Mind Tools - Summary of Goal Setting

Helping you to think your way to a great life!

Summary of Goal Setting

This section has shown that:

Goal setting is an important method of:
- Deciding what is important for you to achieve in your life
- Separating what is important for you from what is irrelevant
- Motivating yourself to achievement
- Building your self-confidence based on measured achievement of goals
You can set goals effectively by:
- Phrasing them positively
- Defining them precisely
- Prioritising multiple goals
- Writing them down
- Keeping them manageable: Not too hard, but not too easy.
- Setting performance goals, not outcome goals
Failure in meeting goals is useful in improving technique and long term success as long as you draw useful lessons from it and feed these back into your goal-setting program.
You should allow yourself to enjoy the achievement of goals and reward yourself appropriately. Lessons should be drawn where appropriate, and should be fed back into training.

As a final point, if you do not already set goals, or if you have not yet focussed on your life goals, now is a great time to start!

You will find a link below to a web page describing our LifePlan goal setting shareware, which guides you through the process of setting goals. A full working version of LifePlan can be downloaded from this page. Enjoy using LifePlan!

Links

Information on LifePlan - Goal Setting and Maintenance Shareware

References

Achievement and Feedback

Return to Planning and Goal Setting page

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