Setting Goals?

Who Likes Goal-Setting?

Creating goals is an excellent way to plan for your future with something tangible to hold yourself accountable. The issue I find is deciding on goals that are relevant and applicable. How do I make sure the goals I come up with will adequately reflect what I would like to achieve in the short and long term? In talking with people over the years, I am not the only one who has had trouble doing this personally and professionally. Those yearly reviews at the workplace can become a daunting task if you too find this to be difficult.

My Little Magic Wand~ Keeping a Journal

If you already keep a journal, you have a book of qualified goals at your finger tips! I am going to share with you how a simple journal can make goal-setting an easy task that will include goals that are perfectly attuned to where you want to be in the next six months to a year or longer.

Take a look at what you have written in your journal at the end of each week. Write down any topics that come up more than once in those entries. After doing this for each of the four weeks in the month, look over the weekly points and then consolidate them. You will likely find that from each week there will be around 2-3 topics that are reoccurring in one month’s time. There could be more, but if you put them into a hierarchy of importance you can keep it to 2-3 topics. Repeat this process for another month and again consolidate that month to come up with 2-3 topics.

Now you are ready to set goals for the next six months to one year!

Look at your two months and check again for any topics that have come up that match. When you have completed this, you will likely have 3-4 important topics that will make relevant goals. When you consider each, think about the context you wrote about them within. For example, one of my personal goals for this year was to be consistent with my daily meditation. I came up with this one because some common threads in my journal entires were about my mind feeling full and having difficulty falling asleep at bedtime because my mind was so busy. It was a strong goal because it came up several times in the two months of journal entries I used for my goal-setting. It is much easier to see the areas that you can work on when they are written down over time.

Personal goals can range from anything like developing a work out routine to trying meal prepping or learning a new language. If you want to learn to play a new instrument or to spend more time with family members, make a goal and it will become a priority and a reality!

If you want to use your journaling for professional goals, you could easily write down some work related activities each day with your entry. Maybe you had a meeting that didn’t go well because you weren’t organized or you lost a file because your desk was too messy. Professional goals can be anything from learning more about a new product, or de-cluttering your workspace to learning how to network better and attend networking events. The substance of your goal should speak to something you believe will help you to enhance your skill set and be meaningful to your professional development.

See how easy it can be?

Patterns occurring in your daily life are not immediately visible and you may not realize what to look for later unless you write things down. This can be done on the go-train home from work, before bed or any time you have to decompress. Writing daily events without even focusing on any purpose for doing so will still yield material with which to generate goals that are both relevant and applicable. I speak to you about this from my personal experience and who knows? Maybe it will work for you too. You could always set a goal to read my blog each week;)