4 Tips for Setting Powerful Goals

Goal setting is a fantastic skill to develop, and how you design your own future. A life best lived is a life by design. Not by accident, and not by just walking through the day careening from wall to wall and managing to survive. If you can start giving your life dimensions and design and color and objectives and purpose, the results can be absolutely staggering.


Goal setting gives you the chance to experience the power of your imagination. Think about it. Imagination builds cities. Imagination conquers disease. Imagination develops careers. Imagination sets up relationships. Imagination is where all tangible values ​​and intangible values ​​begin. So what you've got to learn to do is use this powerful resource.


Tapping this resource of imagination for goal setting involves thinking about your future, thinking about tomorrow or the rest of the day, thinking about the rest of the year or five years or 10. You can use your imagination to start prospecting for the future, for what could be possible for you.


5 Things That Affect You, Your Life and Your Goals

But before you can do that, you need to know the five primary things that affect all of us:


1. The Environment

It doesn't hurt to make a simple contribution to the environment; a little contribution costs nothing. Pick up a piece of trash and throw it in the receptacle. If everybody did that, what a better world it would be. If everybody contributed, what a difference it would make!

2. Events

Think of any big event of local, national or global significance. There are small events and daily events and family events and community events, too. Events affect all of us—some small, some big, some personal, some national, some global.

3. Knowledge

Here's a good phrase to jot down: Ignorance is not bliss. Ignorance is tragedy. Ignorance is devastation. Ignorance creates lack. Ignorance creates disease. Ignorance will shorten your life. Ignorance will empty your life and leave you with the husks, nothing to account for. No, ignorance is not bliss.


Here's another note to make: What you don't know will hurt you. What you don't know will tragically affect your life. What you don't know will leave your life empty. What you don't know will leave you without a relationship.


We're affected by whatever we know or don't know.

4. Results

Whether it's business or personal, we're all affected by results. Disciplines undone in the future give us poor results. Disciplines managed well give us good results.

5. Our Dreams

We're affected by our dreams—our vision of the future.

The Pull of the Future

Some people live in the past. They let their life be continually pulled and influenced by it. Although we must remember and review the past to make it useful to invest in the future, here's the key: Make sure that the greatest pull on your life is the pull of the future.


If you're skimpy on your dreams, or your objectives and your objectives aren't very well planned, then that doesn't pull very hard. You might have more of a tendency to be pulled apart by events or circumstances. So in order to save yourself from being pulled apart by distractions or pulled back to the past, you need to start designing the future.


Goals are like a magnet—they pull. And the stronger they are, the more purposeful they are, the bigger they are, the more unique they are, the stronger they pull.


High dreams pull you through all kinds of down days and down seasons. They pull you through a winter of discontent. They pull you through distraction on every side. A bad day can almost overwhelm you if you don't have something really purposeful to go for on the other side of that day.


If you've got excellent goals, though, they'll pull you through all these things and very little of it will attach itself to you. You’ll be able to get through some of the most difficult times if you have this spectacular vision ahead of you of where you’re going and what you’re going to accomplish.

Learning to Set Goals

Learning to set goals can transform your life forever. There is power in reaching out into the future, designing something to the best of your ability, refining it as you go, tearing it up periodically if you want to, setting a whole new list. It's your life. It's your future.

3 Components of Powerful Goals

The major reason for setting a goal is for what it makes you do to accomplish it. This will always be a far greater value than what you get. That is why goals are so powerful. They are part of the fabric that makes up our lives.


Goal setting is powerful because it provides focus, shapes our dreams, and gives us the ability to home in on the exact actions we need to take in order to get everything in life we ​​desire. Goals cause us to stretch and grow in ways we never have before. In order to reach our goals, we must become better—we must change and grow.


Powerful goals have three components:


They must be inspiring.

They must be believable.

They must be goals you can act on

Life is designed in such a way that we look long term and live short term. We dream for the future and live in the present. Unfortunately, the present can produce many hard obstacles. Fortunately, the more powerful our goals (because they are inspiring and believable), the more we will be able to act on them in the short term and guarantee that they will actually come to pass.

4 Tips for Setting Powerful Goals

So, what are the key aspects to learn and remember when studying and writing our goals? Here's a closer look at goal setting and how you can make it forceful and practical:


1. Evaluation and Reflection

The only way we can reasonably decide what we want in the future and how we will get there is to know first where we are right now and what our current level of satisfaction is. With our focus on goal setting, the first order of business is for each of us to set aside some serious time for evaluation and reflection.


2. Dreams and Goals

What are your dreams and goals? Not related to the past or what you think you can get, but what you want. Have you ever really sat down, thought through your life values ​​and decided what you really want? This isn't what someone else says you should have or what culture tells us successful people do or have. These are the dreams and goals born out of your own heart and mind, goals unique to you and that come from who you were created to be and gifted to become.

3. SMART Goals

SMART means Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time-sensitive.


Specific: Don't be vague. Exactly what do you want?

Measurable: Quantify your goal. How will you know if you've achieved it or not?

Attainable: Be honest with yourself about what you can reasonably accomplish at this point in your life while taking into consideration your current responsibilities.

Realistic: It's got to be doable, real and practical.

Time: Associate a time frame with each goal. When should you complete the goal?

4. Accountability

The word accountable means to give an account. When someone knows what your goals are, they help hold you accountable. Whether it is someone else trying to reach the same goal with you or just someone you can give the basic idea to, having an accountability partner will give you another added boost to accomplishing your goals.


So, evaluate and reflect. Decide what you want. Be SMART. Have accountability. When you put these four key pieces together, you put yourself in a position of power to catapult toward achieving your goals and the kind of life you desire.



Comments (0)