Goal Setting
Goal setting is an important method of:
- Deciding what is important for you to achieve in your life
- Separating what is important from what is irrelevant
- Motivating yourself to achievement
- Building your self-confidence based on measured achievement of
goals
Why Should We Set Goals?
- It helps to visualize, plan actions to achieve the goal,
- Forces you to set priorities and then carry them out
- Helps define reality from wishful thinking
- Makes you aware of your strengths and weaknesses
- Improves concentration levels and ability to remember more
things
- Improves self-image and self-confidence of yourself and the
group
- Makes you responsible for your own life and makes your group
responsible for its own successes and failures.
- Gives you a sense of past victories and gives motivation for
future successes
Sometimes We Don't Set Goals Because…
- We're Scared-we are afraid we won't reach the goal and later be
criticized for it
- We're Scared-but of succeeding because we won't know how to
handle new success
- Over expectations-setting goals too high makes us not want to
even try
How Do We Set Goals?
- Make your goals SMART
- Specific to you and/or the group
- Measurable, i.e. times, technique
- Attainable, a realistic chance of reaching the
goal
- Recorded, goal should be written down so can
be referred back to
- Time, should be set over a period of time,
i.e. short and long term goals
Example 1
"Our organization wants to get more members."
Example 2
"We want to increase membership in our organization by 15%, and we
want this goal to be accomplished by November. We will do this by
focusing our recruitment efforts at Block Party, talking
individually with others to recruit, and by putting ads in the
newspaper once a month."
**Example #2 is the better goal because it is specific in that
we know exactly who and what the goal is about. We also know when
they want the goal accomplished and how they are going to try to
accomplish it. Finally, this is a realistic and attainable goal for
a group of people to accomplish together.
Last Minute Tips
- State each goal as a positive-for example "Execute this
technique well" instead of "Don't make that stupid mistake"
- Set priorities-after you have several goals, give each a
priority to avoid feeling overwhelmed with too many
- Do not set goals too low-set goals so they are slightly out of
your immediate grasp, but not so far that there is no hope of ever
achieving it
- If you learned something that would lead you to change other
goals, do so
- If you achieved one goal too easily, make the next one harder.
Also, if one goal took way too long to achieve, make the next one a
bit easier.