Posts Tagged ‘Goal Setting’

Finding your Direction in Life

Monday, May 25th, 2009

Ever find yourself waking up one morning up full of zest and energy to pursue your life’s dreams and then realize six months later that you aren’t even one step closer to any of your goals? If you find yourself in this rut, then maybe it’s because you’ve been caught in a trap, the kind that is difficult to get out of. Where are you headed? You don’t know. Where have your dreams gone? On the back burner.

Most of us don’t know our direction in life. We live with so many dreams inside us but somehow we keep finding ourselves finding excuses to delay the pursuit of our goals. We offer up so many excuses: bills to pay, family to take care of, work to finish, etc. Too many excuses and too many delaying tactics. In the end, when we see that we haven’t accomplished much, we have no one to blame but us. We don’t want to live life this way. But then, who does?

We get off track time and again, as most people do. We get too caught up in life’s little hindrances that we forget to live in the moment, to enjoy the now! The reason for all the confusion may lie on the fact that our dreams are not as well-defined as we would want them to be. The problem here, therefore, is focus. We must have clarity of thought to know how we can accomplish what we want. We need a step-by-step plan that spells out what we have to do to get to the end. When we experience setbacks, we have to know how to deal with each of them. After all, nothing in life is perfect. There are just things that are way beyond our control, and if we live life going a step forward and then two steps back, we go further away from our dreams. The farther we go, the more impossible it will seem to get what we want.

It’s also important to acknowledge the situation we’re in. We all live in different environments and have different methods of coping with reality. The important thing is that we are in touch with the things that happen around us. Knowing how our surroundings affect us will give us clues on what to do with the inevitable limitations set on us. After that, we make a commitment to change the situation we are in and to track our growth on a regular basis.

We can sometimes fall flat on our faces and commit social faux pas along the way. If this happens, just remember it’s not the end of the world. We get up, keep moving, and come up with an even better plan. We don’t need to be super heroes to avoid traps. What we need is an interminable spirit to continue on despite mistakes. We have to be our own biggest supporter, the person who cheers the loudest during game time. Otherwise, who will believe in a person who doubts? Let us start chasing our dreams and stop running away from harsh reality.

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The Road Forward towards Self Actualization

Monday, May 25th, 2009

Moving Forward – Moving Up

When people ask us what we’d do if we only had a week to live, we would give so many answers. Most of these answers would center on making ourselves better as a person. We’ll ask for forgiveness, we’ll travel the world, and so on and so forth. But that’s just as far as it goes. We say all these things that we would want to do and give no thought as to how real the question could be.

Then, we find ourselves waking up one day not knowing where we’re exactly headed in life. Our relationships with others require love and respect. Why can’t we give the same to ourselves? We need to know what we’re worth and what we deserve so that we are more driven to do what we’ve always wanted.

To move up in life, to keep a steady growth, we need to follow a few simple rules:

• We have to set goals that are important to us. By setting a goal, we have something to look forward to, a driving force that will fuel or energize us. We need something to sustain our hunger or else we will find everything we do is futile.

• We need to trust in our own abilities. The notion that the grass is always greener in the other side is much like a death sentence. We shouldn’t compare what we have to what others have. All people are different; each of us unique unto ourselves. Don’t mind those people who constantly criticize us. A positive mind is the ticket to a successful journey.

  • Learn the power of meditation. Keeping our souls healthy can be beneficial to both our minds and bodies. By learning to channel our focus to something, we will be able to see things in a clearer light. A cool head does better in solving problems than a hot one.
  • Send those negative thoughts out the door. Negativity has never gotten anyone further. In fact, these thoughts can be our life’s biggest roadblock. Negative thoughts attract negative outcomes. It’s a vicious cycle that we all need to get out of. We all have the ability to get of this rut, raise ourselves up, and begin our journey.
  • Love ourselves. No one loves a person who doesn’t love himself. We need to learn how to be thankful for what we have and who we are. By knowing what we can do and believing in our abilities, we will always have the strength to drive forward.

By knowing what is good in each of us is not being egotistical. We don’t have to brag about it. The glow in our faces will be proof enough of how happy we are with the cards that life has dealt us with. For us to succeed and move up, we have to life free of regrets. Being proud of who we are will prove to be good for our psyche. As long as we live in harmony with ourselves, we are bound to fulfill our destiny.

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How to Deal with Stress on Busy Days

Monday, May 11th, 2009

Managing Stress on Busy Days

Feeling like a lead weight is on your shoulders is probably a very common feeling. With the busy lives we lead, we can’t help but feel that there aren’t enough hours during the day, as if the 24 hours that were allotted to us weren’t enough to cover all our priorities.

We can all honestly say though that the overwhelming feeling of having too many things to do is, at some point, our own doing.

When it comes to work, you have to ask yourselves if it’s all worth it. If your efforts bring a promise of triumph, then by all means, push yourself forward. Giving up is probably one of the biggest mistakes you can ever make when you strive to win. Every trial surpassed is a step closer to your goal.

Now, if you’ve made up your mind about going forward and overcoming all the hurdles, here are a few helpful tips that will make your mission easier:

1. Focus on what needs to be done – with the amount of work you still have to do, you need to know which elements are your priorities. Lower priority tasks can be rescheduled while you concentrate on the higher priority tasks.

2. Break down your schedule and allot a reasonable amount of time for each of the tasks – this applies more to the smaller tasks. While you cannot let go of and forget about the trivial matters, you only need to give a fraction of the overall time completing the less important chores.

3. Eliminate clutter – if you find yourself working in a chaotic environment, you will soon see that you also become less productive. Clutter distracts your mind, and if you need to clear the space before starting anything, then by all means, do so. In the end, you can concentrate better and finish your work faster.

4. Set goals – without goals, you simply drift through life like a fish that follows the current of the sea. Goals give you the adrenaline that you need to complete what needs to be done. Attaining your objectives will make you happy, and one way to get to this happy place is by working towards it.

5. Focus – make sure that you set up a corner in your house where there are fewer distractions. Don’t give in to temptation and position your work station beside the television. Be strong, be firm, even with yourself.

6. Know when to pamper yourself – spoil yourself and give yourself small rewards. The gratifying portion of your day does not have to be elaborate. In fact, a simple neck message or a cup of herbal tea will do.

7. Ask for help – know that even the heroes in movies needed help at some point. For us normal people, we would most likely need it even more. Seek the advice of friends and know that you can also delegate tasks to the people in your life.

If you continue to stress about everything, your health is bound to fail. It’s not a choice between your job and health. It’s simply a matter of balance, in knowing when to say no and let go. If the amount of work reaches the point wherein your health and relationships are affected, then maybe it’s high time to do sit down and consider rethinking what you’re doing.

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Motivation and Goal Setting

Sunday, May 10th, 2009

Goal Setting – Putting Motivation Into Perspective

If you’ve ever worked in a corporate environment, especially in a management position, you’re no stranger to the concept of establishing goals and their importance to any organization that practices management by objectives.

Even if you’ve never been in a position requiring you to define specific, measurable goals, you may not realize that every single day you’ve done so. Chances are, by not knowing you were actually setting goals, you were able to achieve them with far less analysis than accomplished through formal goal setting.

The difference between achieving formal goals versus informal goals is one of motivation. Quite often with formal goals, we may make progress towards our objective, but not have a clear understanding of the process required – and we often see a decline in our motivation to continue or to continue effectively.

This is perhaps most often seen in group work environments, where one or two members of the group seem to “Get It”, while others just sort of follow along, contributing as asked and simply waiting for others to ensure the goal is achieved at some hazy future point.

Yet as individuals, we are often able to accomplish our own informal goals almost subconsciously. Each and every day of our lives, we plan, act upon and accomplish innumerable short-term goals, while simultaneously working towards longer-term goals, by establishing patterns of activity.

For example, you may get up a 6:00 AM each weekday, shower, dress, have breakfast and drive to your place of employment. Odds are you’ve done these thousands of times without giving it a second thought and yet, you are in fact achieving five goals every morning.

You’re able to do this for several reasons – first of course, you understand the primary goal of getting to work on time each day at the task level. Next, your motivation for doing so no doubt includes the desire to avoid being fired for continued tardiness. Another motivation is simply a need to demonstrate being a reliable member of the organization.

On a longer-term basis, we often plan for and follow through on everything from vacations and holidays to paying off our mortgages and other debts. Here again, we have plenty of motivation to do these things and we do them subconsciously. And yet we often meet or exceed these goals with little or no effort.

What’s most interesting about this is that in our personal lives, we rarely use any elaborate system to track and complete these tasks. No software, no systems and at best might scribble down a reminder not to ourselves and stick it on the fridge.

If you really sit down and think about it, there’s no reason why you could not apply the same approach to your business or work related goals. A task is a task, whether it’s having to meet with a teacher at 2 pm or having to ensure a critical order was placed and is being tracked.

If you can find your motivation for staying on top of things at the office as you do at home, you’ll never again have any serious difficulty meeting your business goals!

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