ACHIEVING EXCELLENCE TROUGH GOAL SETTING

I wonder how interesting a football match without goalposts will be. I am sure you will agree with me that it will not just be boring, but we will not even know who wins at the end. That is how boring and monotonous the lives of many are.                                                                                 Some powerful millionaires were asked about the secret of their success and this was the summary of their answer: “success is goals, and all else is commentary.”

Your time and your life are precious. The biggest waste of time and life is for you to spend years accomplishing something that you could have achieved in only a few months. 

Your time is such an essentially precious non renewable resources that it can neither be stored nor recovered once wasted. That is why the biggest waste of time and life is for you to spend years accomplishing something that you have no need of or that you could have achieved in only a few months.

Why Are Goals Important?

a.       Goals enable you to do the work you want to do, to live where you want to live, to be with the people you enjoy, and to become the kind of person you want to become.

b.      Success is goal and all else is commentary. All successful people are intensely goal oriented. They know what they want and they are focused single mindedly on achieving it, every single day.

c.       Your ability to set goals is the master skill of success. Goals unlock your positive mind and release ideas and energy for goal attainment.

d.      Without goals, you simply drift and flow on the currents of life. With goals, you fly like an arrow, straight and true to your target.

e.       The truth is that you probably have more natural potential than you could use if you lived one hundred lifetimes. Whatever you have accomplished up until now is only a small fraction of what is truly possible for you.

f.       One of the rules for success is this, it doesn’t matter where you’re coming from; all that matters is where you’re going. And where you are going is solely determined by yourself and your own thoughts.

g.                  Clear goals increase your confidence, develop your competence and boost your levels of motivation. As sales trainer Tom Hopkins says, Goals are the fuel in the furnace of achievement

The importance of writing down your goals

Do you have plans and goals in your life? I’m sure you do because everyone does.

No matter what and how big your dreams are, it’s important that you make it a habit to write them down on paper. You might be thinking, how can such a simple task of writing down my goals on paper help me achieve them?

Mark McCormack in his book What They Don’t Teach You In The Harvard Business School tells of a Harvard study conducted between 1979 and 1989.

In 1979, the graduates of the MBA program at Harvard were asked, “Have you set clear, written goals for your future and made plans to accomplish them?” It turned out that only 3% of the graduates had written goals and plans. 13% had goals, but they were not in writing. Fully 84% had no specific goals at all, aside from getting out of school and enjoying the summer.

Ten years later, in 1989, they interviewed the members of that class again. They found that the 13% who had goals, but which were not in writing were earning on average twice as much as the 84% of students who had had no goals at all. But most surprisingly, they found that the 3% of graduates who had clear, written goals when they left Harvard were earning, on average, ten times as much as the other 97% of graduates all together. The only difference between the groups was the clarity of the goals they had for themselves when they started out.

 Why Writing Down Is Important:

• Writing is the primary basis upon which your work, your learning, and your intellect will be judged—in college, in the workplace, and in the community.

• Writing expresses who you are as a person.

• Writing is portable and permanent. It makes your thinking visible.

• Writing helps you move easily among facts, inferences, and opinions without getting confused—and without confusing your reader.

• Writing promotes your ability to pose worthwhile questions.

• Writing fosters your ability to explain a complex position to readers, and to yourself.

• Writing helps others give you feedback.

• Writing helps you refine your ideas when you give others feedback.

• Writing requires that you anticipate your readers’ needs. Your ability to do so demonstrates your intellectual flexibility and maturity.

• Writing ideas down preserves them so that you can reflect upon them later.

• Writing out your ideas permits you to evaluate the adequacy of your argument.

• Writing stimulates you to extend a line of thought beyond your first impressions or gut responses.

• Writing helps you understand how truth is established in a given discipline.

• Writing equips you with the communication and thinking skills you need to participate effectively in democracy.

• Writing is an essential job skill.

Why People Don’t Set Goals

• They believe goals are not important: most people don’t realize the importance of goals

• They do not know how to: they don’t know how to set them in the first place. Even worse, many people think that they already have goals, when in reality, what they actually have are a series of wishes or dreams like, “Be happy,” or “Make a lot of money,” or “Have a nice family life.” But these are not goals at all.

• They fear failure: People are afraid that if they set a goal and are not successful, others will criticize or ridicule them.

• They fear rejection: Failure hurts. People are afraid that if they set a goal and are not successful, others will criticize or ridicule them. This is one of the reasons why, when you begin to set goals, you should keep your goals confidential

How To Decide Exactly What You Really Want

1.  Imagine that you have the inborn ability to achieve any goal you could ever set for yourself. What do you really want to be, have and do?

2.  What are the activities that give you your greatest sense of meaning and purpose in life?

3.  Look at your personal and work life today and identify how your own thinking has created your world. What should you, could you change?

4.  What do you think and talk about most of the time, what you want, or what you don’t want?

5.  What is the price you will have to pay to achieve the goals that are most important to you?

6.  What one action should you take immediately as the result of your answers to the above questions?