By: Dr. Sanjay Kumar Agarwal, Sr. Associate Editor-ICN Group
Benefits of Goals Setting
KOLKATA: In our previous article no. 5 of this ‘Excellence With G.O.P.T.A.’ Series, we discussed about the main benefit of ‘goals setting’ in life. We saw that the biggest benefit of goals setting is gaining sense of ‘direction’. I left you pondering on the point as to where you are going in your life. Now let us move ahead.
Most of the people wander here and there for their whole life pursuing nothing and there is no surprise that they get nothing. As Zig Ziglar says, “You cannot make it as a wandering generality. You must become a meaningful specific.” So, first of all, we have to identify what is the purpose of our life, so as to correctly work upon goal setting process and effective time management. Cross one milestone at a time, but in definite direction.
Apart from getting direction, there are various other benefits of goal setting process:-
It keeps you motivating to work towards achievement of your goals and maintain your enthusiasm.
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- It helps you to identify your strengths & weaknesses.
- It tells you that you are responsible for your life, whether you achieve success or face setbacks.
- It helps you in identifying what is important for you and what is irrelevant or a distraction for you.
- It tells you when you are expecting to achieve any particular goal.
- It provides clarity in thoughts and enables you to choose between too many things.
- It helps you to devote less energy & time on tasks of lesser importance, which are not taking you towards your goals.
- It helps you in making better choices in life like choosing career etc.
- It helps in choosing relationships with right kind of people, helping you to move in right direction.
- It provides feedback about achievement of goals.
- If you know the process of reaching your goals, your anxiety level will be reduced during the journey.
- It helps you in knowing beforehand the possible obstacles and to prepare the strategy to overcome them. Therefore, when the obstacle will actually arrive, you will not get worried.
- It tells you about the help required and who will be your allies. Sharing goals with others also tells people about your plans and this may bring some outside help from them.
- It provides yardsticks to measure achievement of success.
- Goal setting is a function of your left brain. Once you are through to the goal setting process, your creative part of the brain, i.e. right brain gets free to work upon achieving the same.
- After goal setting, you can focus on what is most important to do on a daily, weekly and annual basis
- Setting goals helps in monitoring and improving the performance levels
- And the father of all, achieving goals boosts our confidence level and improves our self image.
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Brian Tracy aptly puts it in his classic book on time management ‘Kiss That Frog’ (specially dealing with procrastination), “your mind is like a garden: if you do not deliberately cultivate flowers, weeds will grow automatically without any effort on your part. If you do not deliberately plant and cultivate positive thoughts, negative thoughts will grow in their place.”
Only about 3-5% of the people have written goals and these people achieve much more than those, who do not have written goals. Remaining people have to be engaged in the work, which is not of their choice. Successful people are future oriented. They think and plan 20-25 years ahead and then put their best to achieve their long-term goals by breaking the journey into medium-term goals and short-term goals. Successful people are always willing to come out of their comfort zone today in order to work upon their dreams. On the other hand, unsuccessful people keep on thinking on immediate gains & comforts and do not think about the future.
But don’t forget to live in present while focussing your attention on future. Some people get so involved in getting their goals that they start living in future. That is not good for you. Don’t let your future dreams come in the way of enjoyment of the present. Live each day to its fullest and be grateful.
(You must be wondering if the goal setting is so good and powerful and if it is so simple, why everybody does not set goals. We will see the reasons in next article; and after that we will move towards my copyrighted concept G.O.P.T.A.©, which will leave an ever-lasting imprint on your life. So, stay tuned every Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday & Sunday.)
Dr. Sanjay Kumar Agarwal, Creator & copyright holder of the concept G.O.P.T.A.© is an Author, Certified NLP Lifestyle Practitioner, Corporate Trainer & Motivational Speaker and recipient of Honorary Doctorate of Excellence (Management) by prestigious Young Scientist University, California, USA
My book ‘How to Add 50000 Productive Hours to Your Life’ is available at Amazon & Flipkart in English at http://bit.ly/HowToAdd50000ProductiveHoursToYourLife
