How to Set & Achieve Your Lifetime Goals
You may have already gone through the process of creating a list of lifetime goals – the next step is to actually start the process of achieving them. This involves creating a list of smaller goals that you plan to achieve over the next 25 years preparatory to reaching your lifetime goals. After creating a 25-year plan, make a 5-year plan, then a 1-year plan, then a 6-month plan and then a 1-month plan. Get the picture? Each plan is founded and contributes to the lifetime plan.
The 3rd step is to make a To Do List that are tasks that you should do everyday. But be realistic: you might have to do your research first by reading material that will help make your daily goals more realistic. By doing these tasks, are you living a life that is worth living or do you just exist from day to day?
Stay motivated everyday by assessing your To Do List then examining your longer term plans to see if there is any need to make changes due to the experience and priorities that you have imbibed. You may find the following general guidelines useful for this purpose:
- Is each goal stated positively?
- Is it precise? This allows you to measure achievement accurately.
- Have you set priorities among the goals that you have listed down?
- Did you write down your goals? You will be surprised how much more forceful the goals become.
- Are the low-level goals small enough to achieve?
- Can you control the outcome of your goals?
- Are your goals realistically low?
- Did you make your goals high enough to pose a challenge?
It is important to reward yourself somehow once you have accomplished a goal. Absorb the feelings that come with goal achievement and rank your progress among all the plans that you made earlier. What is a good way to reward yourself? It depends – some people find it sufficient to treat themselves to a sweet treat. Others like bigger rewards. Just make sure the reward’s worth is proportionate to the magnitude of the task.
You will find that assessment of your goals is an ongoing process every time you achieve a goal. If you found the goal to be much too easy to accomplish, maybe you should make the next set of goals more difficult. If the task took much too long to accomplish, maybe the goals should be a bit easier. Learning is an ongoing process as well so maybe you should change other goals too to reflect this. For example, perhaps your skills might need adjustment so this will, in turn, affect your goal setting and assessment.
Should you find it difficult to meet goals or outright fail, do not think that this completely derails your plans. So long as you learned from your performance, that is what counts.
Your maturity will be reflected in the changes you make in your goals. Some goals can be let go if they are not suited anymore to your short term and long term plans. Do not be a slave to the goals you have set. Maintain a degree of flexibility.
