growth!
Eric S Burdon
This post is part of an 3 month writing challenge that I’m committing myself to. Every day for 3 months, I’ll be writing articles with specific criteria in mind. You can learn all about my reasoning as well as what that criteria is right here. This is 42 of 91 of this series.
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