[?] Subscribe To This Site

Five Goal Setting Activities

Using the following goal setting activities can give you additional perspective and insight into the goal setting process, ultimately helping you to better achieve your aims. Each of these activities is geared at giving you ideas and strategies to help you in setting, changing, and accomplishing your goals.

Think Long Term

The first of these goal setting activities is to think about the long term outcomes and consequences you are after. When setting goals, think about the effects and outcomes that your goals will bring over time. It's all too easy to make goals based on your immediate situation and needs, but without considering long term effects you may miss out on better opportunities or even cause yourself problems over time.

A common example is with dieting. I have seen people set a short term goal of losing 5- 10 pounds, do all sorts of crazy things to achieve that goal like severely restricting calories and food types, taking all sorts of pills or supplements, or taking on unsustainable exercise programs. Sometimes they accomplish their goal, but the method they chose usually isn't healthy or sustainable for the long term, and after a few more months they end up back where they started.

Choose Exciting Goals

The second of these goal setting activities is to choose exciting goals. Choosing things that get you excited and pumped up will help you stay focused and motivated to accomplish them. Don't choose goals that are geared to appease other people, or that are things you are "supposed" to want. If the goal is not something you are excited about, not something that you really want to accomplish, you may find you have little motivation to take action.

In the worst case scenario, you may find yourself saddled with responsibilities and pressure to accomplish things you really don't care about. What kind of life is that? Choose something else. Think about what you get passionate about, what you enjoy most in life. Focus your goals and energy around those things, and your motivation will be much higher.

Commit to Achieving

It is very easy to set goals, if you really wanted to you could spend an afternoon coming up with hundreds or thousands of goals without too much trouble. The real trick is to actually achieve what you come up with.

Without seriously committing to achieving your goals, goal setting is nothing more than wishful thinking. Achieving a goal requires you dedicate the necessary time, effort, and resources. It's not enough to just decide on what you want- you need to consistently take action, otherwise you will just waste your time on wishes that will never come to fruition.

Change Strategy

One of the most important goal setting activities is to change your strategy as needed. Your strategy is your action plan, the steps you plan on taking to achieve your goal. If you have run into problems achieving a goal in the past, the trick to getting it done is not exerting more effort and working harder.

Rather, the best tactic is to change your strategy. Do something different, approach your goal from a different perspective. Research what other people have done to accomplish similar goals or experiment to find something that works for you. Be flexible in how you approach your goal and you will be more likely to succeed.

Enjoy the Process

While it is extremely important to have goals to give you direction in life to focus your motivation and efforts, I have learned that it is not really the outcome that is important, it is the process of working towards the goal. Focusing too much on the outcomes usually leads to disappointment in the end. If you can learn to enjoy the process your life will be much more fulfilled and complete.

Using these goal setting activities can help you to set better goals and increase your likelihood of achieving what you set out to do.

Return from Goal Setting Activities to Personal Goal Setting

Return from Goal Setting Activities to Self Motivation Strategies

SBI!