Your Lifetime Goals

The first step in setting personal goals is to consider what you want to achieve in your lifetime (or by a time at least, say, 10 years in the future) as setting Lifetime Goals gives you the overall perspective that shapes all other aspects of your decision making.

To give a broad, balanced coverage of all important areas in your life, try to set goals in some of these categories (or in categories of your own, where these are important to you):

• Artistic:
  Do you want to achieve any artistic goals? If so, what?
  
  

• Attitude:
  Is any part of your mindset holding you back? Is there any part of the way that you behave that upsets you? If so, set a goal to improve your behavior or find a solution to the problem.
  
  
• Career:
  What level do you want to reach in your career?
  
  
• Education:
  Is there any knowledge you want to acquire in particular? What information and skills will you need to achieve other goals?
  
  
• Family:
  Do you want to be a parent? If so, how are you going to be a good parent? How do you want to be seen by a partner or by members of your extended family?
  
  
• Financial:
  How much do you want to earn by what stage?
  
  
• Physical:
  Are there any athletic goals you want to achieve, or do you want good health deep into old age? What steps are you going to take to achieve this?
  
  
• Pleasure:
  How do you want to enjoy yourself? - you should ensure that some of your life is for you!
  
  
• Public Service:
  Do you want to make the world a better place? If so, how?

Achieving Goals

When you have achieved a goal, take the time to enjoy the satisfaction of having done so. Absorb the implications of the goal achievement, and observe the progress you have made towards other goals. If the goal was a significant one, reward yourself appropriately. All of this helps you build the self-confidence you deserve!

With the experience of having achieved this goal, review the rest of your goal plans:

• If you achieved the goal too easily, make your next goals harder.
  
• If the goal took a dispiriting length of time to achieve, make the next goals a little easier.
  
• If you learned something that would lead you to change other goals, do so.
  
• If you noticed a deficit in your skills despite achieving the goal, decide whether to set goals to fix this.

Failure to meet goals does not matter much, as long as you learn from it. Feed lessons learned back into your goal setting program.

Remember too that your goals will change as time goes on. Adjust them regularly to reflect growth in your knowledge and experience, and if goals do not hold any attraction any longer, then let them go.

SMART Goals:
A useful way of making goals more powerful is to use the SMART mnemonic. While there are plenty of variants, SMART usually stands for:

• S Specific
• M Measurable
• A Attainable
• R Relevant
• T Time-bound