Personal Goal Setting and Your Vision of Success

The foundation of personal goal setting success is having a clear vision of what you want out of life and taking purposeful steps to achieve your vision.

What you can achieve is limited only by what you can see.

Personal goal setting creates a bridge between today’s vision and tomorrow’s reality.

An important part of your vision will be bound in the personal values that you hold.

If your personal values do not match up with your long term goals, then your long term goals will be less meaningful for you.

Without meaningful goals, you will likely lack purpose and become unmotivated to achieve your goal.

Here we provide two goal setting activities that help to clarify your vision and values that are important to you

Activity 1

Put yourself into the future and imagine that it is your retirement dinner. It is an unusual retirement dinner in which your family, friends and colleagues stand up and describe you.

How would you like to be remembered? What do you want your children and friends to say about you? How would you like to be described by your colleagues? By creating a vision of what you would like to be in the future, from different areas of your life, you often reflect the personal values that are most important to you in each of these different areas.

At the same time, think about what is important to you and the type of person that you would like to be. If you have trouble doing this, then imagine somebody that you admire and respect. What qualities do they have that you admire? Often the characteristics that you admire in another can say a lot about the type of person that you would like to be.

In activity 1, there are a number of different views of your life, which span your career, family, social and personal life. It is helpful when you are trying to create a vision of the type of person that you want to be to consider you life from different aspects. The following are some different aspects that you may want to consider.

Family. Do you want to spend more quality time with your family? What sort of parent or partner do you want to be?

Education. Do you want to learn something new, or become and expert in a particular area? What new skills do you want to acquire?

Physical. Are you wanting to lose weight or become fitter? Perhaps you want to improve your game or remain motivated to keep training. Do you want to remain healthy as you get older? What steps do you need to take?

Mindset and behavior. Do you want to maintain a positive mindset? Are there behaviors that you want to improve upon? Do you want to have more pleasure and happiness in your life?

Financial. What sort of money do you want to earn? Do you want to achieve financial freedom? If so, how?

Career. Where do you want to be in your career? What type of job do you want to work in?

Activity 2

a. Take a blank piece of paper and write down each area of your life?

b. Try to write a paragraph on the type of person that you would like to be in each area of your life. This should clarify your vision of that particular area.

The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.

You have taken the first step in personal goal setting by creating a vision of yourself in the future that is meaningful to you.

By creating a vision you develop a powerful force that provides you with direction, purpose and motivation to achieve success.