Samani Shukla Pragya
Samani Vinay Pragya
Simple Goal Setting Tips
The following broad guidelines will help you to set effective, achievable goals:
Use positive statements:
- Frame and express your goals in proactive language - for example "Empowering women" is a much better goal than "Not a single woman should be backward."
Be precise: Set precise goals - putting in dates, times and amounts so that you can measure achievement. If you do this, you'll know exactly when you have achieved the goal, and can take complete satisfaction from having achieved it. For example, within 15 days, I will finish 50% of my project.
Set priorities: - When you have several goals, give each a priority. This helps you to avoid feeling overwhelmed by having too many goals, and helps to direct your attention to the most important ones.
Write goals down: - Writing the goals gives you reinforcement and motivation.
Keep operational goals small: - Break the goals into manageable chunks, which can be easily achievable. Keeping goals small and incremental gives more opportunities for reward. If you are developing software then make the realistic goal for each day. That way, at the end of the day you will have the satisfaction of completing that daily goal.
Keep some margin for error: You should take care to set goals over which you have as much control as possible. If can be quite dispiriting to fail to achieve a personal goal for reasons beyond your control. In business, these reasons could be bad macroeconomic environments or unexpected effects of government policy. In sport, they could include poor judging, bad weather, injury, or just plain bad luck.
Set realistic goals: - It's important to set goals that you can achieve. Do not imitate others while setting the goals. Do not be emotional either. Know your strengths and weakness. It's possible to set goals that are too difficult because you might not appreciate either the obstacles in the way, or understand quite how much skill you need to develop to achieve a particular level of performance.
Evaluate Your Achievement
- When you've achieved a goal, take the time to enjoy the satisfaction of having done so.
- If the goal was a one, reward yourself appropriately. All of build the self- confidence you deserve.
- With the experience of achieved this goal, review the rest of your goal plans:
- If you achieve the goal too easily, make your next goal more challenging.
- If the goal took a dispiriting length of time to achieve, make the next goal little easier.
- If you learned something that would lead you to amend other goals, do so.
- If you noticed a deficit in your skills despite achieving the goal, decide whether to set goals to fix this.
- Failing to meet goals is not a failure if you learn from the experience and adjust accordingly in order to succeed going forward.
Incorporate lessons learned back into your goal setting. Most important, if prior goals do not hold value or are no longer relevant in your overall scheme any longer, consider letting them go.
Goal Setting Example
For her New Year's Resolution, Shweta has decided to be focused to what she really wants to do with her life. She wanted to become a journalist without compromising the value of truly helping the community.
Her Lifetime Goals are as follows:
- Career -”To be a journalist at the most acclaimed newspaper in the country.”
- Values - To not compromise with the quality and fairness of her reporting and not to defame or present a biased point of view to make a profit or because of envy.
- Public service - To publish news that helps people to uplift their life.
- Physical - "To practice yoga as much as possible.”
- Mental and emotional - Try to be proactive not the reactive to develop her emotional intelligence.
- Spiritual - To meditate
- Family - balancing work and life to maintain a happy family
Now that Shweta has listed her lifetime goals, she then breaks down each one into smaller, more manageable goals.
Purposeful Life, a Healthy Life: A Medical Research
Purpose defined as a “psychological tendency to derive meaning from life's experiences and to possess a sense of intentionality and goal directedness that guides behaviour" -- has long been thought to protect against adverse health outcomes. For example, purpose was recently reported to be associated with longevity.
Those with a purpose had more than a 50 per cent reduced risk of certain disease-related illnesses. Dr. Patricia A. Boyle of Rush University Medical Centre in Chicago and colleagues concluded in the March 2010 issue of the journal Archives of General Psychiatry:
"The tendency to derive meaning from life's experiences and to possess a sense of intentionality and goal directedness are associated with a substantially reduced risk of Alzheimer's disease and a less rapid rate of cognitive decline in older age...”
There was little evidence on the association of purpose with Alzheimer’s disease. So the researchers conducted a study of 951 community-dwelling older patients without dementia who participated in the Rush Memory and Aging Project.
Each had a baseline evaluation about purpose in life, which incorporated a 10-item scale that included agree/don't-agree statements such as "I feel good when I think of what I have done in the past and what I hope to do in the future" and “I enjoy making plans for the future and working them to a reality.”
Patients in the study were tracked for up to seven years, with an average follow-up of about four years. During that time, 155 of the 951 patients developed Alzheimer's disease. The researchers found that those who developed the disease were older and reported lower purpose in life than those who did not.
Greater purpose in life was associated with a 52 per cent reduced risk of Alzheimer's, and those with a high score on the purpose- in-life measurement were 2.4 times more likely to remain disease-free than low-scorers. The association persisted after controlling for several factors, including depressive symptoms, neuroticism, social network size, and number of chronic medical conditions, the researchers found.
Similarly, those who developed mild cognitive impairment (MCI) were older and reported lower purpose in life scores than those who were not impaired. They also had a higher number of depressive symptoms.
There were other benefits as well. Having a greater sense of purpose was associated with reduced heart attack risk of almost 30 percent, as well as a 1.5-fold increased likelihood of remaining heart attack-free, compared to low scorers.
Other studies have found sense of purpose to be associated with lower levels of immune markers, including the stress hormone cortical and inflammatory hormones.
Sense of purpose also has been positively associated with high- density lipoprotein -- the type of cholesterol known as HDL or "good” cholesterol. Additionally, it has been negatively correlated with waist-hip ratios -- in other words, high-purpose people look slimmer.
The findings may have important public health implications.
Align With Your Purpose
Should you eat pizza for breakfast instead of a fruit smoothie? Not, if you value vitality and alertness over satiety. Would you like to sleep late instead of doing yoga and walking in the morning if healthy life is your main concern? Would you like to live a life of an aggressive and negative person if you have decided to always stay happy and balanced? No, you cannot. How can you expect that eating an orange will give you the taste of mango? How can you expect a banana from an apple tree?
Until and unless your purpose is aligned with your life style, contentment cannot walk with you.
Key Points
Goal setting is an important method of:
- Deciding what you want to achieve in your life.
- Separating what's important from what's irrelevant, or a distraction.
Motivating Yourself
Set your life purpose first. Then, establish long-term goals followed by short term goals to reach your lifetime plan. Keep the process going by regularly reviewing and updating your goals. And remember - take time to enjoy the satisfaction of achieving your goals when you do so.
If you have not already set goals, do so, starting today. As you make this technique a part of your life, you'll find improvements in all aspects of your life, and you'll wonder how you did without it!
Discovering your purpose is the easy part. The hard part is keeping it with you on a daily basis and working on yourself to the point where you become the purpose. Stay on task!!!
Knowing Your True Life Purpose: Example
Sometimes a person's actual life turns out to be completely at odds with their life purpose. It doesn't match.
This clearly points out that the "right" person has been living the "wrong” life or working “wrong” field. If actual history does really match with your life purpose and you might need to make the decision and to plan with the new and true purpose.
One day a young professional working as an engineer for four years in America came to us and said that he was going to Change his profession. He was not satisfied with the field of his professional life. It was not the purpose of his life. Now he wanted to become a doctor. What was the reason behind this paradigm shift?
One day his friend got sick, without family readily available to help him. So the engineer took off from his job and stayed with his friend in the hospital for two days. While helping him the thought came to his mind, ‘I am not here just to earn money. I want to serve humanity.’ Compassion and contribution became the central purpose of his life. So he decided to strive for a profession through which he could make a living and can contribute to society directly and profoundly. He found the profession of medicine as a vehicle to achieve his purpose and is now studying medicine. After qualifying as a doctor he wants to settle in India to serve his motherland.
There are thousands of such stories where people are not satisfied with their current mundane existence. But very few have courage and confidence to find and live with their true purpose.
The tougher you are on yourself, the easier life will be on you! The more personal discipline you practice, the less correction will be imposed on you. The more you pay the price now for greatness, the greater your dividends are later. ” - Bishop Dale C. Bronner