Setting Goals For Professional and Personal Growth

Setting your Goals Effectively

There is a difference in setting your goals and setting them effectively. Anyone can set a goal, but doing it effectively means that it will actually get done. There are so many things that you can do to better your life, but if you don’t know how to go about it you are stuck.

The following guidelines will help you to set effective goals and help you manage your time in an efficient manner that will cause those goals to become reality. State each goal as a positive statement Express your goals in a positive way. That is a key component to setting goals that you can attain. How often have you been excited to accomplish a goal that didn’t even sound good when you brought it up? If you are not comfortable or happy with the goals that you have set, the likelihood of you succeeding is pretty low.

If you want to express your goals in a positive way, you simply have to first think of a goal that puts a smile your face when you imagine it completed. Why would you want to set a goal that made you frown, cringe or cry? When you are beginning to set your goals it helps when you are talking about them to others in a manner that states your actions as positives because it will have others seeing it as a positive as well. That will garner you a great deal more support. In the end, don’t we all need a little support when we are trying to do something positive in our lives?

Be precise

Set a precise goal that includes starting dates, times and amounts so that you can properly measure your achievement. If you do this, you will know exactly when you have achieved the goal, and can take complete satisfaction from having achieved it.
Being precise in setting your goals is no more than setting them with exact details. It is easier this way because then you can follow a step-by-step format. That’s all there is to it.

Set priorities

When you have several goals, give each a specific priority. This helps you to avoid feeling overwhelmed by too many goals, and helps to direct your attention to the most important ones and follow each in succession. Setting priorities will force you into the step-by-step format above. By doing the most important first and moving to the least important in succession, you are enabling each task to be easier than the last. It causes the accomplishment of each task to get easier and easier which will encourage you to complete your goal.

Write goals down

This crystallizes your goals and gives them more force. In writing your goals down, you are better able to keep up with your scheduled tasks for each accomplishment. It also helps you to remember each task that needs to be done and allows you to check them off as they are accomplished. Basically, you can better keep track of what you are doing so as not to repeat yourself unnecessarily.

Keep operational goals small

Keep the low-level goals you are working towards small and easy to achieve. If a goal is too large, then it can seem that you are not making progress towards it. Keeping goals small and incremental allows you more opportunities for reward. Derive today's goals from larger ones. It is a great way to accomplish your goals. Set performance goals, not outcome goals You should take care to set goals over which you have as much control as possible. There is nothing more dispiriting than failing to achieve a personal goal for reasons that are beyond your control. These could be bad business environments, poor judging, bad weather, injury, or just plain bad luck. If you base your goals on personal your performance, then you can keep control over the achievement of your goals and get satisfaction from achieving them.

Set realistic goals

It is important to set goals that you can achieve. All sorts of people (parents, media, and society) can set unrealistic goals for you which is almost a guarantee of failure. They will often do this in ignorance of your own desires and ambitions or flat out disinterest. Alternatively you may be naïve in setting very high goals. You might not appreciate either the obstacles in the way, or understand quite how many skills you must master to achieve a particular level of performance. By being realistic you are increasing your chances of success. Do not set goals too low.

Just as it is important not to set goals unrealistically high; do not set them too low. People tend to do this where they are afraid of failure or where they simply don’t want to do anything. You should set goals so that they are slightly out of your immediate grasp, but not so far that there is no hope of achieving them. No one will put serious effort into achieving a goal that they believe is unattainable. However, remember that your belief that a goal is unrealistic may be incorrect. If this could be the case, you can to change this belief by using imagery effectively.


Achieving your Goals

When you have achieved a goal, you have to take the time to enjoy the satisfaction of having done so. Absorb the implications of the goal achievement, and observe the progress you have made towards other goals. If the goal was a significant one, you should reward yourself appropriately. Think of it like this, why would you choose to ignore any accomplishments that you have made? In doing that, you are downplaying your accomplishment which will convince you that it wasn’t that important in the first place. With the experience of having achieved each goal, you should next review the rest of your goal plans and see them in the following manner:

If you achieved the goal too easily, make your next goals harder

If the goal took a disheartening length of time to achieve, make the next goals a little easier

If you learned something that would lead you to change other goals, do so

If while achieving the goal you noticed a certain lacking in your skills, decide which goals to set in order to fix this.

You should keep in mind that failure to meet goals does not matter as long as you learn from it. Feed lessons learned back into your goal-setting program. You must also remember that your goals will change as you mature. Adjust them regularly to reflect this growth in your personality. If goals no longer hold any attraction for you let them go.

Goal setting is your servant, not your master. It should bring you real pleasure, satisfaction and a sense of achievement. If it stops, there is no longer a point. Let’s look at an example. The best example of goal setting that you can have is to try setting your own goals. Set aside two hours to think through your lifetime goals in each of the categories. Then work back through the 25-year plan, 5-year plan, 1-year plan, 6-month plan, and a 1-month plan. Finally draw up a To Do List of jobs to do tomorrow to move towards your goals. When you do, you will soon realize that you will be on your way to using your goals setting on a routine basis.
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2007-2008 Timothy Watson

Career Development: Happy With Your Job?

Career development, are you really happy in your current position?

When it comes to your job, are you really happy with your current position? There are a lot of reasons why someone will stay with the job they have. Maybe you have bills to pay and the pay is great, or maybe you get some personal gain from it. Either way there is a reason, however, are you happy with your current job? Many people will say no, but you will then need to consider what you can do to change your unhappiness around.

For those who do not know if they are really happy with their current position, you can’t think about money. If you think you are happy because of your paycheck and you are unable to come up with any other answer, you’ll need to consider reconsidering your job. Money can never be a reason why you are happy. You need to have a job that not only challenges you, but also a job that allows you to challenge the company. You need to benefit that company and really feel like you are a part of something. It is very important that you feel wanted at the job. When you are needed, you are able to satisfy your personal needs.

Another thing that you’ll want to consider is if the job fulfills you. Maybe you simply like working with others or working as a team. You may get some personal benefit from the job, because it allows you to do something that you love. You will find that the job needs to be something that you have a passion for in order to stay interested in the job and also be able to happy.

If you find yourself thinking and thinking, just trying to search for clues to rather you are really happy with your job or just content, you may want to do something about it. You’ll want to write down everything that you wish your job was. You’ll need to make a list of goals that will help you to become happy with your job. A lot of people would say that if they are unhappy at a job that they would quite, but that is not the case. Often you can’t afford to just quit, but you’ll need to work on making the job better in order to feel better about yourself.

Of course, to deal with your unhappiness you may need to quit if you have reached a point of no return. Often there is nothing that you can personally do to help yourself feel more comfortable with the job. You may need to consider giving yourself the opportunity to look for other options, because you should try to pursue something that will make you happy and also something that you can really put all you have into. You will want to make sure that you think about what you can and cannot do to change your options.

For those who are happy with their jobs, try to think why you are happy. This way you will end up appreciating your job each and every day. When a bad day comes around you will not be so easy to quit and you won’t find it so easy to talk bad about the job. You will be able to overcome some of the issues that you have pertaining to the job and you will be able to stay happy in your profession. You will also find that when you think about the reasons behind the job and behind your feelings you will be able to grow mentally and emotionally. It is something that you will be able to use as motivation as well.
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2007-2008 Timothy Watson http://self-improvement-guidance.blogspot.com/
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Time management is about getting results, not about being busy

The six areas that personal time management seeks to improve in anyone's life are physical, intellectual, social, career, emotional and spiritual.

-The physical aspect involves having a healthy body, less stress and fatigue.
-The intellectual aspect involves learning and other mental growth activities.
-The social aspect involves developing personal or intimate relations and being an active contributor to society.
-The career aspect involves school and work.
-The emotional aspect involves appropriate feelings and desires and manifesting them.
-The spiritual aspect involves a personal quest for meaning

Thoroughly planning and having a set of things to do list for each of the key areas may not be very practical, but determining which area in your life is not being giving enough attention is part of time management. Each area creates the whole you, if you are ignoring one area then you are ignoring an important part of yourself.

Personal time management should not be so daunting a task. It is a very sensible and reasonable approach in solving problems big or small.A great way of learning time management and improving your personal life is to follow several basic activities.

One of them is to review your goals whether it be immediate or long-term goals often. A way to do this is to keep a list that is always accessible to you. Always determine which task is necessary or not necessary in achieving your goals and which activities are helping you maintain a balanced life style. Each and everyone of us has a peek time and a time when we slow down, these are our natural cycles. We should be able to tell when to do the difficult tasks when we are the sharpest. Learning to say "No". You actually see this advice often. Heed it even if it involves saying the word to family or friends.

Pat yourself at the back or just reward yourself in any manner for an effective time management result.

Try and get the cooperation from people around you who are actually benefiting from your efforts of time management.

Don't procrastinate. Attend to necessary things immediately.
Have a positive attitude and set yourself up for success. But be realistic in your approach in achieving your goals.

Have a record or journal of all your activities. This will help you get things in their proper perspective.

These are the few steps you initially take in becoming a well rounded individual. As the say personal time management is the art and science of building a better life. From the moment you integrate into your life time management skills, you have opened several options that can provide a broad spectrum of solutions to your personal growth. It also creates more doors for opportunities to knock on.
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2007-2008 Timothy Watson

What can time management bring to your personal growth

The Key to a Better Life

Time management is basically about being focused. The Pareto Principle also known as the '80:20 Rule' states that 80% of efforts that are not time managed or unfocused generates only 20% of the desired output. However, 80% of the desired output can be generated using only 20% of a well time managed effort. Although the ratio '80:20' is only arbitrary, it is used to put emphasis on how much is lost or how much can be gained with time management.

Some people view time management as a list of rules that involves scheduling of appointments, goal settings, thorough planning, creating things to do lists and prioritizing. These are the core basics of time management that should be understood to develop an efficient personal time management skill. These basic skills can be fine tuned further to include the finer points of each skill that can give you that extra reserve to make the results you desire.

But there is more skills involved in time management than the core basics. Skills such as decision making, inherent abilities such as emotional intelligence and critical thinking are also essential to your personal growth. Personal time management involves everything you do. No matter how big and no matter how small, everything counts. Each new knowledge you acquire, each new advice you consider, each new skill you develop should be taken into consideration.

Having a balanced life-style should be the key result in having personal time management. This is the main aspect that many practitioners of personal time management fail to grasp.
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2007-2008 Timothy Watson.