Definition of goals and their importance
We’ve spoken before about the importance of goals, and how they keep us motivated and moving forward within our life. But how do you set goals up? Each of us will have different things that we want to achieve in our lifetimes, and at different points in our lifetimes too. But this doesn’t mean that the way we go about setting those goals will be necessarily different. So, the question now left to ask, is how do you set your goals?
Setting Your Goals
To reiterate, goals are different for everyone. What you might consider success, someone else might not consider success, they may even consider it a failure, but that doesn’t mean it is. Whatever is considered a goal to you, is worth striving for, no matter how small it is. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about the first mistake people make when setting out their goals.
For a lot of people, making the most out of life is the most desirable thing to do, and to achieve that, they’ll likely be a lot of things that they wish to do. They might want to travel the world, get super fit, have a great career in a really difficult industry, get married and have children, or simply just relax. Whatever it is, they want it. But the mistake is made, by wanting it all at the same time. One thing that all goals share is that they require determination and persistence to achieve, but the main difference between them is that the skills required for each individual goal change, and cannot be transferred. For example, you can’t apply the skills needed to climbing up the corporate ladder, to that of travelling the world. Whilst they both take time and patience to complete, the skills needed to complete them couldn’t be further apart, and this is the mistake that people make.
Research has shown that multitasking isn’t as helpful as it may appear. The reason being that when you multitask, everything that you’re working on is always being held back by another thing. Essentially, you never give 100% of you time and effort to one specific thing, meaning that the quality of which it’s completed isn’t as good as it could be. If we apply that logic to your goal setting, wanting to achieve three separate goals at the same time could end up in not achieving them to the standard you wanted, and in the worst-case scenario, not achieving them at all. What you may find as well is that you don’t stop at three goals. You have five, seven, ten. Experts have debated what the perfect number of goals is, with some saying as little as three, and other arguing that it reaches double figures, however there is no true right answer. What you feel like you can do and achieve is up to you, you just have to make sure that you don’t overwhelm yourself by your own ambition. With all that said however, that doesn’t completely rule out the possibility to achieve multiple goals, some even at the same time. It can be done, but it’s very difficult, and it often relies on you as a person. How resilient you are. Persistent. Patient. Hard-working. But even if you are all those things and then some, the road can still be tough, so take care with choosing your goals. It’s great to understand the pitfalls and helping hands of goal setting, but it’s all vain if you don’t know the types of goal.