Effective Goal Setting

A goal or objective is a desired result a person plans and commits to achieve. To achieve the goal, there are few things that have to be followed or set.

Here are 6 characteristics of effective goals:

1. Challenging: Your goals should be realistic and suited to your present capabilities.Small, progressive steps toward reasonable, long-term goals are crucial to success. But your goals should also push you to extend yourself beyond where you already are. Otherwise you will get bored and quit the game.

2. Attainable: Don’t take your challenging characteristic too far. Make sure you can actually achieve what you’re setting out to do. Otherwise, you will get frustrated and quit the game.

3. Specific: Try to ’do your best’ or at least ’do better’. You need to define some very specific, concrete, and measurable action-steps that tell you what your goal looks like in real-life terms. Include how you will measure your results so you can tell whether you are getting anywhere.

4. Time-limited: Goals need to come with deadlines, due dates, and payoff schedules. Otherwise, they’ll fade into the background with your daily routine, and you’ll quit playing the game. If your long-term goal is going to take a while to reach, create some intermediate - and short-term goals. These will make your larger goal seem less daunting and keep you focused on what you can do here and now to help yourself get there.

5. Positive: Goals should always be framed in positive terms. We are much better at approaching what we want to do than avoiding what we don’t want.

6. Flexible: Good strategies and goals are always flexible, because nothing in this world stays the same for very long, and staying alive and on course means being able to adapt to changing circumstances.

Remember, meeting your goals is 90% attitude. No one is perfect, and you’re going to have days where you just don’t do what you set out to. Build up some good stress management habits and tools to help you deal with those days without losing sight of your long term goals, or losing your motivation.