What, Why and How?
I learned
about goal setting very early on in my sales and management career. Sales training, sales managers and business
owners taught me how to create business goals. I was told how important it was to write my
sales goals down on a sales board, and that there was nothing worse in my
career than defunct goals. I adopted the
art of business goal setting early on and it has had a tremendous impact on my sales
career. I don’t remember hearing much taught about setting personal goals.
There are 3 basic questions you can ask yourself in order to achieve your
personal goals: What? Why? and How?. Simply knowing the answers to these questions will help
you make
the most out of your life and will bring balance to your personal and work
life. Without personal goals, life can be an aimless
journey without much direction.
At age 23, I was running
a successful residential sales organization.
The focus of my life was on my sales career. I never took the time to write my short and
long term personal goals down on paper, the way I had for my business
goals. As a result, my business life was
busy, yet my personal life was a mess, at least according to my standards. I wanted lots of things, like a happy marriage,
a home, kids and plenty of money in the bank, yet I wasn’t mature enough for
the responsibility. A certain level of maturity is needed in order to
know what it is that you really want to achieve in life. To get the
things you want from life, at some point, you’re going to need to ask yourself,
"What do I want from my life?"
It is a new career, a sense
of purpose, a creative hobby, a physical challenge, better education, a romantic
relationship, a family, better health, or more money in the bank? A helpful exercise might be to write down the categories of your life on paper. For example, Family, Health, Career, Education, Financial, Recreation, Community. Take
a look at each category and think about which areas are most important
to you and your life. Write 2 or 3 things in those
categories that you
would like to see happen, regardless of their time frame. Think
about how acheiving these things will affect your life. Will it
have a positive impact?What ever your
personal goals may be, writing them down is the very first step. When you
have the ability to evaluate your life and decide what it is you
want, it’s time to ask why.
"Why do I want this for my life?"
When
you
assess your life’s goals by asking yourself why, you are able to choose
goals that have meaning and importance to you in your particular stage
in life. Those are the goals that you will intrinsicly work hard
to achieve. As you get better at goal setting, or your life
circumstances change, you can re-evaluate it to see if what you want is
really important
to you, or just a distraction. Finding goals that are truly
meaningful to you and your life will bring you greater success.
"How can I get it?"
Asking yourself this question will help you take action and identify what resources
are needed, which people in your life can help, and what steps need to be taken
to reach your goal Using
an action plan will
help you break your actions down into small, easy to accomplish steps,
with smaller time-lines and an easy way to measure your progress.
Much
like climbing up a ladder, each little step taken toward your personal
goals is
progress. Any of life's circumstances can have an affect on your
movement. As your situations and priorities in life change, your
goals may change too. Be smart enough to know the difference
between necessary adjustments that need to be made to your goals
from distractions that take you away from them. By keeping
in tune with the "What" and "Why" of goal setting,
your "How" will always be easy to redefine.