About GOAL-SETTING

The Ten Commandments of Goal Setting
by Jaime L. Mintun

Setting goals is risky business. Depending on how you set your goals, they can elevate you or they can devastate you. And you want to know a secret? Not everyone who succeeds in life sets goals.

[pausing for the oooh’s and aaaah’s…]

Like any tool, however, your goals can be powerful victory-builders. But be careful. If you set your goals too high, you’ll quickly become frustrated and experience feelings of failure and the desire to give up. If you set your goals too low, you won’t be motivated to strive.

Though few people talk about it, there are certain tactics you can use to ensure that your goals significantly aid you in achieving success. Rather than simply be the measuring stick for your achievement, each goal will serve as a vehicle that gets you there. I call these tactics the Ten

Commandments of Goal Setting.

The Ten Commandments of Goal Setting

1. Thou Shall Be Passionate: more powerful than any goal you ever set is the passion you have for what you want, what you do, and who you are. Find your passion first, then set your goals around that.

2. Thou Shall Be Realistic: if your goal is to make a million dollars in one year, and you only make $500,000, according to your goal, you’ve failed. Yet, you’ve made $500,000! Isn’t that a huge success? So why not set your goal at $100,000 dollars in one year, and beat the heck out of it five times that year?

3. Thou Shall Be Value-Driven: in the pursuit of wealth and satisfaction, many of us lose sight of our values and beliefs. Make a list of your goals, then a list of your values. If you can’t directly associate each goal with one of your values, maybe you shouldn’t invest your time in that particular goal.

4. Thou Shall Be Detailed: the goal itself is almost never enough. The most effective goals are designed so that you know the goal, the date by which you will achieve it, the quantity by which you will measure it (is “rich” $100,000 or $500,000?), and how it will change your life.

5. Thou Shall Plan: start with the end result in mind, then work backwards. For example, if your goal is that your teenager confides all her secrets to you, the step before that has to be that she trusts you. To earn her trust, you have to listen, and allow her to tell you her mistakes.

6. Thou Shall Remain Accountable: find someone to hold you accountable to your goal, or create a system whereby you hold yourself accountable. An effective way to do this is to set a realistic “due date” for each step in your plan, and then report to yourself or a friend how far you’ve come in that step. These little goals are easier to measure and give the sense of accomplishment.

7. Thou Shall Have Fun: goals won’t do you much good if they just frustrate you and make you feel guilt or a sense of failure. Have fun with them, reward yourself, and when things get tough, take a break and do something novel and entertaining.

8. Thou Shall Believe: many of us set goals we don’t truly believe we can reach. Just think of the resolutions you made during New Years. Have you ever followed through on one of those? If your goal is to be healthy and fit, and you can’t imagine being able to exercise every other day and stay away from chocolates, then you have to rework your goal into something believable for you. Otherwise, you’ll only frustrate yourself.

9. Thou Shall Seek Support: most of us hate to admit it, but we often won’t achieve our goals solely on our own. Depending on the goal, you may need a professional mentor, a coach, a close friend, or an inspiring book. Don’t always try to achieve your goals alone.

10. Thou Shalt Not Give Up: what if you still don’t achieve your goal? Don’t give up. Maybe you’re concentrating too hard on reaching the goal and losing sight of why you set it in the first place. Not everyone succeeds by setting goals. If you try the above, and they don’t work for you, then try something else. The most important thing is to be passionate and have fun. You’ll get there.


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Pathways and Pitfalls to Setting Organizational Goals and Priorities
Jim Clemmer


"Concentration — that is, the courage to impose on time and events his own decision as to what really matters and comes first — is the executive's only hope of becoming the master of time and events." — Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive

Your management team must identify its three or four strategic imperatives for the next twelve months. A laundry list of urgent goals diffuses focus, spawns unproductive "busywork," and provides enough bureaucratic cover to justify any pet project or protect turf.

Set specific improvement targets for each strategic imperative. The clearer the target, the surer the aim. "Improving customer satisfaction," "reengineering key processes," or "changing the culture" show up on every organization's wish list today. Setting, concrete measurable goals for improvement turns the rhetoric into reality.

Improvement goals should be absolute targets (for example, actual number of dissatisfied customers), never as percentages. Percentages allow you to turn problems into impersonal statistics. They also release the constant improvement pressure since anything over 90 - 95% sounds pretty good ("after all, perfection is impossible"). Real numbers force you to think about the actual number of dissatisfied customers, defects, etc. and their costs to the organization.

Each member of your team then sets three or four personal or team goals or objectives that flow directly out of your strategic imperatives for their area of responsibility. They also establish measurements for each of their goals or objectives along with the level of improvement they are shooting for in the next twelve months.

Every member of you team now meets with individuals or teams reporting to them to repeat the process based on your team members' goals or objectives. This continues throughout the organization until everyone is included.

This process can be driven in a traditional top-down way or be quite participative and interactive. In a top-down approach, each level of management essentially decides and commits to (with perhaps some discussion) what the targets will be for everyone they're leading. A participative approach is much more difficult to manage and takes a few years to get it rolling smoothly.

Using this method, goals, objectives, measurements, and improvement goals are set by the teams that will make them happen. They do this in negotiation with the manager or director they report to. The manager or director than takes these commitments to peer meetings who pull everything together and coordinate whether the commitments and planned activities will be enough to help them reach their goals and objectives. This "rolls up" the organization until everything is consolidated and reviewed by the senior team responsible for the original strategic imperatives. I prefer this much messier, clumsy, and participative process.

A key part of this cascading goals and objectives process is the learning, coordination, and communication that happens in regular (often quarterly) reviews. Each team meets with the teams or individuals reporting to them. They review progress on the goals and objectives. This should not become a "snoopervision" exercise. The purpose of the meetings is early, joint problem solving and learning. After the review with the people and teams reporting to them, each team and/or person then meets with the team they report to for a similar problem solving and learning session.

Focus all organizational systems and key processes on your strategic imperatives. Training, measurements, information systems, improvement teams, human resource systems, and other resource-intensive activities must pass the value-add test; does this work help or hinder movement toward our strategic imperatives?

Ensure that all your improvement and project teams' activities are ultimately linked to strategic imperatives. Intensify and concentrate your improvement process by connecting it to the important and urgent organization issues that are keeping you and your management teams awake at night. Far too many department and process improvement teams are wasting valuable time and resources making improvements that don't really matter. Concentrate precious resources on key leverage points.

Push yourself and others to set breakthrough objectives and stretch goals. An increase of 10 or 20 percent doesn't excite imaginations. We can keep doing things the same old way. Targets of ten times improvement force people to break out of their old patterns, habits, and ways of thinking. Big, stretch goals inflame creativity and innovation. Help people fulfill their deep craving to be on a winning team. Help them become "the best" at what ever you're aiming for.


Jim Clemmer is a bestselling author and internationally acclaimed keynote speaker, workshop/retreat leader, and management team developer on leadership, change, customer focus, culture, teams, and personal growth.

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How To Choose The Right Goals To Focus On

Sometimes setting goals alone is not the only problem that you must face. Sometimes, choosing the right goals to begin with is harder.

Basically, you can choose to work any goal that you feel is necessary for your health, stability and happiness.

Goal setting is nothing more than a formal process for personal planning. By setting goals on a routine basis you decide what you want to achieve, and then move in a step-by-step manner towards the achievement of these goals.

The process of setting goals and targets allows you to choose where you want to go in life. By knowing exactly what you want to achieve, you know what you have to concentrate on to do it. You also know what nothing more than a distraction is.

Goal setting is a standard technique used by professional athletes, successful business people and high achievers in all fields. It gives you long term vision and provides you with short term motivation.

It helps to focus your attention and knowledge which helps you to organize your resources. By setting sharp and clearly defined goals, you can measure and take pride in the achievement of those goals. You can see forward progress in what might previously have seemed a long pointless effort.

By setting goals, you will also raise your self confidence, as you recognize your and ability to meet the goals that you have set. The process of achieving goals and seeing this achievement gives you confidence that you will be able to achieve higher and more difficult goals later on.

Goals are set on a number of different levels.

In the first place, you decide what you want to do with your life and what large scale goals you want to achieve.

Second, you break these down into the smaller aims that you must hit so that you reach your overall lifetime goals.

Finally, once you have your plan, you start working towards achieving it.

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Beginning Your Goal Setting Plans

This section explains how to set personal goals. It starts with your lifetime goals, and then works through a series of lower level plans culminating in a daily to-do list.

By setting up this structure of plans you can break even the biggest life goal down into a number of small tasks that you need to do each day to reach the lifetime goals.

The first step in setting personal goals is to consider what you want to achieve in your lifetime, as setting lifetime goals that gives you the overall perspective that shapes all other aspects of your decision making process.

To help give you a broad, and balanced coverage of all important areas in your life, try to set goals in some or all of the following categories:

Artistic:

Do you want to achieve any artistic goals? If so, what is it? Do you want to write a book; paint a masterpiece, or write a song?

Attitude:
Does your own mindset hold you back from making progress? Is there any part of the way that you behave that upsets you for example, do you talk too much? If so, set a goal to improve your behavior or find a solution to the problem.

Career:
What level do you want to reach in your career? Is it your goal to be the boss or own your own company someday, or do you want to be the president of someone else's company?

Education:
Is there any knowledge you want to acquire in particular or some area of study that you would like to pursue? What information and skills will you need to achieve these goals?

Family:
Do you want to be a parent? If so, how are you going to be a good parent? How do you want your partner or family members to see you?

Financial:
How much do you want to earn by what age in your life? What can you do to make that come about?

Physical:
Are there any athletic goals you want to achieve, or do you want good health deep into old age? What steps are you going to take to achieve this?

Pleasure:
How do you want to enjoy yourself? You should ensure that some of your life is geared toward making yourself happy for no reason other than being happy

Service
Do you want to make the world a better place by your existence? If so, how?
Once you have decided your goals in these categories, you have to assign a priority to them if you want to succeed.

Then review the goals and re-prioritize until you are satisfied that they reflect the shape of the life that you want to lead.

Also, you should ensure that the goals that you have set are the goals that you want to achieve, and not what your parents, spouse, family, or employers want them to be.

Success only happens when you are working for your own well being because doing it for others will ensure that you sabotage your own success.

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How to Begin to Achieve Your Goals

Once you have set your lifetime goals, the best thing that you can do is set a 25 year plan of smaller goals that you should complete if you are to reach your lifetime plan.

From there you can just shorten your overall goal spans for example, you set a 5 year plan, 1 year plan, 6 month plan, and 1 month plan of progressively smaller goals that you should reach to achieve your lifetime goals.

Each of these should be based on the previous plan. It is the best way to begin to achieve a lifetime that is filled with and results in a life without any failed wishes. It results in a life without regret.

You see, by starting out slowly, you are giving yourself the chance to realize and work on achieving the goals that you set out to.

Nobody ever succeeds at attaining a goal that was forced through. Those that tried never really got what they were hoping for. In rushing through and trying to achieve your goals quickly you will likely miss a few key aspects that can really change your outcome.

Think of it this way; if you were to run a 10K marathon and decided to take a cab for half of the journey; have you really achieved that goal? Would you be satisfied when you crossed the finish line?

It would be a hollow victory that could only provide a momentÕs happiness.

Finally set a daily to do list of the things that you should do today to work towards your lifetime goals.

At an early stage these goals may be to read books and gather information on the achievement of your goals. This will help you to improve the quality and realism of your goal setting and in effect; make it easier to achieve them.

You also have to review your plans, and make sure that they fit the way in which you want to live your life.

Once you have decided what your first set of plans will be, keep the process going by reviewing and updating your to-do list on a daily basis.

You have to periodically review the longer term plans, and change them to reflect your changing priorities and experiences in your life.


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Setting your Goals Effectively

There is a difference in setting your goals and setting them effectively. Anyone can set a goal, but doing it effectively means that it will actually get done.

There are so many things that you can do to better your life, but if you don't know how to go about it you are stuck.

The following guidelines will help you to set effective goals and help you manage your time in an efficient manner that will cause those goals to become reality.

State each goal as a positive statement

Express your goals in a positive way. That is a key component to setting goals that you can attain.

How often have you been excited to accomplish a goal that didn't even sound good when you brought it up? If you are not comfortable or happy with the goals that you have set, the likelihood of you succeeding is pretty low.

If you want to express your goals in a positive way, you simply have to first think of a goal that puts a smile on your face when you imagine it completed. Why would you want to set a goal that made you frown, cringe or cry?

When you are beginning to set your goals it helps when you are talking about them to others in a manner that states your actions as positives because it will have others seeing it as a positive as well.

That will garner you a great deal more support. In the end, don't we all need a little support when we are trying to do something positive in our lives?

Be precise

Set a precise goal that includes starting dates, times and amounts so that you can properly measure your achievement.

If you do this, you will know exactly when you have achieved the goal, and can take complete satisfaction from having achieved it.

Being precise in setting your goals is no more than setting them with exact details. It is easier this way because then you can follow a step-by-step format. That's all there is to it.

Set priorities

When you have several goals, give each a specific priority.

This helps you to avoid feeling overwhelmed by too many goals, and helps to direct your
attention to the most important ones and follow each in succession. Setting priorities will force you into the step-by-step format above.

By doing the most important first and moving to the least important in succession, you are enabling each task to be easier than the last. It causes the accomplishment of each task to get easier and easier which will encourage you to complete your goal.

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Write Goals Down

This crystallizes your goals and gives them more force.

In writing your goals down, you are better able to keep up with your scheduled tasks for each accomplishment. It also helps you to remember each task that needs to be done and allows you to check them off as they are accomplished.

Basically, you can better keep track of what you are doing so as not to repeat yourself unnecessarily.

Keep operational goals small

Keep the low-level goals you are working towards small and easy to achieve. If a goal is too large, then it can seem that you are not making progress towards it.
Keeping goals small and incremental allows you more opportunities for reward. Derive today's goals from larger ones. It is a great way to accomplish your goals.

Set performance goals, not outcome goals

You should take care to set goals over which you have as much control as possible. There is nothing more dispiriting than failing to achieve a personal goal for reasons that are beyond your control.

These could be bad business environments, poor judging, bad weather, injury, or just plain bad luck. If you base your goals on personal your performance, then you can keep control over the achievement of your goals and get satisfaction from achieving them.

Set realistic goals

It is important to set goals that you can achieve.

All sorts of people (parents, media, and society) can set unrealistic goals for you which is almost a guarantee of failure. They will often do this in ignorance of your own desires and ambitions or flat out disinterest.

Alternatively you may be na•ve in setting very high goals. You might not appreciate either the obstacles in the way, or understand quite how many skills you must master to achieve a particular level of performance.
By being realistic you are increasing your chances of success.

Do not set goals too low

Just as it is important not to set goals unrealistically high; do not set them too low. People tend to do this where they are afraid of failure or where they simply donÕt want to do anything.

You should set goals so that they are slightly out of your immediate grasp, but not so far that there is no hope of achieving them. No one will put serious effort into achieving a goal that they believe is unattainable.

However, remember that your belief that a goal is unrealistic may be incorrect. If this could be the case, you can to change this belief by using imagery effectively.

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Achieving Your Goals

When you have achieved a goal, you have to take the time to enjoy the satisfaction of having done so. Absorb the implications of the goal achievement, and observe the progress you have made towards other goals.

If the goal was a significant one, you should reward yourself appropriately. Think of it like this, why would you choose to ignore any accomplishments that you have made?

In doing that, you are downplaying your accomplishment which will convince you that it wasn't that important in the first place.

With the experience of having achieved each goal, you should next review the rest of your goal plans and see them in the following manner:

If you achieved the goal too easily, make your next goals harder
If the goal took a disheartening length of time to achieve, make the next goals a little easier
If you learned something that would lead you to change other goals, do so
If while achieving the goal you noticed a certain lacking in your skills, decide which goals to set in order to fix this.

You should keep in mind that failure to meet goals does not matter as long as you learn from it.

Feed lessons learned back into your goal-setting program.

You must also remember that your goals will change as you mature. Adjust them regularly to reflect this growth in your personality. If goals no longer hold any attraction for you let them go.

Goal setting is your servant, not your master. It should bring you real pleasure, satisfaction and a sense of achievement.

If it stops, there is no longer a point. Let's look at an example.

The best example of goal setting that you can have is to try setting your own goals. Set aside two hours to think through your lifetime goals in each of the categories. Then work back through the 25-year plan, 5-year plan, 1-year plan, 6-month plan, and a 1-month plan.

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What are the Key Points in Goal Setting?

Goal setting is an important method of accomplishing any lifetime achievement.
However, there are some key points that you should consider before setting your goals. Let's take a look at what those are.

Deciding what is important for you to achieve in your life and making your choices based on this knowledge

Separating what is important from what is irrelevant so that your focus is in the right place

Motivating yourself to achievement to ensure their accomplishment

Building your self-confidence based on the measured achievement of goals

Ensuring that your goals are your own and no one else's

You should allow yourself to enjoy the achievement of goals and reward yourself appropriately.

You must draw lessons where they are appropriate, and feed these back into future
performances. In learning from mistakes and errors, you are guaranteeing future success.

You would think that there would be more than five key points to goal setting, but truly there are only five. Everything else is just a branch of the main five points. Let me show you what I mean.

What this diagram shows you are the key points in setting your goals. It shows that they are the key points in the setting of your goals.

If you continue to add more branches to those four, you will see that they are all manifestations of what you are already seeing.

As you continue to add more branches you will find that all these things will tie into the first branches.

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Getting Specific in Goal Setting

Although the concept of setting goals in general is a great one to learn; which was explained in the above sections, it helps to be able to set goals in specific areas of your life separately.

For example; if you want to better your career options, you will be setting goals that specifically cater to your career. Of course, career goals aren't the only goals that most people are looking to set. Other areas of goals include:

Relationships
Family
Health and fitness
Spiritual
Social/cultural

Let's take a look at all of the most common goals that you should consider and how best to go about each one.

What would be the point in learning how to set goals in general and not give specific examples and instructions on the most common goals that are set? Let's get started now.

First of all what do you think stops most people from achieving what they want out of life?

Perhaps it is a lack of talent, lack of ability, personal circumstances, and upbringing. I'll tell you this much; it's none of those.

The single biggest reason for an inability for reaching goals is a lack of action, or not setting them in the first place or doing anything about it.

If you don't start in the first place, then how do you expect to move forward? Many a life long adventure started with the smallest of steps. Action is the first step to achieving your goals

Most people are fine at choosing a goal to set, but are inept at reaching them.ÊÊYou can achieve
everything you want by making one step.

One step is all you need to make. One step today, one step next week or tomorrow, whichever is more convenient to you. The important thing is to keep making steps once you have started.

The trouble is, often the first step is the hardest, and the next step is just as hard. It is only after you have made a series of steps that it gets easier.

You need to know the truth about what is really holding you back. Motivation and goal setting go hand in hand. The goal is your journey and the motivation your fuel to get there.

You may have many goals, but no fuel to get there. You may have gallons and gallons of fuel, but no journey to go on.

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Setting Career Goals

One of the toughest issues in making a good career choice and career goal setting is identifying what it is that you want. Even when it seems that you know what you want, you may still have doubts on if your career choice is the right one for you.

Reaching clarity in those issues may be the most important thing you can do in your career planning and goal setting. Here are a few career goal setting guidelines that can help.

Most people, even very successful ones, have some periods in their career path when they seem unsure about their career choice and goals. It is totally human to feel that way.

Often, such periods just come and go. For example, they come when you face some overwhelming obstacles on your way. It is all over as soon as you get through these obstacles.
That situation by itself is not a problem of choosing a career, only a test of your perseverance in seeing it through but what if those doubts persist, or if they always live somewhere in the background of your thoughts? If it just does not feel right?

If this is the case, then it is time to look more carefully at your career choice and overall career objectives.

Often we choose or are placed in a career because it just seems like the right step to make or that is what your studies have focused on.

The only problem is that sometimes that passion that we once had as a young adult are now gone, or the realism of the job has taken the interest and joy out of it.

That is when it is time to set a new career goal or objective. Choosing the right career goal to sink into requires a great deal of soul searching. You need to ask yourself these questions beforehand:

1. Am I making the kind of money that I want to make?
2. Do I want to make more money?
3. Does money even matter to me?
4. Do I like what I'm doing right now?
5. What am I passionate about?
6. What could I be doing that would make me happier than I am right now?
7. Would I be happier simply switching positions or getting a promotion; or would I be happier changing careers all together?
8. Why am I still working here?
9. What is stopping me from leaving this job or getting that promotion?
10. What is stopping me from leaving this job?

These are all vital questions that you have to ask yourself before deciding what your career goals are going to be. If you are honest with yourself, you will know exactly what direction you should be going in.

Without being honest with yourself you can't expect to better your life, you can only expect to have to ask yourself these questions all over again until you find happiness.

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Finally draw up a To Do List of jobs to do tomorrow to move towards your goals. When you do, you will soon realize that you will be on your way to using your goals setting on a routine basis.