Right now, the Internet is a great place to go if you’re interested in anything related to goals. For example, a number of sites offer some great goal setting forms that can help you write down (or type up) the achievements you’d like to have in your life. These forms give us some much needed structure when it comes to preparing our goals. Before you start brainstorming your future, here are a couple of tips to help you make the most of these useful tools.
Be Optimistic but Realistic
If you want to be a good goal setter, you have to walk the fine line between optimism and realism. Basically, you also want to be hoping for the best but planning for the worst if you’re going to be successful. Unfortunately, too many of us end up falling on one end of the spectrum or the other. We’re either too pessimistic to write goals at all or too dreamy to write goals we have any chance of obtaining.
Be Emotional about Goals
When you do start writing down your goals with these goal setting forms, don’t take the activity lightly. This is not a “What I Did Over the Summer” school assignment that can be blown off and forgotten once it’s finished. Instead, these goals should have meaning for you because they represent the path you want your life to take. And if you’re serious about reaching whatever is at the end of your goals, you have to take them seriously. If you don’t, they won’t be any more useful to you than a New Year’s resolution on January 3rd.
Repeat Your Goals
Following your goals should ideally become a habit – something you do without even thinking about it. But this type of automatic behavior doesn’t happen overnight. To reach that level, research has shown you need repetition.
When you write down a goal, your conscious mind is in charge and is doing all of the thinking. What you want, however, is for that goal to become part of your unconscious mind like driving a car or riding a bicycle. The best way to make this happen is through repetition. Make a habit of repeating your goals to yourself at least five times a day.
Reward Yourself
You have your completed goal setting forms and now you have successfully obtained one of them. What do you do next? Well, you’ll start working on the next goal for starters. But that’s not all. You should also take a moment (or more) to congratulate yourself on a job well done. This is going to motivate you to keep working harder to achieve the next goals. How you congratulate yourself is up to you but make sure it’s something special that you enjoy.
Also, it doesn’t hurt to have a ritual for goal achievement. For example, before you cross the goal off the list, you might have a glass of wine.
