Are you feeling uninspired and unfulfilled ?
Personal goals can help you get there. You may have set personal goals for yourself but for some reasons couldn’t follow through. Let’s dive into why setting personal goals matter, how to set them efficiently to achieve results and what personal goals can look like.
What are personal goals ?
Personal goals are desired objectives that people seek to achieve, maintain or avoid in their carrier, health, relationship, finances and personal lifestyle. The basics of setting personal goals are identifying desired objectives or targets, developing action plans and working towards achieving them. They can be long or short term depending on your targets. Personal goals are meant to enable you to achieve what you want in life. Personal development goals help you grow as a person. They exist to give you a long-term vision of how you want to improve yourself over time.
Benefits of setting personal goals:
- Setting personal goals boost our motivation and our sense of purpose, direction, and control.
- It can help us link our daily behavior with the bigger picture of our important aspirations and dreams.
- Helps us visualize. Plans actions to achieve goals we set and then carry them out
- Makes us aware of our strengths, which can be used to overcome obstacles and provide solutions to problems.
- Makes us aware of our weaknesses so we can begin to improve them and make them into our strengths.
- Makes us self aware and enables us to control our future.
HOW TO SET GOALS FOR YOURSELF
Follow these steps to create goals for yourself:
Step 1: Write down what you want to achieve. Before setting a goal, think about what you want to achieve or see. Ask yourself if its truly what you want and if it aligns with your values and other goals. Also ensure its important to put into it hours of your time and efforts. If its not then its not worth pursuing it.
Step 2: Set SMART goals
Smart goals stand for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. For instance instead of saying “I want to loose weight”, try something like, “I want to loose 10kg in the next three months by doing skipping daily and by eating healthy”.
Step 3: Ask yourself
How important your goal is ?
How big is the goal ? Example, i want to set up a business will a certain amount be enough ?
How much money will i need to save
How long will i need to achieve this goal
step 3: Divide your goals into three achievable sections
Immediate goals, intermediate goals and long-term goals
Immediate goals could be things you want to achieve immediately depending on your order of importance and your capabilities. Example, paying of debt in full, enrolling yourself in school, buying a manageable car the list goes on and on.
Intermediate goals are goals that you can accomplish in one to five years as they take more planning and will take quite a bit of saving. They might include purchasing a home, planning a wedding or preparing for birth or adopting a child.
Long-term goals are goals that will take more than five years to accomplish. They might include saving for your retirement, setting money aside for your children’s college.
From here, you may want to arrange your list by order of importance, add a dead line and work towards achieving them. If u create a long list of what you want to achieve at the same time you may end up achieving nothing. Instead, focus on one goal at a time depending on what is most important to you.
DEVELOPE ACTION PLAN
Many people fail to achieve their goals because they fail to create action plans on exactly how theyll meet their goals. Your action plan should the overall goal you want to meet and a step by step plan on how to get there. It should also include possible challenges you could face and how to solve it if it happens. You can get creative with your action plans by using colored pencils, stickers, crayons and markers as this will activate a different part of your brain and cement your goals in your mind according to Forbes.
TAKE ACTION
Its time to put your plans into action since everything is well planned out. Every step should lead you to your next step until you finish your goal. Do a routine evaluation to measure your progress. This will keep you motivated once you see how close you are to your finish line. Make the needed adjustment if you are a little behind and keep going. Holding yourself accountable can help you identify strategies that work best for you. By meeting small goals every day, bigger ones will be achieved, too.
Types of personal goals to set for yourself.
There are several types of personal goals you can set for yourself to help u grow as a person. Here are some examples :
- Educational goals
Educational goals are mostly related to academic achievements such as completing a degree, obtaining a certificate, obtaining knowledge on a subject or a new field of study.
- Financial goals
Financial goals are about setting targets relating to funds. It’ll help you take control of your finances. Most people spend more than they earn. Setting financial goals will help you live within your means and save towards achieving other goals.
- Career goals
Career goals focuses on your professional life. It may be a personal professional aspiration or an institutional goal. Setting professional goals will help you achieve a more productive and progressive professional life.
- Family goals
These could be finding a partner, planning to start a family, or strengthening your relationship with your family. Family is so important because being in a healthy company of people you see as family have a positive impact on your lifestyle and wellbeing.
- Health goals
Staying alive is probably the most importance goal anyone could set before anything else. When you are fit and healthy embarking on any other life goal is easier. People see health goals as mostly eating healthy. What better way to stay healthy than staying mentally sound.
Example of goals to set for yourself
Here are example of long term goals you can use as inspiration for setting your own goals ;
- Save for Mortgage : This will involve managing your savings account by reviewing it at least once a year to ensure you have the best interest rate. You can pay extra off your mortgage to reduce the amount of interest you’ll pay.
Aim to build up enough savings to afford a down-payment on a house within the next 10 years. - Save for retirement : Set aside a percentage of your income towards your retirement every month.
- Save towards the children’s college:
- Buying a house: If you want to purchase a home or upgrade your current home, you can set the goal of saving for a down payment.
- Travel the world : Visit or tour one or two countries in a year to expose you to other cultures. This starts with planning your budget.
- Retire early : Retiring early before the traditional year can be exiting to look forward to. It involve saving like it’s your job and spending smartly.
- Have kids : If you have the desire for having kids then planning towards it should be key in your planning because kids can be expensive to maintain. Decide on how many you can afford and plan towards them. Again you need to be physical and mentally ready to have kids. There preparing to have kids could be a personal goal.
- Get married : Marriage could be a personal goal depending on whether you have the desire for it or not. If truly you and your partner get each other through life when you need each other then planning on getting married could be your desire.
- Learn a new language: Determine why you want to learn a new language. Let’s say to want to take a trip to India, you’ll need to know enough of their language to start a basic conversation.
- Relocate to a new country : Relocating would begin with researching on your destination country and getting your documents ready. If your goal is to relocate to a new country then you should work on your finances because this could be draining.
- Start a business : Start with a good business idea and follow up with a business plan. Get all necessary documentations and register for permit.
- Publish a book : Publishing a book yourself could be a personal goal. You can start by researching on how you can public a book for free or online. Know what it entails before embarking on the journey so you don’t get stuck alone the way.
- Learn a skill : You can task yourself to learn one or two skills in a year. This could be job relayed or personal depending on what your desires are. It could be creative thinking or decision making skills to enhance your efficiency at your workplace or self awareness and self management for your personal lifestyle.
- Become a partner in a firm: Work on developing yourself career wise to enable you rise in the course of your career. Improve upon yourself to earn partnership on your firm.
- Get a degree : Sometimes getting a new or more advanced degree can help further your career. You can also aim for this type of goal if you want to change careers.
Short Term Goals
- Create a morning routine : This will help you to be more organized.
- Read more: Another effective way to improve your knowledge is by reading more. It could be reading a job related book within a month or reading for pleasure.
- Be more productive at work : Many people get distracted with their phone at work and not get productive. instead of distracting yourself with your phone why not read and article on your job, build a to-do list, engage in one task at a time. Take regular breaks.
- Drink more water : This short-term goal is fairly easy to do. Make a deal with yourself to drink one large glass of water more every day.
- Obtaining certificate : Obtaining new certificate in your chosen field indicates your commitment and dedication to your industry. This will help improve on your competencies and abilities.
- Start Blogging : Research and decide on a blog topic, create a blogging schedule, and post at least once a week for four months, aiming for a 10% increase in followers each month.
- Reduce Screen Time : Monitor daily screen time and aim to reduce it by 10% within two months, replacing screen time with healthier activities, measuring improvements in the sleep cycle.
- Learn to dance : Sign up for dance classes (salsa, hip hop, contemporary, etc.) and attend on a weekly or monthly basis, aiming to perform an entire dance routine with confidence at the end of five months.
- Plan a Solo Trip : Choose a destination, book a trip within your budget, and travel solo for at least a week for the purpose of self-discovery and resilience building over the next six months.
- Create a saving plan : Set up a finance tracking system to track or monitor how you spend monthly especially If you struggle with finances at the end of each month. You can start by writing down every expense for at least a month. After 30 days, you can sit down and evaluate the list. The goal is to identify unnecessary purchases, spur-of-the-moment shopping, and any kind of impulsive buying.
- Get out of your comfort zone : In order to grow as a person, advance professionally, and obtain any other goal, we need to grin and bear it and face whatever is lurking outside the parameters of our safe zone. Decide on one thing that you you are scared doing (from going to the dentist to signing up for a dance class) and give yourself a one-month deadline to do it. Once you’ve done it, you’ll feel a huge weight lifted off your shoulders, so use this energy to think of the next scary or uncomfortable thing to do in the next month.
Conclusion
Are you ready to give it a shot and start working on your personal goals for the next quarter? This is your times. With these steps you can plan on setting your personal goals. Remember to keep track of your everyday progress because it’ll motivate and help you stay on track. Even if you lag behind or slip up, don’t worry about it. What matters is that you don’t give up . So pick up from where you left off, and you’ll soon see the benefits. Good luck.