The Importance of Setting Goals

Did you ever go the store without knowing what you needed to buy? Did you ever buy a home or car without an idea of what you wanted?

For everything in life, we have a reason for going where we go, or doing what we do.

For every facet of our life, especially the important ones related to work, raising children, and marriage and relationship success, we need to set goals.

If we just live day by day with no clear direction in our lives, ultimately our lives will have no clear direction and we can feel frustrated and depressed.

How does a singer or actor attain success?

He or she doesn’t just wake up and sing or act one day. If a promising singer or actor has a dream of making it to the stage, to the Broadway play or in the movies, that dream is his or her goal. He or she will work at it untiringly through study and making contacts.

The most organized way to approach the large challenges in our lives, as well as the everyday small ones, is to set goals for each. When you wake up each day, there should be a clear idea of what you want and need to do that day. Some people make lists, and these can be very effective in getting things done.

The point is, you need structure in your life to achieve things, and you need to start setting small goals to gradually set large-scale goals.

According to mindtools.com there is a way to set goals that will help you achieve what you want, without experiencing the failure that sometimes happens when our goals are too out of reach. The key is to develop “performance” goals vs. “outcome” goals.

If we set outcome goals such as “My goal is to be accepted into Harvard University,” this may or may not happen based on our abilities and the competition among students. However, if our goal is to study hard so as to excel in high school so that we are accepted into the best university that we have applied to, this is a more realistic goal. We have focused on our performance in school, rather than a potentially unrealistic goal of being accepted by a prestigious college.

The same applies to work. Our goal should be to work effectively to achieve the next step, rather than have a goal to be the department director, without thinking about our qualifications.

Goal-setting, then should be an important part of our daily lives, but goal setting should be realistic, and be based on what we can expect from our best performance. Goal setting should help us strive and give us a sense of accomplishment at the end of the road.