Your Road Map- How to Set your goals

The New Year is the time of year that many people speak of making their New Year’s resolutions and setting their goals.Setting goals are very important. They become the road maps to our lives.Knowing what we want to achieve and get out of life, making a plan and following through with our plans will help us to achieve our goals. Most successful people understand the importance of goal setting and do it religiously.

Here is an excellent way to approach goal setting:

“SMART is an acronym that you can use to guide your goal setting.

Its criteria are commonly attributed to Peter Drucker's Management by Objectives concept. The first known use of the term occurs in the November 1981 issue of Management Review by George T. Doran. Since then, Professor Robert S. Rubin (Saint Louis University) wrote about SMART in an article for The Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. He stated that SMART has come to mean different things to different people, as shown below.

To make sure your goals are clear and reachable, each one should be:

• Specific (simple, sensible, significant).
• Measurable (meaningful, motivating).
• Achievable (agreed, attainable).
• Relevant (reasonable, realistic and resourced, results-based).
• Time bound (time-based, time limited, time/cost limited, timely, time-sensitive).” Taken from article SMART Goals -How to Make Your Goals Achievable. The Mind Tools.

Keeping‘SMART’ in mind when setting your goals will help to keep them clear, stimulate meaning and purpose, make them attainable and realistic all in a set time line. Remember as you are setting your goals to use as many of your senses as you can. By feeling the goal and seeing the goal as if you have already accomplished it is so important. Review them every day until you have accomplished them and then set new goals. Many people give up or fall short on their goals each year.That is ok.If your goal has changed then set a new one. The important thing is to get back up and start again.Goals help us outline the life we want. They do not have to all be material ones. Set out physical, mental, spiritual, emotional ones too. The beauty in goal setting is that we are the artist of our lives. We can create the lives we want with just deciding to do so, setting the goals and going after them. It is also important to enjoy the journey. Every step, every little victory, every time you get back up is a step closer to realizing your dreams. 

BECOME EXCITED! BE CREATIVE! BE PASSIONATE!