Set Goals, Smash them, Repeat!

^{Image - Pixabay CC0}

Hello Steemit family, how are we doing? I apologize that my post is not as consistent as they use to be lately, the reason is that I have been a little busy with college. So my time is constantly under pressure because I have so much to do. Anyways, it is always nice to be here, I hope to post regularly real soon. So enough about me, let’s get down to today’s topic, and it is a special one to me because its one that I have come to appreciate.

Goal setting is very important, on many levels, it means a lot of set goals than just doing it as a vocation or an activity. In Fact, we take the need to truly set SMART Goals SMART stands for Specific Measurable Attainable Realistic and Time-bound goals, we in a way, are trying to see into the future. Although this sounds like a long shot, goal setting and management is such an important task that those that excel in life take it really seriously, while those that aren’t excelling, take it lightly.

Today’s post is about setting the right goals, and getting past those goals and setting better and more advanced goals and figuring ways to achieve these seemingly harder goals.

Ask yourself the tough questions

What do I want from life? Where do you want to be in 3 months, 6 months, 1 year’s time? What do I want to be professional in a specified period of time? These are the kind of tough questions you should be comfortable asking yourself. And the quality of answers you get tells you where you are in terms of growth and progress. With the engagement you get, you can now easily start mapping out areas where you want to see improvements, these improvements can be called targets, or better still goals. After this exercise, you have a baseline to work from, as now you understand what needs to be done, and you have an idea on how to go about achieving this goal.

This conversation can be a form of a soliloquy, or you can have it with a trusted partner, the person should be someone you are absolutely comfortable talking to regardless of the outcome of the conversation. When you are talking to yourself, we tend to be a little soft and go easy on ourselves, but someone else is involved, it makes things more serious, and we have a witness that can track our progress and we want to impress, and at the same time, not let ourselves down. So asking ourselves these tough questions can help us set the tone in creating solid goals that if achieved, can take us further in our personal lives, career or what endeavour we hope to work on.

Put pen to paper

This is the actual task of setting the goal that we must have identified by engaging in the above conversation. Remember, your goals must be SMART, so we don’t waste time running in circles, without making progress, and wasting time in the process. So, when writing a goal, it must be relevant to what you are trying to achieve, and it must also be time-bound, which means there must be a duration or an expiry date attached to the goal. This way you can truly measure your progress in attaining the identified goal(s). So, working on a set goal, one can now create action plans and to-do list on how to achieve the dissected parts of the goal, these bits are actionable tasks that will all accumulate into forming the complete object.

The final part of setting goals, is the execution part, which is actually the most important, because when all is said and done, its the result that matters, and execution is what brings the final product at talking the hard talk and drawing up a goal that was followed by action plans and to-do lists. The final product is execution.

References

^{MindTools - Smart Tools}

^{Wikipedia - Smart Criteria}