Deciding to set goals is one of the most important things you can do to improve your life. However, nearly 98% of people take the time to set clear goals for themselves in their life. It’s essential for you to think about where you want to be, whether it’s in one month, one year, or one decade from today. Taking the time to identify where you want to be is the best way to make sure you are going in the right direction and help you avoid pursuing goals that don’t excite you.
Those who don’t set goals for their life may not believe that they have any control over their lives, leading them to wander through life heavily influenced by the people and circumstance that surround them. They give their power over to the environment rather than using it to create the experiences they genuinely desire. This results in them achieving less than if they would have taken the time to set specific goals and plan their lives.
However, it is important to remember that merely having goals isn’t enough. Something that can be just as bad as not having any goals in life have unclear goals that are not aligned with what you want out of your life. Unfortunately, many of the people who take the time to set goals, spend years in single-minded pursuit of a single goal, only to achieve it with the sudden realization that it isn’t want they genuinely wanted.
Setting specific goals is one of the best decisions you can make in your life. Learning to set the right goals will allow you to tap into your intrinsic motivation, live autonomy, mastery, or purpose, and put you on the right path for uncovering your hidden potential. You might be intimidated about setting goals at first, but you’ll discover that the journey is more than worth it in the long run.
Why It’s Important to Set Goals
Setting goals gives direction to your subconscious mind, helping you to achieve your goals. They give you a path in life. However, setting vague goals like “I want to make more money,” or “I want to live a happy life,” won’t end up leading you to a fulfilling life. Your subconscious is a powerful machine, and gaining an understanding of how it works is a big part of setting goals that are successful. Maxwell Maltz, the author of Psycho-Cybernetics, explains how setting goals gives your subconscious mind direction.
“Your automatic creative mechanism is teleological. That is, it operates in terms of goals and end results. Once you give it a definite goal to achieve, you can depend upon its automatic guidance system to take you to that goal much better than “you” ever could by conscious thought. “You” supply the goal by thinking in terms of end results. Your automatic mechanism then supplies the means.”
Your subconscious mind behaves similarly to GPS; it is continuously scanning the environment around you for the information relevant to the details you’ve given it. This is why setting goals that are clear will provide you with a higher chance of accomplishing them. A strong signal is sent to your subconscious mind, allowing it to unleash its power of focusing on looking for opportunities to achieve the goal.
Setting Goals Empowers You
When you begin setting your own goals, in all significant areas of your life, rather than letting someone else set them for you, you stop giving your power away. When you set goals for your relationships, finances, career, health, and personal life, you begin to take your control back and become more empowered. You begin to make the conscious choice to become the creator of your own life and start to take responsibility for every single aspect of your life.
Taking the time to figure out your goals for your future will make a significant impact in your life. What would you do differently today if you knew how much you wanted to make in five years, where you wanted to be in twenty-five years, or how long you wanted to live?
Setting Goals Improves Your Self-Esteem
When you set clear goals, you can begin to improve your self-esteem. Having clear goals and knowing what you need to do to accomplish those goals not only builds your self-esteem but reinforces it as well. Part of our self-esteem, according to Nathaniel Branden, author of ‘The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem,’ comes from a disposition to experience ourselves as competent to cope with life’s challenges. This means that with every goal that you accomplish, you will feel better equipped to deal with other goals and problems in life.
One of the best predictors of personal happiness is directly related to high self-esteem. Consistently accomplishing the goals you set for yourself is one of the most efficient ways to build your self-esteem.
Setting Goals Changes Your Reality
Regardless of whether you achieve them or not, setting goals is a valuable process. When you set goals, it gives you the opportunity to think about your future, allows you to reflect on your values, and helps you to discover what really matters to you. Setting goals will bring you clarity and will enable you to see the bigger picture. As soon as you begin setting clear goals, you will begin to reconstruct your reality and start to realize that the dreams you previously believed to be unattainable are in fact achievable. This process starts when you start identifying your actual goals, no matter how ambitious. This begins the process of being able to overcome your limiting beliefs that stem from past experiences. Your prior limiting beliefs make it more difficult for you to obtain the life you want and deserve. As you begin working on your goals, you’ll quickly start to realize just how restrictive limiting beliefs are and you will figure out just how many of them are as a result of repetitive messages that you receive from friends, family, and the media.
Finally, setting clear goals will provide you with the chance to assess your current situation and will help lead you to close the gap between where you currently are and where you want to be.
Setting Goals is Good for Your Health
One of life’s best medicines is setting goals that excite you and can be good for your overall health. In fact, having a life’s purpose is one of the nine common characteristics shared by people that live to one hundred. On the opposite end, those who no longer have exciting goals that motivate them, often die within a few years after retirement. This is especially true for individuals who heavily identified with their job.
Many people don’t want to set goals because they are afraid of failing to achieve them. However, people who set goals consistently and are unfailing in their pursuit to realize those goals understand that every time they set a new goal, they are creating a better life. They are making a compelling new cause, resulting in a more fulfilled and happy life.
Unfortunately, too many people allow fear, lack of understanding, and temporary setbacks to keep them from achieving their dreams. What they fail to understand is that achieving their goals is a lot easier than they think. Setting goals and taking the appropriate steps to achieve those goals allows you to create the future that you want.