Steps to attaining your personal development goals by ericwelke

Articles from EricWelke.com Steps to Attaining Your Personal Development Goals by Eric Welke

Each of us has his own dreams. The size of our ambitions and goals may vary but they will always be present. The need to reach for our dreams moves us forward in life. It is part of our lifelong personal development. Goals are not the same as dreams. They are the actual concrete steps you take to achieve your dreams and ambitions. What concrete steps can we take to reach our personal development goals? The most important step is defining them. Setting your targets and making sure they are the right goals for you. There is a very useful acronym that can help you define what the proper goals are. It is S.M.A.R.T. Specific – You can have the best and brightest dreams ever, but if you don’t ground it in reality, you’ll never be able to achieve them. Getting rich by 30 is a very good goal but creating an investment plan to make you rich by 30 is a more specific plan. Measurable – Quantifiable personal development goals that allow you to measure your progress. It is critical that you know how much progress you’ve made towards your goal. It will help judge which of your activities are helping you reach your goal. If your goal is to save enough money to buy a car, then you need to know how much money you have in the bank. Attainable – Your goals not only need to be specific and measurable, they have to

be attainable too. Winning the jackpot at the lottery by buying X amounts of ticket is a specific and measurable goal, but hardly attainable if based on the actual odds. Graduating from college in 5 years is an attainable goal, being President of the USA before you’re 25 would be considered unattainable except in fiction. Relevant – This component of a SMART goal can be quite subjective. Each person assigns different levels of importance to his actions. Finishing college might be more important to starting a business for one person and another may view it differently. The bottom line is the goal has to be relevant to you. Time Bound– This is where a lot of personal development goals fail. A good goal must have a time frame. There is no reason to go after a goal if it is not time bound. You need to commit to a deadline or else the whole effort is wasted. Of course some goals are less urgent than others but committing to a deadline means we are forced to maintain the effort. A lot of people may say that it’s the trip not the destination that counts, which is true if the goal is to keep floating around. A time bound goal means you are committed to producing results.

Analyze your goals and break them down into different steps. Sort them out into short term, medium and long term. Check if each of your personal development goals passes the SMART criteria. If they don’t then you need to make them so. Establishing clear cut goals is the first step to achieving your dreams.