Goal-Setting: Dream big and pursue your goals with passion

One way to turn your life around is by setting and pursuing new goals. Goal-setting is the one activity that sets apart self-developers from those who survive or just get by. Goal-setting enables us to create the future we want to happen rather than live the future that others impose on us. In goal-setting, we take charge. Here are 4 ways to set reachable goals and change your work life balance.

Start With Your Strengths

Although you can base your goals on anything you want, your chances of success are greater if, first, you base them on your strengths and second, on the current opportunities in your field. To find out your strengths, do some self-research, such as a personal SWOT: your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. While we must keep an eye on weaknesses and threats, our goals should be built around strengths and opportunities.

Dream Big

One of the factors that restricts the realisation of our full potential is the belief that we shouldn’t go for big goals. Yet all the evidence of those who realize big goals is that we can always achieve far more than we think. David Schwartz says in his book “The Magic of Thinking Big”: “Big goals attract big resources like a magnet.” There is nothing wrong in thinking big when you set your goals. But you need to remember that a goal and a dream are not always the same thing.

Imagine Yourself Succeeding

When your will, your rational left-brained self, comes into conflict with your imagination, your creative right-brained self, your imagination wins every time.

If we want to achieve our goals, we need to imagine ourselves succeeding. Such thoughts send out an energy that attracts complementary thoughts from people who can help us achieve what we want.

Express Them Right

It’s important to express your goals in the right way.

• never express your goal in terms of what you don’t want; always in terms of what you do want

• express your goals in performance terms not reward terms

• express your goals in terms of how others benefit

• express your goals according to the principles which matter.

Whilst focusing on goals is a sure way to move towards them, focusing on some goals at the cost of neglecting others is a way to achieve hollow victories. It is like the man who worked so hard to provide for his family that he neglected them in the process and ended up losing them from his life in separation and divorce. When we manage to harmonize or align goals in one area with those in another, we find that motivating forces in one area actually help those in other areas at the same time. As psychologists put it, they become “ecologically worthwhile”.

Pursue Your Goals with Passion

The driving force behind your goal-achievement is Desire. You must desire your goals constantly, vividly and with a burning passion, knowing that you have already achieved them and now only need to realise them. If you do, you cannot fail to achieve them.

Goal-setting is central to maximising our potential because it enables us to create something unique and new in our lives. Goal-setting allows us to feed our goal-oriented brain and puts us in control of our futures.