Plan to Live by setting Goals!

Personal Goal Setting-Planning to Live Your Life Your Way

Many people feel as if they're adrift in the world. They work hard, but they don't seem to get anywhere worthwhile.

A key reason that they feel this way is that they haven't spent enough time thinking about what they want from life and haven't set themselves formal goals. After all, would you set out on a major journey with no real idea of your destination? Probably not!

Why Set Goals?

• Setting goals helps you choose where you want to go in life.
  • By knowing precisely what you want to achieve, you know where you have to concentrate your efforts.
  • Also quickly spot the distractions that can, so easily, lead you astray.
• Achievers in all fields all set goals.
• Gives you long-term vision and short-term motivation.
• Focuses your acquisition of knowledge and helps you organize your time and your resources so that you can make the most of your life.
• You can measure and take pride in the achievement of those goals.
• See forward progress in what might previously have seemed a long pointless grind.
• Raise your self-confidence, as you recognize your own ability and competence in achieving the goals that you've set.

Starting to Set Personal Goals

You set your goals on a few levels:

• First you create your "big picture" of what you want to do with your life (over the next 10 years) and identify the large-scale goals that you want to achieve.
• Then, you break these down into the smaller and smaller targets that you must hit to reach your lifetime goals.
• Finally, once you have your plan, you start working on it to achieve these goals.

Start the process of setting goals by looking at your lifetime goals. Then, work down to the things that you can do in the next five years, then next year, next month, next week, and today, to start moving towards them.

Step 1: Setting Lifetime Goals

• Consider what you want to achieve in your lifetime (or at least, by a significant and distant age in the future).
  • Setting lifetime goals gives you the overall perspective that shapes all other aspects of your decision making.
• Balanced coverage of all important areas in your life.
  • Try to set goals in some of the following categories (or in other categories of your own, where these are important to you): career, financial, education, family, attitude, physical, pleasure, public service
• Spend some time brainstorming these things, and then select one or more goals in each category that best reflect what you want to do.
• make sure that the goals that you have set are ones that you genuinely want to achieve, not ones that your parents, family, or employers might want.

Step 2: Setting Smaller Goals

• Once you have set your lifetime goals, set a five-year plan of smaller goals that you need to complete if you are to reach your lifetime plan.
• Then create a one-year plan, six-month plan, and a one-month plan of progressively smaller goals that you should reach to achieve your lifetime goals. Each of these should be based on the previous plan.
• Then create a daily To-Do List of things that you should do today to work towards your lifetime goals.

Staying on Course

• Keep the process going by reviewing and updating your To-Do List on a daily basis.
• Periodically review the longer-term plans and modify them to reflect your changing priorities and experience.

SMART Goals

• S – Specific (or Significant).
• M – Measurable (or Meaningful).
• A – Attainable (or Action-Oriented).
• R – Relevant (or Rewarding).
• T – Time-bound (or Trackable).

Further Tips for Setting Your Goals

• State each goal as a positive statement
• Be precise
• Set priorities
• Write goals down
• Keep operational goals small
• Set performance goals, not outcome goals
• Set realistic goals

Achieving Goals

• Enjoy the satisfaction of having done so.
• Review the rest of your goal plans:
  • If you achieved the goal too easily, make your next goal harder.
  • If the goal took a dispiriting length of time to achieve, make the next goal a little easier.
  • If you learned something that would lead you to change other goals, do so.
  • If you noticed a deficit in your skills despite achieving the goal, decide whether to set goals to fix this.

[ The following is the full transcript from this week's post. This is a health blog with a focus on weight loss. Please consider that all episodes are unscripted, direct to camera, with focused talking points. ]

Hello, I am Dr. Kelly Cox

Today, I want to talk to you about goal setting.

This is something that is really important in your life. People go through life, and they kind of work hard, and continue to strive to do better. But they really kind of find themselves not getting where they want to be.

One of the biggest factors in this is, they really aren't setting goals.

They are basically applying their knowledge in their daily lives, but they don't really have that long term vision of where they want to go.

So, the point in today's talk is about goal setting and the impact it can have on you.

The first thing is why set goals?

Well, if you have a goal in mind, and a plan to achieve that goal, it acts as a compass. It is going to help you prepare your day, and plan your life, so that you're moving forward to that.

If you look at pretty much all successful people, they set goals. That is one of their major factors in success is they set goals and then achieve those goals.

So, the next thing I want to talk about is how to set goals.

Remember, there is the setting of goals, and then there is the execution of achieving those goals. And those are kind of two separate, but related things.

So, other factors that are good reasons why to set goals. Would be it kind of adds clarity to your life. It makes sure that you are using the resources you have, in a way that is going to fulfill you, so that you're not wasting time, or energy or money on things that really are not important to you.

So, goal setting is essential for success. But it also can bring about significant happiness for you.

The first thing you need to do is you kind of work backwards. So, if you ask someone: where are you going to be tomorrow at “x” time? A lot of people could answer that.

But the thing is a lot of times that decision, is kind of a decision forced upon them. So someone else has made that decision maybe a boss of sort says to have a meeting this time or something like that.

In the near future, people can often see what they are going to be doing, but they really haven't made a very good decision of why they're doing that. The important thing with setting goals is to work it backwards.

Most people think: Where are you going to be in 10 years?

That that block at time, and your future has not been obligated yet, for the most part.

If you think, “Okay, where do I want to be in 10 years?” You do not have any conflict or competing things. Relating to where are you going to be in 10 years. Because nothing has been scheduled yet.

If you are looking at a long-term goal, that's what you need to do to start first and look at where do you want to be in 10 years?

Then you are going to break that down into smaller pieces to the point that you are going to want to create daily habits, that support whatever your long-term goals are.

The important thing to remember here is what I call it the rule attends. Do you know where you are going to be in the next:

10 minutes?

10 months?

10 years?

If you do not, then you need to have a plan to develop that, and work on those goals to fulfill those needs you have for yourself.

So, remember, you start by focusing on the big picture. You are going to work backwards into breaking these things into smaller little kind of objectives, and then you are going to convert those things into daily habits.

Once you have done that, then you need to, basically, define the clarity of your goals.

Goals need to be very clear.

So often, you will hear the acronym smart goals.

Your goals are going to be specific and significant.

They need to be measurable and meaningful.

They need to be attainable and action oriented.

They need to be relevant and rewarding.

They need to be time bound and trackable.

Let us discuss the ten-year goal. A lot of people will say, “Well, where do you want to be in 10 years?”

They say, “I want to be financially independent.”

Okay, but what does that mean?

That can mean a lot of different things to different people.

You need to break that down into, what does that mean?

Is it “Well, I need to have half a million dollars in the bank.”

“I need to have my house paid for.”

“I need to have my car paid for.”

“I want to make sure I have X amount of dollars in savings for my kid's education.”

Whatever you define that is, you have got to make it very clear definition of what that is. It needs to be something that you can measure.

If you want to lose weight, people often say, “I want to lose weight.”

Well, how much weight do you want to lose and what time period?

And then, you are going to break that down into, basically, smaller goals that you can monitor daily. And so that you can, both when you are being successful in accomplishing those daily goals, you enjoy the satisfaction that comes with being successful and accomplish the goals.

But also, on those few days where you are not successful. It allows you to make your course correction early on, so you do not wait a significant amount of time to correct your course. So you stay on track for your goals.

So, you are going to set your goals based on your long-term goals, breaking them down into smaller pieces to the point of a daily habit. Then you are going to monitor your goals.

And that is really important because often what happens is, they set goals and they have a strong desire to achieve them. But then the execution is becoming the problem.

People may start off strong. And then kind of that excitement of the newness fades and becomes kind of work, if you will. So, it loses its luster, so they start to fall off.

Two important things here, you have got to understand why you set this goal, and it has got to be an emotional why.

If you want to lose weight it may be because you really want to fit into that that outfit or you want to be able to play for your kids in the park or grand kids and not get out of breath.

You gotta have that emotional component to that. That is going to help you on those off days. That you struggle with obtaining your goals, so that you can refocus.

Secondarily, part of reflection is to adjust the plan if you will.

You may have a goal of losing weight, that you have then basically broken it down into a daily activity that you are going to do exercise an hour a day. Every day.

That is something that is very easy to measure. You can get a calendar; you can write an X on it. Every day, you do this, build momentum.

But if you see that there are certain times that you are unsuccessful, because maybe your schedule and the time of day might be the wrong time, then you can make modifications to the goal.

But the important thing is that you are reflecting on the goal so that you can modify it in ways that still are helpful to you.

And goals do not have to be painful.

There probably will be some pain, because if it is a good goal, that means it is a stretch goal, which gets you outside of your comfort zone.

So, by definition, there should be some discomfort, but if you are doing this right, you can learn that this discomfort is related to a higher purpose.

If you set your why good, then you can actually enjoy that pain, because, you know, you are paying a sacrifice to get to where do you want to be.

The important thing to remember is first, you need to set goals.

And what I mean by that is, do not let life lead you, you need to lead your life. And you do that by sitting down and reflecting.

Where do you want to be in 10 years, 10 months, 10 minutes, and think, “Okay, am I doing things now that are propelling me to that? Or am I doing things that are taking them away from that?  Or am I really kind of in the middle and not really moving forward or backwards?”

Either way, you really need to start by first, sitting, reflecting, thinking about what it is what is you want to accomplish in life.

And then you are going to take that long term goal and basically break it down into smaller pieces, something that you can work on every day, and measure and move forward with that.

Another important thing to remember is, when you are setting long-term goals, do not focus all your efforts on one of Life's buckets.

Remember to consider kind of all areas of your life.

You may have a 10-year goal. It is a financial goal. But you probably need to have some type of like personal growth goal, family goal. Things like that, the other kind of spheres of your life.

So that one area of your life does not become overwhelming and crowding out the other areas.

Remember kind of the different aspects of your life in goal setting.

The thing is this is not easy to do. It is hard.

It is hard work, but the hard work is worth it in the end.

It is going to get you where you want to be in life, and make you have more fulfilled life.

So, again, thinking about your long-term goals, break them down into smaller pieces, into daily habits.

And you are going to get there, you are going to be successful.

If there is anything we can do to help, please just let us know.

Thank you.

Kelly Cox MD, FACEP

Member, American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine

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