TNP News – Goal Setting

Goal Setting
17 January 2012 by TNP Newsdesk 0 Comments

It is the New Year. A time to start a fresh, rest and recover from the last year. A time to asses what we need and want from this year.

It is really easy to get lost in the day to day monotony of keeping a float and juggling life. Losing focus and making sacrifices to get stuff done is common amongst us all. It does not make life any easier when we are bombarded with negative media stories telling us how bad everything is from the moment we wake up until we go to bed at night.

But in the grand scheme of things our lives are great, wondrous even. We can do pretty much anything we want, as long as we follow a few basic steps.

*Make sure your goal something you can control. Do not set a goal to get quoted in a local newspaper. You can’t control that. No matter how much you work, and how much you try, it’s ultimately someone else’s decision. You CAN choose a goal that you will contact 5 newspapers to try and get quoted in one.

*Break the goals up into smaller chunks. Creating smaller goals will help you stay motivated towards the larger goal. Like when you are running and you tell yourself you can make it to the stop sign – and then the stop sign comes and you tell yourself you can make it to the next corner, and you keep going until you have finished your run!

*Set reasonable time frames. If your goal is to build a deck, and you know it is going to take 15 hours. Do not give your self until tomorrow to complete it - what if it rains? And what if you have other commitments as well? If you are unreasonable in your time frame, your goal date is going to come and go, without your goal being accomplished, and you will feel discouraged. So you might set aside Saturday afternoons over the next month to complete the project. If you finish the project early it is a bonus.

*FOCUS. When you set goals, make sure you don’t try and bite off more than you can chew. Don’t set 5 goals at the same time for different things. When you try to do too many things at once, you will feel overwhelmed, and become discouraged. Focusing your time and efforts will help you to achieve the goals you have set, instead of leaving 5 goals half way completed.