In my journey of meeting so many people from different walks of life as an entrepreneur and more recently as a trainer and coach, I find myself getting loads of questions around the concept of having goals, and more specifically life goals. For someone who has never set a goal in his life, asking him to set seven different goals in key areas of his life can be a daunting task. Give him a pen and paper and boom! You’ve just put him into deeper trouble!
Yet, the fact remains. Having clearly defined, written life goals are key to a life filled with happiness, contentment and success. Here are a few reasons why you need them:
Clarity
When you don’t know what you want in life, no one can help you. It’s the same as asking the best shooter to aim in the dark and hit bull’s eye. Impossible right? The best way to get clarity is realize that being busy around a whole lot activities in the day is not necessarily driving you closer to your goals. As Bill Copeland put it across very adeptly, if you don’t have a goal in life, you are spending your life running around and not achieving anything for yourself. You get the illusion that you are doing a lot of things, but they aren’t what you want. Setting goals gives you the much needed clarity about the things you truly want to have in your life. It helps you live more consciously when you know with clarity what activities are taking you closer to your goals.
Drive forward
When you have crystal clarity about what you want to achieve in life, your days are filled with purpose. Your mind automatically starts focusing on opportunities that will take you closer to your goals each day. Your goals are a mirror of your inner desires. Written goals are the fuel that give you energy to wake up each morning and make positive moves towards your goals and ultimately craft a life of your dreams. When in doubt, the best way forward is to revisit your goals and see if the options that lie ahead align with your desires, and make choices in favour of your goals.
“Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world.” – Harriet Tubman
Makes you accountable
Goals give our days’ purpose and our life a meaning that runs deep and hard wires us towards having an achieving mindset. When you write your goals and set out daily tasks to take step by step actions towards achieving them, you make yourself accountable to the most important person in your life – YOU. Holding yourself accountable inculcates the much needed self-discipline to help you accelerate your journey towards your goals.
Life of your dreams
Having written goals and spending your days realizing them is perhaps the best way to live a life of meaning, a life of your dreams. You become a better person as a result of being on this journey. As they say, while it is important to achieve your goals, it is more important to observe who you become as a result of being on this journey.
The importance of having life goals cannot be over emphasized and there is no better time to begin setting your life goals today. Today is after all the first day of the rest of your life. It is never too late and you are never too old to set another goal. So wake up, take charge of your dreams, write them down, make a plan of action, take productive action each day and begin to live the life you always desired.
Share this with people you know and together let us take with us our loved ones and dream big, set audacious goals that make us stretch and better our best each day and live the life of our dreams!
