So let’s finally set up some goals!

Outline

At first, you need to think. Think about your life, what you want to achieve, which skills do you want to have, how you want to appear to others, where you want to be in 5 years etc. Write down your thoughts. Just do it. Write it all down. Important and less important goals. Big and small ones. Take your time. This material gathering will help you to get an overview of your present goals. You’re creating the outline now.

Focus

The next step is creating a focus. You will probably have listed too many goals. That’s perfectly normal. But it’s time to sort the unimportant stuff out now. Simplify! Try to notice what is of real importance to you. You can still reach those other less important goals later, but you can’t reach them all at once. It would be like trying to catch 10 tennis balls at the same time. How much easier would it be to catch them one by one? The same applies to goal setting as well. Too many goals will take away your focus and cause you to fail. (Although you can focus on slightly more goals at the same time than you can catch tennis balls.)

Adjust

Now you should have a rather small list of major goals. What you want to do next is adjust them. Good formulated goals are so much easier to reach. Even if they seem to be far away from simple. I’ll give you some powerful tips for the correct formulation of goals:

• Set precise goals. This gives you a better focus. I’ll give you an example. You might want to “become a known blogger”. But what does “known” mean? Who should know you? “Known” is not precise enough. A better goal would be “Having over 100 visitors to my blog a day” or “Earning 100$ a week with blogging”.
• Your brain doesn’t understand negations. Avoid using them when setting your goals.
  Maybe you know the famous example: “Don’t think of a pink elephant!” You’re likely to fail. If you didn’t even know about it, this task would be extremely easy to accomplish. Parents probably know the same effect from telling their children to not play on the street or something like that. The brain can make it hard to obey prohibitions. On that account, be careful with formulations such as “don’t get nervous”. Use something like “feel confident” instead.
• Tomorrow never comes. Act now or set precise dates. Who doesn’t know those intentions starting with “Tomorrow…”? And what’s going to happen tomorrow? All too often you will still have the very same intentions, still starting with “Tomorrow…”. Same with “next monday” or “next month”. So if you really can’t start now to go for a certain goal, set a precise starting date. On that score, a goal like “I’ll smoke my last cigarette at 15.11.09″ would be OK.
• Set deadlines if possible. Slight pressure causes motivation. Deadlines are really effective. They don’t really work for goals like getting rid of addictions, but you should set time limits whenever you can. (Set a starting point for such problems instead, as mentioned above.)
• Split up big goals into smaller steps. You can reach big goals but things that seem to be totally out of reach, like “becoming a millionaire”, don’t give you enough motivation to act NOW. Plus, you will probably feel lost and loose focus if you try to take it all at a single blow. “Becoming a millionaire” could be divided in small steps like “earning 200$ a month”, “earning 500$ a month”, … Another example of a rather big task is setting up your goals. Yep, and that’s why I wrote this article. Did you notice how I split it up into minor steps? Always try to split up the big chunks. A step by step approach is easy and motivates you.

You set your limits yourself. Go for your goals.