Business and Personal Development: Setting Goals

To achieve your goals you must first set the proper goals.  If you have set goals or objectives in the past, only to have them slip away unachieved, please continue reading this.

Of course our goals must be S.M.A.R.T. for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely.  This is the subject of a future blog.

Discover Your Passion

To start, you must identify your passion.  This is what you:

• talk about when you have the opportunity,

• read about or study on your own or

• do on your free time.

To discover your passion, for about two weeks record the subject of your conversations, books or magazines read and activities.   Do not record conversations, reading and activities in which you engage because you must such as school assignments, employment or legal requirements.  At the end of the two weeks, you should have a good idea of how you spend your discretionary time and efforts.

Some people have many passions and bounce from project to project.  If this describes you, choose one or two passions that have a high importance to you for the coming year and work with them.

Set Your Goals

With your passion discovered, write goals to support that passion.  For instance, if your passion is to work with disadvantaged people, your goal may be to get a degree in social work or to volunteer at the homeless shelter.  If you passion is travel, your goal may be to visit three new countries in the coming year or to visit all 50 states.  If your passion is flying, your goal may be to get a pilot’s license or to purchase an airplane.  If your passion is earning money your goal may be to make your current annual income a monthly income.

Discover Your Governing Values

Make a list of your governing values.  These would be things like Truth, Freedom, Family, Spirituality, Health, Wealth, Obedience.  Prioritize the list by comparing the first two items and moving the higher priority to be above the other item.  Then do this for the next two.  Keep doing this, going through the list several times until all the items are in proper order.  As an example if the first two items on your list are truth and freedom, you may ask, “Would I lie to keep from going to jail?”  If “Yes,” then freedom is a higher priority, if “No,” then truth is a higher priority.

Apply Your Governing Values

Now compare your goals to your governing values.  Where there is a conflict, the goal will lose.  If necessary, adjust your goal to eliminate the conflict.  An example would be that if your goals require that you work 80 hours per week and a high priority value is family, you will need to adjust your goal or get your family’s acceptance of that goal for you.

Keep the three lists (passions, goals, governing values) together where you can see them daily or more frequently.  Your goals are where you are going because of your passion, but controlled by your governing values.

Develop Your Action Plan

Many of the example goals and the goals you may choose will require sub-goals.  For example, to make your annual income your monthly income may require sub-goals of: 1) research alternative methods of getting income and select the best one or two for me, 2) get the education or training necessary to become successful in my new endeavors, 3) create a business plan and 4) execute the business plan.  As you write each of your sub-goals, be sure to make them    S.M.A.R.T. goals

For each of your goals or sub-goals create an action plan that will take you from where you are to where you need to be, including milestone checkpoints to track your progress and adjust your action plan as necessary.

Goal achieving is the subject of a future blog.

Good Luck on setting ACHIEVABLE goals.

Tags: Business, Freedom, Goal Setting, Goals, Objectives, Success