Setting goals is an essential practice for living a happy and fulfilling life. Goals provide you with purpose, direction, and motivation. They give you something to strive for and they force you to change and improve yourself to achieve them. Goals are good things.
The act of setting goals isn't always as simple as defining what you want and then going after it. There's actually a science behind it that, if followed, enables the true power of setting and achieving goals.
Set Clear and Concise Goals
This means your goal should be very well defined and not be unclear or vague. You should be able to picture exactly what your life would look like after you achieve your goal and when you want it to happen.
Unclear goals are a recipe for fumbling around, hitting road blocks, and never really achieving what you want. After all, how do you know if you've accomplished a goal if you never really knew what you were after?
Having something concrete and measurable not only makes achieving your goals more likely, but also makes it much easier to track progress along the way.
Make Your Goals Challenging
"If you want to be happy, set a goal that commands your thoughts, liberates your energy and inspires your hopes." — Andrew Carnegie
Having a clear and concise goal isn't enough to make it an effective one. It's nearly as important to make sure that the goal you set for yourself is also challenging. It should be enough to test your character and make you feel like you've really accomplished something.
Your goals have to be something worth fighting for. The research shows that challenging goals inspire increased performance. Meaning the level of effort you put in is directly related to the difficulty of the goal. The more difficult the goal, the more effort you exert to achieve it and the better the sense of accomplishment you get from it.
Truly and Deeply Commit To Your Goals
People perform better when they care about what they're doing and why they're doing it, plain and simple.
It's the emotional commitment to your goals that gives you the motivation you need to accomplish them. If your goal is to lose weight, but you don't actually care or need to, then why would you feel motivated to drop those unnecessary pounds? The short answer is that you wouldn't.
To be successful, you need to make sure the goals you set are something you truly want and can fully be on board with.
Review and Acquire Feedback on Your Progress
You are crazy if you think you can just set a worthwhile yearlong goal and in the end discover if you were able to reach your goal once your deadline comes and goes.
You need to have feedback along the way to ensure you're making progress towards your goal, and to take stock of what's working and what's not.
Set some time aside every so often to step back, review your goals, and track your progress. Doing so will help you hit your mark and keep you motivated along the way.
Break Down Complex Tasks into Simpler Tasks
If you've followed the second principle and set a challenging goal for yourself, by nature, it will probably have many complex tasks associated with its achievement. These tasks can be daunting and extremely overwhelming, especially when starting with a stack a mile high.
You have to break down these daunting tasks systematically into simpler, less-complicated tasks that are easier to approach and overcome.
Don't get the wrong idea though. Nothing that is worth doing will ever be completely easy. There will undoubtedly be simple tasks that frustrate you and test your will to continue. That's just the fact of the matter, especially when learning to accomplish something new.
Take things one at a time. Knock down the barriers and keep progressing forward.
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