Setting Goals For Yourself

Have you ever wanted to set a goal and achieve it, but weren't sure where to start? Many people run into this problem, and end up not even going after a single goal. The secret to setting great goals is in using a simple system that finds what you want, what you need, and what will make the biggest difference for your life.

When thinking about what you want to accomplish, you may find that you want to achieve more things right away than you really have time for. You can overcome this problem by writing down your goals and using the process of elimination to reduce them to fewer goals. If you try to accomplish too much in a short period of time, you could find yourself failing at all or most of those goals and feeling like a failure. By narrowing your goals down to the ones that you really want to achieve, you'll have a higher success rate and be much happier.

First, write down all of your goals into a piece of paper. Allow yourself to write down as many goals as you can think of, and don't worry at all about writing down too many. You need to be sure you consider every goal you could possibly want right now, to be sure you really want to go after the ones you finally choose. If you weren't thorough with this process, you might discover a new and better goal right when it's getting tough to accomplish the one you chose to focus on.

After you've written down all of your goals, number them 1-5, with #1 being your top goal. This will help get rid of all the clutter. We all want to drive a Ferrari, but there's little point in making it a goal to own one if another goal is to make at least $45,000 each year and pay off $35,000 in student loans. In that case you'd want to increase your income and get those paid off before blowing money on a sports car.

Finally, remove those numbers, but now focus only on those five goals. Thinking about it carefully, number the goals according to which ones will make the biggest difference in your life. You want to find which of these favorite goals will make the largest and most positive difference in your life, and that is your top goal. You can still focus on the other 4, of course, but this one goal has to have a higher priority than all of the others. Don't worry though - once you achieve it, you can move one of the others up to the top.

As you can see, goal setting is the beginning stage of a long road of accomplishment. Set your goals carefully, swiftly, and decidedly for top success.

Andre Zayas is a professionally syndicated author. Setting Goals