Skies the limit...

Meaningful goal setting, planning and execution is the key to hard work and overall inner satisfaction!

While in England I had to learn this lesson the hard way. I was a missionary, and away from my parents for the first time, it was a tough transition to say the least! What was more, I found it quite difficult to achieve the level of success I saw others having as I worked hard. Coming from a background where I always tended to be the one succeeding while I was in South Africa as a child, it bothered me immensely.

Part of growing up though is recognising, first, that we are all different and we all have different capacities to do work and succeed. Maybe even our success is defined in a different way from others. It is a tough thing to accept, while others are getting praised for the work that they're doing and yours doesn't seem to get any recognition.

But that is the beauty of goal setting and planning, it isnt a respector of persons and ultimate success is setting goals with your personal capacity and then achieving them. I struggled to figure this concept out because I was too busy trying to be like everyone else and would slam my hands on the desk often when looking over the results of my weeks work, not knowing what was wrong with me. When I finally stopped looking at others and looked at where I was, personally, mentally, emotionally, I was able to set a worthwhile goal that was for me and thus gave me the drive to work harder to achieve it.

So then what makes a good goal. Well there is the old acronym S.M.A.R.T. Ive heard it said many ways but how I know it is, Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time bound. This is a measure of how smart essentially your goal is. Making sure that a goal meets these specifications is so key as it will determine your motivation to achieve it. If one element is missing say specific, and you set a very general goal, like say I want to be a better singer(which is actually something I aspire for), there is no way to measure whether you'll be a better singer or not because what defines that. If I set my goal as, I want to do vocal exercises for half an hour everyday for a whole month, that is specific enough but still you could go more in depth and say I want to do specific vocal exercises to practice high notes for half an hour, every day for one month. You are able to measure your success because it is measured on the specific action taken. So you see already how knowing these points helps.

Another key element in achieving our goals is the careful planning we put into it. Taking my example of vocal training, it would be important to plan what specific exercises would be best, what specific time I would do it and then in what location. All this plays a factor in achieving the goals we set for ourselves.

Lastly, execution. I have found that it is in our nature to lack the discipline to execute things on our own often times. That's why we need someone to be accountable to until we are self sufficient at performing the daily tasks that bring us success ourselves. Being accountable means that we take responsibility for our actions, we report to our accountability buddy on whether or not we have done what we said we would, and if we haven't, accept the consequences.

If however we find ourselves being unable to achieve them, don't be discouraged. The ultimate success is the work we put into our goal, not necessarily achieving them and if we aren't achieving them, we should evaluate and maybe adjust them so that we are still stretching ourselves but, still have that feeling of overall success.

And there's no greater feeling than finishing a day knowing you've done all you can to live life to the fullest. Simply, goals will help you gain that inner satisfaction. Go on...try it.

Thanks for reading! :)