Mental Health Drop In Center

Goal setting is an important technique of achieving any lifetime ambitions. However, there are some key points that you should consider before setting your goals. Let’s take a look at what these are.

* Decide what is important for you to achieve in your life and make your choices based on your hopes and dreams.

* Motivate yourself to achievement to ensure your accomplishment. I have an article titled: “An Exercise in Learning Motivation.”
You may read it at: Learning Motivation Exercise

* Build your self-confidence based on the measured achievement of your goals. I have several articles on self-confidence at:
Self Confidence Articles

You should allow yourself to enjoy the achievement of your goals and reward yourself appropriately. You must draw lessons where they are appropriate, and feed these back into future performances. In learning from mistakes and errors, you are on your way to success.

How Goal Setting can go Wrong

Goal setting can go wrong for a number of reasons. When these things happen, it can be a letdown to the self esteem and can make the idea of setting any new goals mute.

Before we can look into what we can do about solving these goals setting problems, let’s see what the problems can be.

Outcome goals are set instead of performance goals. This forces you to focus on the end result immediately instead of taking your time to go through the steps of goal setting. When you set goals properly, you will be doing it in a step by step manner. Where you are using outcome goals, and you fail to achieve the goal for reasons outside your control, this can be very dispiriting and can lead to loss of enthusiasm and feelings of failure. Always set performance goals instead as this will give you a higher chance of succeeding.

Goals can be set unrealistically high. When a goal is perceived to be unreachable, usually little effort will be made to achieve it. Set realistic goals so that you can best decide how to go about achieving them.

Goals can also be set so low that you feel no challenge of benefit in achieving the goal. Always set goals that are challenging enough to be worth the effort, but not out of reach.

Goals can also be so vague that they are useless. It is difficult to know whether vague goals have been achieved. If achievement can’t be measured against your expectations, then your self-confidence will not benefit from goal setting, nor can you observe progress towards a greater goal. Set precise and quantitative goals.

Goal setting can be unsystematic, sporadic and disorganized. In this case certain goals will be forgotten, and the achievement of goals will not be measured and feedback will not occur into new goals. The major benefits of goal setting have been lost. Be organized and regular in the way that in the way that you use goal setting.

Too many goals that aren’t given priority may be set, leading to a feeling of overload. Remember that you deserve time to relax and enjoy being alive and not solely focused on your goals and achievements.

By avoiding these problems, and setting goals effectivelyas described in the previous section, you can achieve and maintain a strong forward leap into your future.

My next article will focus on
““Getting Specific to Goal Setting”.”

Scott Barker- EzineArticles- Expert Author

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Filed under: Motivation, Self Help, Self-Improvement