Setting Goals and Establishing Priorities

Several years ago...many years ago now...I was among the unemployed - involuntarily, I might add. However, that's another story for another time. During this period, my travels to interviews took me all over the Northeast. It was fascinating to hear interviewers ask, "What do you want to be doing ten years from now?" Now, you can chalk it up to naiveté, the boldness of youth, inexperience, or just plain stupidity, but my initial reaction - uttered only to myself, of course - was, "How the hell do I know. I just need a job and this one looks good." That was not what I would say. I generally managed to come up with some brilliantly esoteric statement that I was certain would just impress the daylights out of them and which, when I received the rejection letter, made it just as obvious that I hadn't impressed them in the least. Eventually, I learned that they had asked the perfect question. It doesn't have to be "...ten years from now," but you should have some very definite goals set out to guide you down the path to what you consider success. I had been foundering. When I graduated from college, I remained; I'd taken a job there and moved along steadily, finally achieving a position that was comfortable and that I probably would have been willing to spend the rest of my life doing. It offered a fair degree of challenge, but looking back, I now see where it might have become boring and dull at some point, and I would have stagnated. Today, I can honestly state that the best thing that happened to me in my professional career was having a job abolished right out from under me. I urge everyone to get fired...once. It teaches you several things:

If you have set some goals already, congratulations; if you've set lifetime goals, magnificent. If you're a beginner, congratulations are also in order to you because you now realize the importance of goal setting.

What is a goal? There are a ton of definitions for a goal, depending on which "expert" you happened to be speaking to at the time. One definition that I like is that a goal is a burning desire for which you have developed and implemented a plan of action. Goals are anything you can have, anything you can be, or anything that you can do. Put another way: Whatever your mind can conceive and whatever you can bring your mind to believe, then that is what you can achieve.

Goal setting will be covered in much greater detail in the goal setting workshop. For now, let me give you some criteria for a goal:

  1. It is specific: "I am going to lose 30 pounds by such-and-such date."

  2. It is measurable: Come the date you've set, you will either have lost the weight or not.

  3. It is attainable and realistic: These are combined because it isn't attainable if you don't change your diet or make other changes to make it realistic.

  4. It is time lined for measurement of progress.

Now if you wish to turn that into an acronym, you might try taking the first letters of those four criteria...SMART...and that's exactly what goals are.

Once you have established your goals, and by the way, you may have them for many, many parts of your life, not just your job, but once you have set them, they must be prioritized. Which is the most important? No, it is not necessarily making a living and doing it a certain way and achieving a certain income or status. Maybe it's your family; maybe it's your further education; maybe it's any number of things. I can't tell you what's most important; you have to do that. However, remember this: Everything you do should be directed toward the achievement of one of your goals. "That's it?" you ask. "You're trying to regiment my life around goals?" Of course not. In all things that you do, there has to be moderation. What, you think I want to take the fun out of living? Are you nuts?

I know that the average man or woman, working in an office, is interrupted every 7-9 minutes during the working day. That's 40-60 interruptions per day. There is very little that you can do about the majority of those interruptions. Therefore, plan for them; plan that things are going to happen that will take you away from accomplishing your goals and objectives in the time you originally felt it would take. Remember Parkinson's Law: "Work expands to fill the time available." Frankly, I like Murphy's second law better: "Everything takes longer than you expect." The point is that you must recognize that you cannot expend 100% of your effort 100% of the time in the accomplishment of your goals. However, also remember this; it's a hell of a lot better to go into the game with a plan rather than waiting until the fourth quarter to begin thinking about one. I enjoy the quotation, "If you believe you can, you will; if you believe you can't, you won't."

At this stage, let me simply say this about priorities. Determine which of your goals you wish to achieve first. If you've written them all out as SMART goals; if you've studied them for a couple of weeks, you'll know which is which. Later, we'll get into the prioritizing of goals as well as begin to talk about affirmations. For now, you have enough to think about. Good luck

End of Setting Goals section