Are You Setting the Right Goals?

There’s a lot more to goal setting than just choosing a goal. It’s also important to ensure you are setting the right goals at the right time so you can truly be successful. Ask yourself the following questions:

Are Your Goals Specific, Realistic and Measurable?

It takes a little research to ensure that a goal is realistic. If you’re not sure if something is actually achievable, then you haven’t done enough research. Once you’ve set a realistic goal, then you need to be specific enough in your description of it so it’s also easy to take the goal and work backward to create a schedule of actions needed to succeed. As Michael Hyatt says, goals should be specific (so you know exactly what you’re shooting for), realistic (something you can actually see yourself achieving), and measurable (so you can know for sure when you’ve achieved it).

Are Your Goals Multifaceted?

Focusing on only one part of your life is a bad idea. People live multifaceted lives and need to make goals for all areas of their lives in order to feel successful. If you have a wonderful business and career but your personal life suffers, then no matter how successful you are, you will not feel successful. Something will always feel as if it’s missing from your life if your goals aren’t inclusive. Therefore, make sure your goals include something from each aspect of your life.

Is Your Scheduling Representative of Real Need?

Once you create a schedule for yourself to reach each goal you’ve set, you need to truly consider how representative it is of reality. Say your goal is to be healthy and reduce your cholesterol by 10 percent in six months. But, you haven’t set aside the time needed to exercise and eat right. If you don’t schedule in the time needed, you won’t succeed because something will always be in your way. It will be very frustrating to practice your schedule because it doesn’t represent reality.

For instance, if you are going to exercise 30 minutes each day, setting aside only 30 minutes isn’t going to be realistic. You’ll probably need to set aside an hour to account for getting ready as well as cooling down or getting cleaned up to go back to work.

Are You Learning from Failure?

Many times when setting goals and schedules, instead of learning from failure, people give up. Using the example above, once you implement your schedule to reach the goals you’ve set when you notice there are things you’ve forgotten to take into account, don’t give up. Learn from the mistake and change the schedule to be more realistic.

You might find that in practice you have to rewrite your goals and your schedule, but that’s perfectly normal.

Do Your Goals Represent Your Needs and Wants or Someone Else’s?

A lot of people set goals that represent what someone else wants instead of what they want. This can cause bad feelings and resentment. As you set your goals for your life, ask yourself if they’re really what you want for yourself or what someone else wants for you. Ask yourself if you’re OK with any goal you make being for someone else before you embark on your journey.

It’s OK to do things because of someone else, but it’s important that you’re honest about it and make some goals for yourself that don’t involve anyone else’s needs or wants.

Are You Checking in Often to Stay on Track?

Schedules are very important to the success of reaching any goal in life. To-do lists pale in comparison to a well-laid-out calendar of tasks and activities that get you from point A to point B. Ensure that you look at your schedule every morning and every night and note when you succeed in sticking to your schedule and where you don’t. Noticing a pattern of activity can be helpful in fixing a poorly written schedule as well as staying realistic about whether or not you’re sticking to the plan.

Are Your Goals Focused Positively?

When writing a goal it’s important to write them in a way that feels positive to you. In the quest to improve your life, try writing down a goal and then changing the words to sound more positive to see if it isn’t more motivating. For instance, “losing weight” seems like a good goal, but for some people, it might signify deprivation. So instead, the person might frame the goal as “improving my BMI by 10 points” or “improving my cholesterol by 10 percent.”

Do You Have Too Many Goals Set at One Time?

Just as setting too few goals can be a problem, so can setting too many. Everyone has a personal life and a career life and points in between. If you have set goals in too many areas of life at once, you might tire yourself out and get overwhelmed. Instead, pick one personal goal, and one other type of goal to focus on until you reach them, and then you can add more goals as time goes on. You don’t need to do everything today. Slow and steady wins the race is a good motto to hang on to.

Setting the right goals for yourself takes some thought and consideration. Don’t try to set all your goals in one day — instead, set some goals in different stages and in different areas of your life and give a lot of thought to why you’re making the goal in the first place.