Why Is Goal Setting Important?

How To Achieve The True Meaning Of Success

Why is goal setting important anyway? Supposedly only 3% of adults have written goals. And guess what? Everyone else works for them! So basically, if you want to be successful, a personal development plan that incorporates goal setting is imperative. How else can you hope to achieve your true meaning of success?

The reason goal setting works so well is because it helps you develop motivation and forces you to focus your time and energy. This helps inform what decisions you make in every waking moment. When you lack goals, it's difficult to avoid just drifting through life as your day-to-day decisions have no larger purpose. Hence the saying "If you aren't sure where you're going, any road will lead you there."

Once you create a personal development plan with your key goals you will find your life has more meaning and purpose. Often enough, it isn't even obtaining a goal that becomes exhilarating, rather it's taking the journey and achieving the small milestones along the way.

Why Is Goal Setting Important? Dr. Stephen Covey's Perspective

In his book, The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People, Dr. Stephen Covey tells us that we all have roles to play in life (depending on how we each define our true meaning of success), and to be effective in these roles we need to create intentions for each role.

So, even though your vision and roles in life might be big, slightly abstract and thematic (for example: I want to be successful in my career, I want to be a good mother), your goals give you the opportunity to live your vision in your daily actions (for example: I want to obtain Vice Presidency by June 2010, I want to spend three weekends a month with the kids.)

Why Is Goal Setting Important? It Allows You To Build On Your Strengths

The truth is, we all have strengths and weaknesses, and life is usually much more fun when we focus on building our strengths than when we focus only on reducing our weaknesses. It is also much easier to develop motivation when you're building on positives. While we all want to improve ourselves, make sure you'll be utilizing some of your strengths in whatever goals you set.

This doesn't mean ignoring what's stopping your progress. It just means utilizing your natural resources - what you're intrinsically good at. And even when you do this, you'll still face obstacles that need to be overcome in order to succeed.

Managing Obstacles: Brian Tracy has some great advice with managing constraints. He calls this the theory of constraints. Brian recommends asking yourself, why you aren't already at your goal. The main reason you aren't at your goal is your answer to this question. He recommends your initial focus should be single-mindedly on alleviating this constraint. Once it's gone, you can move onto the next challenge. This is a great way to develop motivation and make continued progress toward your goal.

Are you feeling convinced yet that goal setting is important? If so, read some of the suggested articles below to start writing your personal development plan and set some goals!

Related Articles

How To Achieve Any Goal

Your Specific Purpose Statement

Setting SMART Goals

Your Action Plan Template

Importance Of Visualization

Benefits Of A Positive Attitude

Self Motivation Tips

Stories Of Perseverance