How to set realistic goals
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Setting Realistic Goals
One of the biggest mistakes people make when they are bettering themselves is set goals that are too hard to achieve. Goals are very important because they will allow you to be all that you can be, but when you set goals that are too lofty, you can be setting yourself up for failure. This is why it is so important that when you set goals, you set goals that you can achieve not too easily, but not too difficulty either.
An example of this is to say that you want to develop yourself personally by losing 100 pounds in a month. Well, you cannot do this without getting surgery and surgery is often the easy way out and will not allow you to keep the weight off. This is an unrealistic goal. However, if you set a goal of losing 100 pounds in a year and a half, then you are creating a goal that is achievable, but not too easy. If you set a goal of losing 100 pounds in 10 years, you are not challenging yourself enough.
Goals will help as guide posts for your journey to becomi8ng a better person. You will be able to use your goals to determine how you are going to better yourself and the achieving of those goals will show you that you are making progress.
To ensure you do not set goals that are unrealistic, you should do the following:
Make a list of things you can do right now, without much money and with ample time available.
Looking at that list, determine what can be done sooner rather than later, and then sort the items on the list in terms of when they can be done.
At this point, ask yourself each time you read a goal whether you think it is realistic or not. Saying that 100 pounds in six months is not realistic is not cheating; it is being real with yourself.
Based on the answers you give for each question, adjust your goals accordingly so that you can ensure you have created goals that you will be able to achieve without having to set yourself up for failure.
One of the biggest reasons people fail in their goals is that they set themselves up for failure. Running a marathon is a great goal, but if you have never run a marathon before and plan to next weekend, you are only setting yourself up to fail at that task. As a result, you will want to ensure that you make that goal realistic because then when you achieve it, you will feel that much better at your accomplishment.
Goals are one of the most important things to have for yourself, and they will show you that you are doing well with bettering yourself. Talk with people about your goals and ask them whether they think they are realistic. They may say they are not, but that does not mean you have to listen to them. The only person you must listen to is yourself.
To streamline and minimize blog maintenance, I will be discontinuing maintaining the Simplepersonaldevelopment.com website (however, I will still hold the domain). I will gradually move all articles from this site to Ahmed Dawn Dot Com. This article originally published on the above website on July 25, 2010.
