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Your goals are the goals that a person consciously sets for himself, and not the goals that someone sets for him. When goals are his, a person realizes himself personally interested in achieving them. Your goals are distinguished by a clear understanding of what you want to achieve in life.
To have your own goals means to go your own way through life, and not to be a means of achieving the goals of other people.
In December 1730, a convoy with a sleigh loaded with frozen fish set off from the village of Mishaninskaya, Arkhangelsk Governorate, to Moscow. This convoy was joined by 19-year-old Mikhailo Lomonosov. The Pomor son dreamed that in Moscow he would acquire knowledge and make his life brighter and more meaningful.
How to define your goals?
Author: Arthur B. Van Gundy, professor of psychology at the University of Oklahoma, owner of the consulting firm Wangandy and Partners. Source: delovoymir.biz
Goal setting can be a powerful life-changing force if done properly. There are five basic principles of goal setting that are essential.
The first is the principle of congruence.
Your values represent your deepest beliefs about true and false, good and bad, important and unimportant. High performance and great self-respect are only possible when your goals and values are in perfect harmony with each other.
The second principle of goal setting
This is the area where you are perfect. Each person is capable of achieving excellence in one thing, perhaps even in several things. Only by finding your area of excellence and devoting yourself to the development of your own talents in this area, you can realize your full potential.
You will never know happiness and satisfaction until you identify your heart’s desire and dedicate your life to it. It is the only thing that only you can do really well. It’s up to you to find this area, if you haven’t already.
Your area of excellence may change as your career progresses, but only those who manage to find it succeed. Your area of excellence will invariably be related to the activities that you most enjoy and are best at.
The third principle of goal setting
This is the concept of a diamond placer. Diamond Placer is the title of a speech delivered by Minister Russell Conwell. The speech became so popular that he was asked to repeat it more than five thousand times word for word.
This speech mentioned an old African farmer who was very excited by the story of a traveling merchant about people who came to Africa, discovered diamond fields and became fabulously rich. He decided to sell his farm, organize a caravan and go deep into Africa in search of diamonds, in order to bring untold wealth to his wife.
For many years he explored the vast African continent in search of diamonds. Finally, he ran out of money and everyone left him. Left alone, he threw himself into the ocean in despair and drowned.
Meanwhile, in the backyard of the farm he had sold, a new farmer watered a donkey from a stream that ran right through the field. There he came across a strange stone that surprisingly reflected light. He brought the stone into the house and forgot about it.
A few months later, the merchant mentioned above, traveling on business, stopped for the night at this farm. Seeing the stone, he became very excited and asked if the old farmer had returned. “No,” they told him. The old farmer was never seen again. But what is the reason for such excitement?
The merchant took the stone and said, «This is a diamond of great value and value.» The new farmer was skeptical, but the merchant insisted that he show where the diamond was found. They went into the field to where the farmer was watering the donkey, and looking around, they found another diamond, then another, then another, and another. It turned out that the whole farm was covered with diamonds. The old farmer went deep into Africa in search of diamonds without even looking at his feet.
The moral of the story is this. The old farmer didn’t realize that diamonds don’t look like diamonds unless they’re cut. To the untrained eye, they look like ordinary stones. A diamond needs to be cut, cut and polished before it becomes one of those diamonds we see in jewelry stores.
Your own diamond deposits can also lie under your feet. But they are usually disguised as hard work. Maybe your diamond deposits are in your talents, interests, education, life circumstances and experience, in your industry, in your city, in your contacts.
You are not required to cross the country or make a grand revolution in your own life. In most cases, what you are looking for is right under your nose. But this does not look like a possibility lying on the surface.
The Fourth Principle of Success in Goal Setting
The principle of balance. It means that in order for you to be the best you can be, you must have multiple goals in the six essential areas of your life. Just like a car wheel needs to be balanced to spin smoothly, your goals need to be in balance for your life to run smoothly.
You need:
- setting personal goals and goals related to your family;
- physical and health-related goals;
- mental and intellectual goals;
- goals related to learning and self-improvement;
- goals related to work and career;
- financial and material goals; and finally
- setting spiritual goals, goals aimed at developing inner peace and spiritual enlightenment.
In order to achieve the necessary balance, you should have two or three goals in each area — a total of twelve to eighteen goals. This kind of balance will allow you to constantly work on something that is important to you. When you are not involved in fitness development, you can work on developing your personality or professional abilities. When you are not doing meditation or contemplation or other work to develop your inner world, you can get busy with your material goals. Your goal is to make life a continuous stream of development and achievement.
The fifth principle of goal setting
This is the definition of your main life goal. Your main goal is your number one goal, a goal that is more important to you than achieving any other single goal or goal today. You can have many goals, but you can only have one central, main goal.
The main reason for the dispersion of efforts, loss of time and inability to develop is the inability to determine the primary, dominant, main goal. The way to determine the primary goal is to analyze your goals, followed by the question: “Which goal, if achieved, will most help me achieve all the other goals?”
Usually this is a financial or commercial goal, but sometimes it can be the opposite, a health or relationship-related goal. Your main goal becomes the catalyst. When you are enthusiastic about achieving a clear main goal, you begin to move forward quickly, despite all the obstacles and restrictions.
Goal setting rules
First of all, your goals should be in harmony, not in conflict with each other. You can’t have both the goal of becoming financially successful or starting your own business and the goal of spending half the day at the beach or taking a golf course. Your goals should mutually support and reinforce each other.
Second, your goals should challenge you. They should make you worry. When you first set a goal for yourself, the probability of achieving it should already be 50 percent or more. This level of probability is ideal for motivation, and it is not so low that you quickly become disillusioned. Once you get some skill at achieving goals, you can be quite confident in setting yourself goals that have only a 40 percent or even 30 to 20 percent chance of achieving.
Thirdly, you must have goals both tangible and intangible: qualitative and quantitative. You should have clear goals that can be objectively measured and evaluated. At the same time, you should have quality goals related to your inner world and relationships.
In relation to your family, you may have a quantitative goal — the acquisition of a large house. A qualitative goal for your family could be, for example, the desire to become a more patient, loving person. These two goals complement each other perfectly. They balance the inside and the outside.
Fourth, you must have goals, both short-term and long-term. You need tasks for today and goals for five, ten and twenty years ahead.
The ideal time frame for a close goal in business, career, and personal life plans is about ninety days. The ideal window for long-term goals in the same areas is two to three years.
The best main goal or primary goal is a quantitative goal, calculated over two or three years. Further, you can break it down into ninety-day segments, and then break the latter down into monthly, weekly, and one-day subgoals that have measurable criteria by which you can evaluate how far you have progressed.
The ideal life is focused, full of goals, positive and organized so that every hour and every day you move towards important goals. You always know what you are doing and why. You have a constant sense of progress. Most of the time you feel like a winner.
How to define your goals
Here are seven questions that you should ask yourself and answer over and over again. I suggest you take a notebook and write down your answers.
Question one: What are the top five values in your life?
The question was asked to help you figure out what is really important to you and, in addition, what is less or not important at all.
Once you’ve identified the five most important values in your life, rank them in order of priority, from the first—the most important—to the fifth.
Your choice of values and the order in which they are important precedes the setting of your goals. Because your life moves from the inside to the outside, and your values are central to your personality, being certain about them enables you to choose goals that match those values.
Question two: What are your three main life goals at the moment?
Write the answer to this question in thirty seconds.
This is the so-called fast enumeration method. When you only have thirty seconds to write down your three main goals, your subconscious mind quickly discards many of your goals. The best three just hits your mind like a shot. In thirty seconds you will achieve the same exact answer as in thirty minutes.
Question three: What would you do, what would you spend your time on if you found out today that you only have six months to live?
This is another value-related question that will help you determine what is truly important to you. When your time is limited, even if only in imagination, you become very aware of who and what is really of paramount importance to you. As one doctor said, “I have never met a businessman who, on his deathbed, said, ‘It’s a pity that I spent so little time at work.’”
Someone once said that a man is not ready to live until he is ready to answer what he would do if he had only one hour left on earth. What would you do?
Question Four: What will you do if you win a million dollars in the lottery tomorrow?
How will you change your life? What will you buy? What will you start or stop doing? Imagine that you have only two minutes to write down the answers, and you can only do or take as a decision what you write down.
This question can help you decide what you would do if you had a lot of money and time and no fear of failure at all. The most accurate answers come when you consider how much you would do differently if you had a choice.
Question Five: What have you always wanted to do but were afraid to try?
This question will help you see more clearly where your fears were preventing you from doing what you really wanted to do.
Question six: What do you like to do? What gives you the most complete sense of self-respect and self-satisfaction?
This is another value-related question that can show you where to start looking for your «cherished desire.» You will always be happy doing what you love to do, and what you love to do is undoubtedly something that will make you feel like a complete, fulfilled person.
Question seven, perhaps the most important: What is your wildest dream if you knew you couldn’t fail?
Imagine that a genie appears and gives you one wish. The genie has guaranteed that you will achieve absolute, total success in whatever you choose, big or small, near in time or distant. If you had a total guarantee of success in any one thing, big or small, what exciting goal would you set for yourself?
Whatever you write in response to any of the questions, including «What is your wildest dream if you knew you couldn’t fail?», it’s all you can do, get, or become. The very fact that you were able to write it means that you can achieve it. Once you’ve decided what it is you want, the only question to answer is «Do I want it badly enough and am I willing to pay the price for it?»
Take a few minutes and write down the answers to all seven questions. Once you have the answers down on paper, go through them and choose just one of them as your main, defining goal in life for now. By simply deciding what you want and writing it down, you will propel yourself into the elite three percent. You will do something that very few do. You will make a written list of goals for yourself. Now you are ready to take a giant leap forward.