Goal setting is a powerful practice, especially for a challenging economy and market as the one exists today! Especially so for modern people, dealing with a constant flow of information, focus deficit, and multiple conflicting tasks need attention.
The pandemic period has shown that despite our advances in many sectors of life and business, people are not yet fully equipped to deal with the changing of the basic operational conditions of their environment.
When Normality Breaks!
The abrupt severance of ‘normality’ and the irrational adjustment to new conditions, led many people to lose their focus and abandon or fall behind their normal lifestyle conditions and their dreams. And that led them to need to re-caliber their goals and their priorities.
Goal setting is a powerful tool that can help you not only to adjust to a flexible environment but also to keep you on track according to your main life and business operation principles and goals! Research has suggested that goal setting can lead you to higher and more concrete results in relation to your personal and professional life and in higher performance in general.
And that became apparent when health has made a prime objective for all of us! It was in that time that you needed most to find out the THINGS that are important to YOU? It was that time that you decided that it was about the time to start doing what you want in life!
Why Do You Need To Set Up Goals?
First thing first is why you need to set up goals. As I told you, goal setting is very important for both your professional and personal life. But it is not just that!
Setting up goals and finding ways to achieve them is not the easiest thing you can do. It takes commitment, investment in time, planning and preparation, and investment in tools that can help you make things happen. It also takes a lot of effort or investment in finding the resources that can help you achieve more effectively the goals you have set.
Setting up goals has a cost (sometimes quite large) and can be tedious at times, especially if you are not in the habit of recording, documenting, and following through your activities in a structured and methodical way !
If goals have a cost, why should you take it? This is a good question because this is the question you should answer, in order for all other things to fall into place.
And with that I mean that you need to reflect on what you really want in your life and query the things that would help you to achieve them.
The one thing you need to find out for yourself is the goals that are suitable to you and your values. And along that you need to find the reasons why you need to achieve these specific goals.
There are many reasons that support the importance and imperative of setting up your own goals in life and business! Among them are reasons that should resonate to you and your lifestyle. You set goals in order to:
- Have control in your life and its direction,
- Know where you are directed to,
- Feel a sense of accomplishment,
- Become more productive and achieve tangible results,
- Become a better person, parent, husband, friend, son/daughter, etc.
- Develop more focus on the important areas of your life,
- Achieve work-life balance,
- Make a better living or get more money,
- Bring better results for you, your family, and your friends,
- Develop accountability and ownership on whatever you do and get,
- Find motivation in accomplishing what you are aiming of,
- Live a better life and achieve more results in your work.
et cetera.
As you can see there are many, too convincing arguments, on why you need to set up goals. Just pick the ones that have a meaning to you and start turning them into tangible goals, activities, tasks, projects, etc.
At the end of the day you will find that it is more beneficial to you to have your own goals and pursue them, rather than try to fit to the goals of someone else’s.
And for good reasons too!
How Your Goal Setting Affects Your Life & Business
You see your goals affect everything in your life and business. Without goals you cannot track nor where you are today, nor if you have reached your destination.
A good, clear formatted goal gives you motivation, your present position, where you want to go, and if you reach it or not yet. This is important information, not just for business, but for your life as well!
Most people believe that goals are important but just for the business field. And most of the people, when talking about goals, think about money issues. Most people also believe that when you find ways to get more money, automatically you become happier, a better person, etc.
Nothing more elusive than that! Believing in such concepts, they focus all their energy and time in finding ways to develop a more robust income, in the hope that more money will bring their desired life and a sense of meaning and direction to their life.
This is totally wrong since the materialization of the goals would bring balance, nor the acquisition of more resources, assets, or money.
This is the reason there are many ways to help you balance your money setting up robust goals especially for business (like the 50/20/30 Budget Rule).
People following this course of action, most of the time, fail to define what ideal life is for them.
You cannot be happy for instance, when you have the money you want, but if you have lost or have not the time you want for your family, health, friends, and all the things that matter to you!
You need to define your level of ideal life in respect to the other areas of your life that have importance to you and develop specific and tangible goals for all the things that are important for you.
You need to set your goals wisely in respect to all the things you want to achieve in life. Because eventually all your goals would become interconnected and the accomplishment of one may foster or hinder the accomplishment of other important goals.
Certainly money can solve a lot of problems, but money is not the only area of your life that needs your attention.
There are many more areas you need to focus on and set appropriate goals. Areas as your:
- Personal or professional growth,
- Health,
- Fitness,
- Family,
- Friends,
- Education,
- Relationships,
- Social responsibility and contribution,
- Mindset,
to name only a few!
All these areas are important to you, and in order to live a balanced life, you need to define your goals for any of these areas that have a meaning to you and you want to achieve specific results.
That’s why you need to start developing the habit of defining SMART goals for every area of your life or/and business that you need to achieve results.
Do You Want to Setup SMART Goals?
You need SMART goals in order to gain clarity on what you want to do, how to achieve it, and what you need to do next. You also need SMART goals in order to track your course of actions and if your specific goal has been achieved or not.
We have established why the goals are important for your life and business and I think I have convinced you how important it is to set up well-defined and robust goals. So the last component (besides reflecting, planning, setting up the right to your goals, and reviewing their effects) is YOUR motivation.
The one thing that makes you tick!
Generally speaking, most people do something for one of the following reasons:
- Make or save time / energy / money,
- Avoid effort,
- Make something quicker or in a better way,
- Avoid physical, psychological, or mental pain,
- Gain more comfort, beauty, health, fitness, love, social status,
- Gain a better, more elevated or richer level of life,
- Affirm their beliefs, values, status,
- Gain more awareness, praise, etc.
All these are valid reasons for doing something, but it is for you to find out which one of those can prompt you to become a better person by achieving your goals in different areas of your life.
And there are many methods and approaches to achieve results in your life. I have documented my best approaches here to help me define better how I’d like to do things. And I have developed a whole framework to make things happen.
But none of these can help you, unless you have defined what you need and how you want to achieve it. And this is something that depends on your values, beliefs, and mindset.
Next Actions
All the above might persuade you that setting a goal is not as easy as first looks. It needs intention, deliberation, and reflection on what and how you want to live and work! But it is worth it. It is worth it to set goals in your life for yourself and your family and strive after achieving them.
Most of the people failed to do so and keep on complaining why they don’t get what they deserve!
You are not one of those people. The fact that you spend time reading this shows that you want to have control over your life, your family, your financial, or your health/fitness status and you want to become a better person. Moreover you want to become the engineer of your daily happiness and achieve the things that matter most to your life.
Start thinking and start setting goals, one-after-the-other achieving the results you want and raising higher towards the levels and plates you want to climb on.