How To Set Your Goals – Step 1
Need Help Getting Organised?
It is amazing to see that even the most organised of people can find it difficult to organise themselves when it comes to doing a task that pushes their ‘fear’ button. They just can’t apply their inborn, ‘to die for’, organisational skills to the task at hand. Their minds become blank! They have allowed fear to dictate their behaviour (no loner able to organise themselves, focusing on time consuming trivial details), so as to prevent them from progressing towards their goals.
But as mentioned in the previous post, emotions do not have to dictate our behaviour. For this to happen however, we need to develop some awareness around who is in charge of dictating our behaviours? Our emotions or us?
The simple 5 step process delivered to you over the coming days, is excellent in bringing awareness to the choices you are making in response to your emotions.
So let’s get started…..
Step 1 – What is Your Goal?
As obvious as it may seem, you need to start with the end in mind! What is it that you want to achieve? While learning how to break through your procrastination, work on only one goal at a time, and write it down.
To set your goal, it needs to be:
- Important to you. And I mean really important – important enough that you are even willing to put the time in to design a plan for yourself and implement the strategies, rewards and consequences to get your desired result.
- Measurable and time bound. What are the indicators you are going to use that will let you know you have achieved your goal? You may want to include something about your desired performance level or alternatively what habit you want to have eliminated. And how long will you give yourself to get there?
- Realistic. This can at times be a difficult step for people who have a pattern of ‘failing’- proving they are no good at anything. If you think this is you, decide what is attainable and then cut it in half again by further simplifying your goal. Why? Because you are doing this to experience a win!
- Positive. This is when you focus on what you do want, for example “I will walk daily and eat well”. A negative goal focuses on what you want to eliminate, for example “I will stop smoking”. Positive goals will help you keep focused on your positive desired results, in this case, good health.
What might a written goal look like?
I want to lose weight to improve my health and my self image so that I can be fit enough to run with my son in the next city to surf fun run, next year on 25 March 2010. I will lose 25kilos by 31 January 2010, being my ideal weight of 75kilos. I will also be able to run 10 kilometres uninterrupted within 70 minutes by 28 February 2010.
It’s about as simple as that. So why don’t you write yourself a goal. To start with, aim for something attainable by the end of two weeks. Perhaps you have a project you have been wanting to at least get started. You can decide to have certain things in place by the end of 2 weeks. This will help give you a good idea of how this process works.
