As we are coming to the end of the third quarter of the year, I have this week spent a little time reviewing my progress against the personal and professional goals that I set for myself in January.

It helps to remind me what has been accomplished, decide if some are still relevant or require adjustment. It provides me with focus and motivation for the remaining months of the year.

I am a big believer in setting goals and find it really useful. For me personally, setting goals helps

  • Provide a sense of achievement and pride
  • Ensure that I focus my time and more importantly my energy on what really matters
  • Enable me to grow and develop
  • Me to new experiences
  • Provides balance to my life

Some personal development experts encourage us to have BHAGS (big hairy audacious goals); I am unable to claim that all my goals fall into that category. Some are bigger than others, they are all meaningful and some are challenging.

Some of them relate to things that it is easy to forget and put off when we caught up in the busyness of modern life – things such as places to visit, concerts and days out.

When I sit down in January, I consider various areas of life – business/career, relationships, family, home, money, fun and recreation, health and fitness, learning. I then come up with 2/3 goals for each area.

I set about breaking the goals down into specific actions that I can take over the year to make them a reality.

I have found the following to be helpful to consider when setting goals and I hope that they help you too:

1) What would specifically like to achieve and by when? For instance” to get fitter” is a goal but a better goal would be “improve my fitness by going for a 30 minute walk each day, starting on January 2 and maintain this until December 31”

2) What is your motivation for wanting this, why is it important to you? By getting clear on your motivations help you to maintain focus when the going gets tough and feel like giving up. It acts as a reminder to persevere if you are contemplating quitting.

3) What’s your current position? This helps you make an assessment on how realistic the goal is and helps quantify what needs to be done to make the dream a reality.

4) Are there any obstacles to overcome? Obstacles may be personal limitations or limiting beliefs, other people or external factors such as a lack of time, money, knowledge or skills. By clarifying what needs to be overcome, helps you to start to think about ideas and solutions.

5) What support is available to you? Do you need to ask for some help or support to achieve your goal? What personal strengths, people or resources will help you to accomplish what you set out to do? It’s also a chance to consider, if you need to be accountable to someone. If we share our goals with others, they can check in on progress and provide encouragement or challenge if required.

6) What action steps will you commit to? For bigger goals, I find it useful to break the goal down into smaller chunks and devise some small specific steps action steps with some deadlines. This helps prevent a big goal feeling overwhelming. If we feel in a state of overwhelm it can makes us procrastinate and stop us from starting

7) What will you do to celebrate and reward yourself when you achieve your goal? This provides added incentive to achieve a stretching goal and keeps you focused and motivated. It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking about what we haven’t done or achieved and not take any time to celebrate and reward ourselves when we complete something that we set out to do.

This week, why not take a few moments to think about how you have done against the goals and intentions that you set in January? Consider if there are things that you would like to do and achieve by the end of this year.

This week’s quotation:

“You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream. C. S. Lewis

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