Setting Seamless and Efficient Goals

We all set goals regularly, be it regarding health, academics, work, finance, or building hobbies and habits. After all, we try to achieve personal growth and development by setting goals for ourselves. Though setting goals is an important step, it is just the first one and many times reaching our goal may seem like a huge task. We may try our best but still end up not achieving our goal, while other times we may give up before we even start. There are scenarios where, halfway through the path to success, we lose motivation or things get too hard, and we give up. Other times, even though we succeed, we don’t feel as fulfilled as we expected to. Though the goal is something we want, things may not always work out. So where do we go wrong?

Determining and setting your goal itself is crucial. Before setting your goal, you need to ask yourself the right questions. Ask yourself what the goal means to you, why it is important to you and how achieving it would make you feel. Answering these questions will help you get a clear picture of whether you are aiming for things that matter to you. Setting goals one personally does not value is often a pitfall. 

Done determining what the goal means to you? Next, you can formulate a plan based on your strengths and weaknesses. Find a way of organisation that works for you and prioritise what’s most important. Set SMART goals! What are SMART goals, you ask? It stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time specific goals.

Once you’ve set your goal, try to establish flow. Flow is a state where you are highly engaged in a task and experience a sense of timelessness. You can do this by making sure that the task at hand is not so difficult that you are anxious and unable to work, but also that it isn’t so easy that you get bored. 

It is essential to also acknowledge the importance of reassessing your goals. Revisit your goals from time to time and see if they still matter to you. If your priorities have changed, that is nothing to be ashamed about. You can always tweak the goal to make sure it matters to you. If your goals are still important to you, but you are nonetheless having a hard time reaching them, you could try to change your approach. Use different techniques or readjust the timeline in a way that is realistic to your current situation.

Finally, upon achieving your goals, don’t forget to learn from it. Take feedback. Understand what you did right and what you could’ve done better along the way. And most importantly, don’t forget to reward yourself! Acknowledge your abilities and celebrate your wins.