Do You Use Smart Goal Setting?

One of the earliest blogs I wrote was The Advantages of Goal Setting. While that blog still contains some great advice and tips, I’ve become better at Smart Goal Setting for myself and in addition, my own goals have moved on from what I set myself back then.

The article was written in the very early days of getting my business up and running, so at the time it was important to me to get in a good habit of blogging, building followers and learning more about my industry. All of these things are still important to me, however they have become ingrained into what I do day to day and my goals now cover a wider range of challenges.

Smart Goal Setting is a Acronym for goals that are:

Specific

Measureable

Attainable

Relevant

Time-Bound

There are many advantages to Smart Goal Setting:

• They give you clear focus and vision
• Goals help you control your future
• They give you a sense of purpose
• Goals permit you to focus your energy
• They enable you to be positive in your outlook
• Goals afford you to be more motivated and greater enthusiasm
• Goals increase desire, passion and motivation.
• They enable you to overcome any difficulty or obstacle
• They reduce doubt and procrastination
• Goals make life more fun and give you direction and certainty

I think this goes to show the importance of setting yourself goals and then monitoring your progress over time. Without having something to aim for, how can you tell how well you are doing?

So, using Smart Goal Setting, how do go about setting realistic, achievable goals for yourself?

Work Backwards. Most people simply have no idea how to go about achieving a distant future ambition. If you’ve always wanted to be CEO of a huge company, yet you currently work in Telesales, the distance between the two jobs seems huge. If you imagine yourself in the CEO’s shoes, then work backwards from that position and what you have done to become the CEO . By doing this, you are bringing the CEO closer to where you are now, and making the end goal into a series of smaller goals.

Stay motivated. By setting yourself smaller targets that are easier to achieve you are giving yourself stepping stones to skip across, rather than a huge canyon to jump. Don’t be disheartened if the smaller steps don’t seem to be giving you enough progress, remember the end result is what you are after and be sure you congratulate yourself on your achievements every step of the way.

Don’t dwell in the past. It can be easy to say, “if only I’d done a different college course, I’d have got a better job, and more experience, and I would already be further in my career.”� This doesn’t help! Nobody has perfect foresight, and likewise nobody has a time machine! Learn from all your past experiences and move on with what you have learned towards the future that you want.

Track your progress. Sometimes, we can become so focussed on the end goal, that we lose sight of whether it is still something that we want to achieve, or whether it is actually still important to achieve it.

An example of this is when I once worked really hard for a couple of years to earn a promotion, only to get the new job and realise that actually, I didn’t enjoy it. I had been so blinkered in wanting to achieve the recognition for my work, that I forgot to see the bigger picture -in getting the promotion I could no longer do the job that I enjoyed, and instead found myself in a job that left me unfulfilled.

Maybe it would have been better to adjust my goal so that instead of going for promotion, I could have stayed on the same team as before, but taken on some extra responsibilities?

The flip side of this is that in taking the job that I didn’t enjoy, and being unable to go back to the previous role, I found the motivation to set up my own business and a whole new list of goals to achieve!

Whatever you want to achieve, there�WILL be a way for you to go out and do it. Just break it down into simpler steps, and as you make your way on your journey make sure that you use Smart Goal Setting to check you are still headed in the direction in which�you want to go!

About

James Debono is a small business owner and Internet entrepreneur. James dedicates his time to helping other small business owners leverage the power of the Internet to drive business growth and positive change. Click here Join James Debono on Google+

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Related posts:

1. The Advantages of Goal Setting