One of the best ways that you can improve your quality of life is by setting goals that help you improve and create new opportunities for yourself. For instance, they can provide you with a greater sense of purpose, more happiness, additional motivation to improve yourself, and a good sense of accomplishment.
More importantly, goals provide you with a path to realize the life that you want for yourself. Here are the steps needed to create and attain empowering goals.
Begin with What Matters Most to You
When it comes to creating life-changing goals, you should start by searching within yourself for what matters most to you. Think about your personal values and what makes you happy. Remember, you don’t want to set goals that are in conflict with your personal ethics and values. Instead, your goals should be closely aligned to your values with a focus on your happiness and well-being.
Visualize Your Ideal Life
After considering your values and the things that make you happy, it’s time for you to think about your ideal self. Take some time to reflect on your life’s purpose and meaning. Then, visualize images of what your ideal self looks like. Once you have your vision in mind, start considering the types of goals that it will take for you to realize your vision. It might help to write down your vision, as well as the steps it will take for you to realize it.
Focus on Specific Outcomes
You can’t set empowering goals that are capable of changing your life if they aren’t focused on specific actions. For instance, when you create a goal for yourself, you must understand the reason that you want/need to accomplish it. Unfortunately, if a goal is too vague – or you can’t see how it helps you achieve your vision – then you need to think of something different that’s more specific. That’s because the more specific a goal is, the more likely you are to follow through on achieving it.
Focus on Getting Measurable Results
If you don’t set goals that include measurable results, then it will be much harder to track your progress toward achieving them. For example, let’s say that you want to lose weight. Instead of just setting a vague goal to lose weight, you should set a more measurable goal – for instance losing 25 pounds in three months. Then, you can easily track the progress of your weight loss goal to ensure that you are on course to achieve it by the end of the three months.
Understand How to Reach Your Goals
It isn’t enough just to set empowering goals for yourself if you don’t reach them. Therefore, if you want your goals to be life-changing, then you are going to need to know how to attain them. If your goal is large or seems overwhelming, a good strategy is to set smaller goals to achieve a big one.
For instance, let’s say that you would like to switch careers to find a better paying job. You will need to figure out the steps it will take for you to become qualified to work in your new chosen occupation. For example, it might require that you go to school to get additional training.
Set Realistic Goals for Yourself
You might be one of those people who thinks, “if you are going to dream, then you should dream big.” While setting big goals for yourself is fine, they still need to be realistic. It does you no good to create unrealistic goals that you can/will never achieve.
Strategically Plan Your Goals
If you are serious about achieving empowering goals, then you need to strategically plan them. For example, if you set goals for yourself without creating a specific plan of action, then you won’t be nearly as likely to achieve them. Therefore, when you are creating a goal, you need to plan each step required to accomplish the goal. It might help if you write down all of the steps to help you keep track of them.
Eliminate Bad Habits That Hold You Back
Bad habits will kill your dreams quicker than anything else. For example, let’s say that you set a fitness goal, but you are still smoking a pack of cigarettes every day. No matter how hard you work to become more physically fit, smoking will jeopardize your health and wellness – undermining your overall goal. Therefore, you need to replace the bad habits in your life with healthier habits that will help you achieve your goals.
Use Your Time Wisely
Mark Cuban often tells Shark Tank contestants that “time is the one thing in life that you can’t buy more of.” Therefore, when it comes to working on your goals, you need to spend your time wisely by carefully planning each day. Remember those steps you created earlier to help you reach your goals? Turn them into daily tasks – and make sure you give yourself the time to do them. Avoid procrastination at all costs, as you don’t have extra time to squander.
Eliminate Negative Thinking
Lastly, negative thinking is the antithesis of empowerment. Having a pessimistic attitude will convince you that you are incapable of improving yourself. Therefore, if you want to achieve empowering goals, you need to embrace positive thinking. Replace that can’t-do attitude with a can-do attitude. Surround yourself with positive people who will help support your goals. You can also keep yourself positive and motivated by reminding yourself what it will be like to turn your life’s vision into a reality.
In short, the purpose of creating empowering goals is to help you realize a more satisfying and fulfilling life. However, like anything in life, good things require hard work. Furthermore, it can become easy for you to get distracted or discouraged from working on your goals – especially when you face setbacks and disappointments. Just remember to keep your eye on the prize – turning your life’s vision into a reality.