The Truth about Goals The common meaning of goal is something that any person wishes to achieve but only we ourselves can truly define our unique goals to ourselves.
Throughout the civilization of the human race, every achievement originates from the ideas and efforts of our ancestors.
Since then, many individuals have gathered and aspired to achieve goals in their respective fields. In each generation, we have found meanings of our lives in our different goals when we possess the desire to achieve a certain purpose in life.
By all means, we will use our best efforts to achieve these goals. Then, these achievements, in turn, inspire the next generation to improve and achieve more than our predecessors have succeeded.
As it is subjective to define a person’s goal to another, the chances for a person achieving his/her goal can depend on various factors as shown by multiple research projects from various fields of study.
While some pursuits of success are limited by certain factors, there are others whose success grows on different factors.
Industry experts, businesspeople, motivational speakers, entrepreneurs have all shared their knowledge, methods and skills with us to achieve our targets or emulate their success.
Despite that, many have often overlooked the importance of setting their goals clear enough to utilize the information and skills they possess effectively.
So how do we perfectly set goals that will launch our work to success? Before trying to answer this question, we must first understand why so many have failed to set their goals. 10 Reasons Why People Fail at Setting Goals
1. Not Realizing the Importance of Setting Goals The most habitual mistake during the planning stage is to ignore the importance of setting goals.
In fact, most who do not understand that specifying goals for both the short term and the long term cannot find purpose, meaning or even inspiration in their efforts to achieve the goals set.
Such mistake does not only affect an individual or organization’s course of actions but also the attitude towards the goals.
Without a sense of purpose or meaning of the goals, one cannot simply use passionate effort to achieve success.
Goals are not just tasks on a to-do-list which you can tick off once you’ve completed it. Goals can also be stepping stones to a bigger cause in life. Therefore, we should define our goals clear enough before we set ourselves on our journey.
2. Writing Only the Long-Term Goals Our focus on the end results have often derailed us as our progress is not constructively planned when we have only set long term goals but not the short-term ones which are required to accomplish the long ones.
For instance, if you wish to start a bakery, you must not only be good in baking cakes and making a variety of confectionery and pastries, you must also know how to manage the business and employ the right people to help you operate the bakery.
Those are the short-term goals of getting everything prepared before realizing the long-term goal of operating a bakery.
Setting short term goals in sight of the long one is to help us focus on one goal at a time and build on each success to reach further and apparently achieve our long term goals. Usually, this sort of achievement satisfies us even more in the end.
3. Pre-Belief that It Won’t Work Those who have such belief usually have very consistent reasoning on rejecting certain ideas before reaching the final stages of setting their goals.
As such, during the stages of setting goals, one should embrace the foreseeable challenges after sufficient analysis and not discouraged by them.
However, over-analyzing and constantly filling ideas and efforts with doubts will definitely end the goal setting process earlier than expected.
During the stages of goal setting, we also have to acknowledge that it would not be possible to answer all the questions and create substantial plans to overcome the foreseeable challenges.
4. Writing Our Goals as Negative Statements Instead of working towards something we want, writing our goals as something we try to avoid or as obstacles we do not wish to overcome may affect our motivation to finish work. How we write our goals down can really affect how view it.
In other words, nobody wants their goals to sound discouraging. Writing “Don’t lift less than 120lbs for your bench press” definitely does not sound as inspiring as “Good job on lifting 100lbs on the bench press. Try lifting 120 lbs next week.”
The way the goals are written should inspire us to be dedicated to our goals and not try to instill the fear of failure in us.
5. Generic Goals Having goals which are often too similar to others around your age usually means the goals you have set are not specific enough.
So how does this deter you from being successful? PAGE | 9 Not having enough details of how your goals should specifically be means the effort which you will use might not be able to help you achieve whatever targets.
For instance, if you wish to buy a house, you must find out the market price of the house, its size, its design, the loan repayment, interest rates of the loan, the location of the house and many other necessary factors for you to purchase the house successfully.
Whether it’s a vacation you’re planning or increasing profits of your business, the more you specify your goals, the clearer it is in your mind that you are convinced these are the goals you really wish to achieve.
