Connor Brooke
If you want to get things accomplished, you need to set goals. But how do you go about doing so? What is it you need to do to achieve your goals? Here are some tips to get started:
What areas in your life need big changes? Little changes? No changes?
Think about all the facets of your life – your career, your love life, your health, your family life, your spiritual life, your financial life – and how everything is going now. Where are you happiest? Unhappiest? What do you want to change right now?
Think about the future
Remember that job interview question you may have been asked a time or two in your life, about where you see yourself in five years? That would be a good question to ask yourself in all areas of your life. You may be happy with some area in your life now, but how will that be five years from now. Think long-term as well as short-term.
Be SMART about your goals
It is not enough to have nebulous dreams, like being rich one day, as a goal. If you want to actually achieve these goals, get SMART about them. SMART is an acronym for goal-setting. It stands for setting goals that are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely. That means if you want to be rich one day, split your goal out in concrete ways that you are going to achieve it, showing how you will increase your income X amount each year, save X amount each month, get more training to get a better job, and make X amount of investments each month.
Eat an elephant one bite at a time
As the saying goes — How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. If you owe $20,000 in credit card debt, that may seem like a daunting figure, or a big elephant haunting your life. But if you come up with an action plan for your goal to get that paid off using SMART goals, you may be able to eat that elephant in a quicker time frame than you can even imagine. A SMART goal for that would be to figure out a manageable time frame for paying it off, commit to paying a certain amount each month on it, and focus on paying the debt as a priority by coming up with ways to get more income to pay towards the debt. A tangible goal, combined with focus and energy, can be achieved.
Write down your goals
Just having goals in your head, even if they are well thought out, isn’t enough. Life coach experts say that you should write the goals down and keep them in a place where you can easily view them. Having such tangible reminders can help you keep your eyes on the prize.
Get SMARTER about your goals
Besides the SMART mnemonic, there is also a SMARTER acronym to help you with goals. The E stands for Evaluate, and the R is for Reevaluate. You should set checkpoints where you evaluate your goals, and adjust them if necessary. Good luck.
This article was written for Business 2 Community by Connor Brooke.
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I’m the biggest convert to setting SMART goals. I first heard about the SMART acronym at work, it was presented to us as a way of improving our productivity in the work place.
Having seen how well SMART goals had improved output at work I started trying to incorporate them into my personal life.
Unfortunately not many websites talk about using SMART goals outside of a business environment, but I found this link (http://www.monsterpiggybank.com/setting-smart-goals) which really went into a lot of detail on using SMART goals in your personal life and it helped me immensely.