The Power of Setting Goals
Posted on February 15, 2012 by Cherese Jackson, One of Thousands of Leadership Coaches on Noomii.
If you don’t have goals in life, you are spending your life aimlessly. Time wasted is something you can never retrieve.
Goal setting is the first step towards personal achievement. It marks your first point towards success. It is what puts your dreams into real action mode.
Have you ever encountered people who have a lackadaisical approach towards life? They don’t set any goals and they just live life on a day-to-day basis. You see them a year, three years, five years from now, and their lives are basically the same, except for a few changes that are really more the result of others’ actions rather than their own.
If you don’t have goals in life, you are spending your life aimlessly. Your energy is randomly dispersed in improvised activities which you engage on whimsical basis. These are activities that play no role in your larger scope of life. You end up mislabeling a lot of fun or menial activities as important; primarily because you can’t think of a better way to spend your time.
Our goals fail because of (2) major reasons:
- There is no date attached – a goal without an expected date attached to it is simply a dream. Once you’ve applied a time frame to your established goal you are now obligated to take action. Setting a specific deadline gives you clarity on whether you are living up against what you committed yourself to do when you first set your goal.
- We don’t have a new behavior attached – a wise person said that the definition of crazy is doing the same thing and expecting something different. By setting goals, you set targets to strive for. These targets make you venture into new places, new contexts, new situations which puts you into growth mode. They make you stretch beyond your normal self and reach new heights. Goals force you to establish a new level of discipline.
Goals provide accountability!
Time passes so quickly, whether we want to or not. Goals with specific measures or deadlines ensure we are maximizing our output and experiences during our time here. If you have already discovered your life purpose, your goals will ensure you get the best out of your purpose.
Setting your goals gives you clarity on what you ultimately want. It makes you crystallize and articulate the desires floating in your mind. It ensures that you are channeling your time, energy and efforts into things that really matter to you. It makes you live more consciously.
Goals give you a single focal point to place your attention in. Your purpose gives you a broad, directional focus to move your life in, goals fine tune your focus so you know exactly what exactly to spend your time and energy on.
You may have a broad idea of what you want to do. But until you clearly articulate it in the form of a goal and attach an ending date, you are not channeling your efforts properly. It’s really quite easy to get caught up in the currents of everyday life. You may get the general overall impression that you are moving in the right direction, but it’s just an illusion. With no goals, you have no focus.
Your Best You!
Goals help you achieve your highest potential. Without goals, you subject yourself to the natural, default set of actions that keep you blindly navigating your life. But this prevents you from growing. It does not enable you to become the best person you can be. It denies you from tapping into all that potential inside of you.
Setting goals means that you are not willing to settle for anything less than you deserve. Goals help you face and overcome countless barriers than you would otherwise. Goals cause you to become more self aware and learn more things about yourself and life in general.
Your Best Life!
Firstly, by becoming a better person, your new found knowledge and abilities let you experience more out of the same life events compared to the previous you. Your world view will become different vs the old you (that used to be). You’ll see life with much more clarity, depth and perspective than you did in the past? What may be a simple daily occurrence in the past holds a lot more meaning to the more highly evolved you today.
Secondly, time passes in our life, whether we want to or not. Goals with specific measures and deadlines ensure we are maximizing our output and experiences during our time here. If you have already discovered your life purpose, your goals will ensure you get the best out of your purpose.
If you are to take some time out to set your goals now, I can guarantee you that you will definitely experience more growth as a person. By just spending a few minutes to articulate some aspirations that have been in your mind and establishing some goals with a date attached, you will experience fulfillment and direction and much less frustration. You will be much closer to becoming the “you” that you’ve only dreamed of becoming.
See you at the TOP!
Cherese Jackson
