I was in my late twenties before I became really sold on the idea of goal setting. Today, not only can I not picture how I lived before that, I can not picture living any other way in the future.
Zig Ziglar gives the illustration of a blindfolded man who has been spun around and asked to shoot an arrow to hit a target dead center. He asks… “how can you shoot a target you can’t see. Take it one step further… how can you shoot a target you don’t have?” I think that’s a question that each human being should take time to reflect on.
Setting goals streamlines your activities. It helps in doing away with all the unnecessary mental clutter. It aids in giving you laser like focus, a key component to any form of success that you are going to achieve. Make no mistake about it… anything worthwhile that you are going to achieve is going to be because you have engaged in the exercise of careful and well thought out planning and preparation. Yes it will be dependent on other factors also… your ability to react to setbacks, your ability to show consistency and follow through with things, your ability to push yourself to work. BUT, it all starts with the foundation of having a goal. You’ve visualized it, you’ve made it a target and you’ve methodically taken action to make it a reality. Sir Edmund Hillary doesn’t just wake up one morning and decides “you know what, I’m going to go see if I can climb Mt. Everest today”. I wager he doesn’t make it a quarter of the way if that was the case. Roger Bannister doesn’t just get up and decide to run the four minute mile.
Setting goals gives you direction. That direction creates time. People always complain that they do not have enough time to do all the things they want to do. More often than not, the issue is not a time problem. It is a direction problem. By taking time to clearly define your goals and reorienting your life such that every action you take revolves around and is in pursuit of one of those goals, you will find that you start to have time to do the things that are important to you and get you closer to where you are trying to go in life and who you are trying to be.
So how can you give yourself a better chance at achieving the goals you set? In Zig Ziglar’s audio series ‘Goals: Setting and Achieving Them on Schedule’, he outlines the following method to setting goals:
- Identify what you want and write it down
- Spell out why you need to reach those goals
- List the obstacles to overcome in order to get there
- Identify people, groups and organizations you need to work with in order to get there
- Identify what you need to know to reach that goal
- Develop a plan of action to reach that goal
- Put a date as to when you expect to get there
I made a determined lifestyle adjustment a couple of years back to try to follow those steps above, and the result has been a more focused life. No I have not achieved every goal I set in the time span that I set out to achieve it, but I generally feel like my life is finally starting to head in an upward trajectory. To put it in another way, I’ve got that winning feeling back. Happiness as they say, is not always pleasure. Happiness is victory. I hope you’re spurred on in your own way to make goal setting more of a habit, or to start the journey if you haven’t begun.
Cheers!