How To Set Goals!

How does one set effective goals? Firstly, do not confuse desires and wishes with your goals. A lot of times people want some accomplishment or situation and thing and name it as a goal. Once they do not get these, they are often disappointed. Just penning down your desires is not a part of setting goals. Goals that are perfectly put together have one or all the following aspects:

 

1. Good goals are specific. Goals like being healthy are too generic. It is better to have a specific goal like you decide to walk 3 times weekly in order to lose weight. 

 

2. They're realistic. It’s not that something is impossible; it is just that when you set unrealistic goals, it will lead to failure. 

 

3. They're written down. Written down goals are more real and it helps to influence your mind subconsciously, and will have a greater impact if you review these on a regular basis. 

 

4. They're measurable. Make a goal of how many pounds you plan on losing? Put a figure to the amount of money you want to make. Keep a picture of that perfect relationship you want to have.

 

5. They're motivating. Set a goal for the correct reason and give it a good start. Goals that are good excite you when you think about and visualize the benefits to accomplishing them. One must also learn skills for re-motivating and rewarding oneself when any progress is made. 

 

6. Good goals become plans. Take any goal and make specific steps to achieve it.

 

7. They have specific deadlines. Give yourself an end date. Set a target and stick to it. 

 

8. Good goals consider personal factors. You can never succeed if you think you do not deserve it. You need to set goals that teach you personal development along the way to achieving them and personal development a part of the major goal you want to achieve.

 

9. They're followed by action. The best way to motivation is to start with some movement to reach the goal. Slow and steady wins the race. So start slow and then progress. 

 

10. They're not written in stone. Every goal evolves naturally. You need to become more practical when setting your goals, make sure you keep your likes and dislikes in mind. Be what you wish to be and do what you want to do.

 

Ways to Develop Self-Discipline

1. Take consistent little steps:

 

The steps to bringing discipline to one’s life are similar to growing up in life; both require consistent small steps. One cannot achieve success in being disciplined overnight. A lot of people try this overnight method and fail miserably and out of frustration return back to their undisciplined life. It takes time to develop discipline and one needs to be determined. You could begin this with the smallest thing possible like exercising for 15 minutes everyday or getting up 10 minutes prior to the time you do now. It could be reducing the number of cigarettes you smoke in a day, even if it is reducing the number by one every week. It would eventually mean having a single smoke a day and then no smoke at all. The basic rule is to take smaller steps and try reaching your goal. 

 

2. Try not to procrastinate:

 

It is a good idea to place things on a list and then decide on taking action on achieving these immediately. Try to set a deadline and promise yourself to stick to the plan of action till you achieve the goal. Try to avoid procrastination. Procrastination makes the path to discipline take longer. Once you are successful with little goals, it strengthens inner resolve; helps set more goals and helps in achieving them. 

 

3. Every day changes: 

 

It is a good idea to start with smaller things to move towards discipline. It can be as small as waking up at 5am to do your study or waking up 15 minutes earlier than usual to perform some exercise. Every day must be taken into account; if a day is skipped the discipline level falls and it will weaken your determination to achieve the goals you have set. 

 

4. Visualize your final achievement:

 

Take time to sit and visualize how it would look the goals are achieved and remember it will only be possible if you take these smaller daily steps. If you know what it would take to achieve a particular thing make an outline and take actions to immediately set out to achieve these things. The visualization process helps you to focus and maintain the goal even if you get distracted with other things. 

 

5. Get someone to coach you: 

 

If you could get someone to record your progress, it would definitely help. It could be a professional or a friend. Having a coach has a lot of positives; firstly, for example, you’d be less likely to procrastinate. 

 

Positive Psychology - Finding the Right Path

Giving a boost to and improving your emotional intelligence is similar to trying to improve one’s physical condition with the help of practice and exercise. There are exercises that help to train you and help you manage your emotions better and have more control over them. Practice is a must; it is very rare that you can expect to achieve success or be good at it immediately. 

 

It is practically impossible that you walk on to a tennis court for the first time and you win a game especially if you have never played the sport. One can never achieve great results in cognitive restructuring, mindfulness and meditation if one has not practiced them before. Controlling one’s emotions is not an easy task to achieve. However, the exercises could be practiced anywhere; it is possible even when you are sitting in a chair at your dentist’s clinic or during waiting in a line at the grocery store. 

 

The first step to getting a grip on one’s emotions is to start developing a complete positive psychology towards life. For a lot of years, researchers ended up spending resources and energy to find solutions to problems and solving abnormal aspects in people. Today, the difference is that it has switched to developing and finding individual strengths. This is a major shift in the psychology field and it usually helps in understanding, focusing and awareness of human strengths. Hence, it helps everyone to consider one’s own life and helps in gaining new perspective to his or her own identity. It is always a good idea to concentrate on your positives and not worry about your weaknesses, as those are areas where you are vulnerable. When you allot more time to your positives and try and completely exploit those areas it is easier to apply them in your job and also in your personal life. 

 

It is of utmost importance that you focus on the things you are really good at and you channel your energies and all efforts in that area. This forms the basis of the basic principle in positive psychology. Once you positively believe that you have a hidden form of talent to manifest and cultivate is when your talent, skill and passion begins to increase. There is nothing more rewarding than doing something you are good at. Once you begin to walk on a path that you believe is the correct one, a powerful positive emotion is activated. 

 

How and Why to Use Positive Affirmations as a Stress Management Tool

The best tool one can use to reprogram one’s unconscious mind and change it from being negative to positive thinking is positive affirmations. The basic concept to positive affirmations is using positive statements and repeating the same for enough time to let them get into your system. You then see the world from that angle; this works as strongly as negative self-talk works. If you want to make up a set of personal positive affirmations, make sure you use the guidelines that follow: 

 

Look At Your Intentions: Firstly, be clear on what is that you want to create in life. You must know the end product in order to realize the traits, attitudes and behaviors that would help you to reach the final destination. Do you want to be a supportive friend? Do you need more peace in life? Do you want to have a healthier lifestyle? It is a good idea to begin writing a journal in order to brainstorm and figure what is important for you and get to the core of what is needed to create that in life. 

 

Create Statements: Once you know what you are aiming for put it into simple words that help to reflect the reality of the goal you have set out to achieve. Frame these sentences like they were already true, not like they are going to happen. For instance, “I am” instead of “I want”. This helps you to tune your brain to believe the statement and it will help them to manifest into reality. 

 

Be Sure They’re Positive: When you are making positive affirmations, make sure they are positive. In other words, you must say things you want to experience and see and not the things you DON’T want to. For instance, instead of words such as “I don’t” one must use “I will”. 

 

If you like the idea for affirmations that are designed to reduce the stress in your life use ones that suggest peaceful thoughts, fostering a strong sense of efficiency, feeling safe. You can use the game of ‘Affirmation Hangman’ or use your own techniques in order to deal with stress. 

 

Once you to deal with negative thoughts in life you can achieve the goal you set out to achieve. 

 

What Is Personality?

It is a daily process to assess and describe the behavior of individuals around us. Although many times we do not understand this we on a daily basis discuss and predict the behavior of various individuals around us. This is nothing but very much what psychologists who deal with behaviors do. The difference being that when we assess personality informally it tends to focus more towards the individual and the psychologists, instead, tend to use rules to devise analysis of the given individuals’ personality. When personalities are researched various theories are developed that help to explain why and how certain traits in personalities develop.

 

Components of Personality

 

There are various theories for various personalities and different ways to understand what exactly one means by the word personality. A short introduction can be in simple words described as; personality comprises of characteristic patterns, that of feelings, behaviors and thoughts that make any person different from another. Personality generally arises from the deep core of any individual and more or less remains constant through the journey of life. 

 

There are a few fundamental characteristics traits that differentiate one from the other: 

 

Consistency – Behaviors are usually recognizable due to their regularity and order. Any given individual might act similarly in a given situation repeatedly.

 

Physiological and psychological – It is true that personality is a byproduct of psychological changes but a lot of research also says that biological factors could also influence the making of a personality. 

 

Impact actions and behaviors – It is not just the movement and response of an individual to the environment that is influenced but the certain way an individual acts. 

 

Theories of Personality

 

A variety of theories are derived till date on how a personality is developed. All of these theories belong to different schools of thought and have come from various psychological theories. The major ones include:

 

Type theory is the oldest perspective. This one concludes that very limited types of personalities are due to biological influences.

 

The trait theory views personality to be the end result of characteristics that are genetic and internal in nature. 

 

The behavioral theory concludes that it is the result of the reaction between the environment and the individual. These theorists usually get their conclusions after analyzing measurable and observable behaviors. 

 

The humanist theory emphasizes the individual experience and free will that result in the development of any personality. 

 

Personal Growth Means Understanding

 

The most important lesson an individual must learn who is aiming at personal growth is a simple one; that no one particular formula will define one’s path to success. Each one of us has a different priority and goal. That implies that individuals must have different attitudes and activities that make them achieve that feel good factor. We at the same time also have weaknesses and strengths that come to us naturally as a package deal with our personality. 

 

Understand What's Important to You

 

Every kind of personality has a unique idea of what success means to them. Personal success can be achieved if the goal is self-knowledge. A lot of times individuals adopt somebody else’s definition of success and are striving to achieve it; in the process they are unable to detect what truly is important to them. Although there is no harm in having influencers and role-models in one’s life, it is of high importance that one must recognize and understand that the idea of that particular person or belief and an individual belief will have a difference in perspective. It is highly possible that an individual feels unhappy and exhausted when trying to achieve the definition of success someone else defined for him and ignores the message from their own psyche. The major step when trying to achieve personal success is to realize what is really important to oneself.

 

For example, are you an ISTJ (introversion, sensing, thinking, judgment) personality type? You will react differently than other personality types. 

 

The individuals who fall into the ISTJ type of personality are hardworking, analytical, methodical and serious. These individuals store the gained knowledge from past experience and then apply this to handle new problems and manifest new ideas. They work on a given problem till they find a given conclusion. 

 

They get uncomfortable if the idea is unknown to them completely and prefer theoretical solutions. When they have a new situation to deal with, they have no past experience to refer to and hence they feel lost. ISTJs usually make great managers and are very capable in their jobs. They are many times reluctant to bring in changes or new systems unless they have a past record that it would work. They value and internalize the structure and rules of the environment they reside in and do not approve of any behavior against the code of conduct. They believe in using their past experience to benefit the institution they belong to. 

 

So, you can see that you really need to find what is important to you and not go by some other persons view as it may not match yours. 

 

Individual Hypnosis

What a lot of individuals state is that many things may be accomplished by targeting the mind over matter. You might be able to see what individual hypnosis may do for you.

 

There are indeed many Advantages to individual hypnosis, particularly when an individual is determined to see matters to the very end or dedicated to do things that he believes he can, then the possibilities are perpetual.

 

Even when someone trusts that he may achieve what other people, or occasionally even he himself, would find hard, he may actually do it if he just puts his mind into it.

 

Individual hypnosis is a positive reinforcement of mental conditioning and positive idea paths. While it might be simple to state that positive thinking may produce many great results, still the idea of injecting the mind to believe that way might not be as simple as you think, particularly when we're at our witting state, particularly when weighing the pros and cons of every one of our actions.

 

However, with hypnosis, the brain may be convinced to do such things and work marvels when it comes to our positive mental training processes.

 

Here are a few of the areas where hypnosis may do wonders for the mind particularly with behavioral approaches and the positive mental conditioning procedure.

 

With hypnosis, even with self-suggestion, we may heighten our sense of concentration. This is especially helpful when we want to train our minds to center on what is truly important for us and separate out other trivial thoughts.

 

The concentration facet has been discovered to be specifically helpful for those who wish to improve social and people skills, communicating skills, memory and comprehension, creative thinking, centering and much more.

 

One’s personal mind-set may also be bettered dramatically through hypnosis, particularly for those who want to improve their personal welfare for the enhancement of their vocations, professional and personal relationships, and focusing toward accomplishing goals.

 

A different advantage of hypnosis is the life-changing capacity in helping individuals overcome their dreads. By hypnosis, those dreads may be accessed and modified, utilizing hypnosis processes that may eliminate irrational thoughts and dreads.

 

Taking away negative thoughts in the human mind is out and away the greatest breakthrough that forged the practice of hypnosis and brings about a great glimpse of what individual hypnosis may accomplish for you.

 

Personal Development Plan

So now you have finally made the decision to make changes in yourself completely and begin to alter life as a whole. When something deep within you stirs your spirit. That peculiar inner gnawing you feel that urges you to make a change in order to better the position of yourself in life increases to a point that you make a decision to take some action! You are completely ready with a list of things you need to change and have a plan on how you’d like to change these. Hold on! Are these thoughts properly organized? Have you made a note of the smaller steps that would lead you to eventually achieve that desired goal? 

 

You need to get in place, what in the commercial world is known as PDP, Personal Development Plan in order to get a blueprint on how to make changes and reach the desired goal. Get out a sheet of paper and first put down all your desires. Make sure you think carefully and note down all the changes you can think about. Once this is done get another piece of paper and write the following headings:

 

·       Personal Growth/Personal Development

·       Finances/Career

·       Home Life/Relationships 

·       Health

 

Below every heading list at least five desires from the first list you made and set them in priority. These would become your goals. 

 

Below is the example of goals a person working in a busy office might have: 

Personal Growth/Personal Development

1. Trying my best to stay calm in a stressful situation.

2. Gaining extra experience working with IT. 

3. Improving recall memory ability.
4. Learning to photo read or speed-read.
5. Boosting my own self-esteem. 

It’s necessary that every goal is not just realistic but also challenging in nature. Also necessary is that you set a time deadline for its achievement. Now get another sheet of paper and think and jot down techniques you could use to achieve the set goals in the calculated time frame. You will be pleasantly surprised at the amount of information that your brain can actually put onto that paper. 

 

Once you have a list of ways written, pick out the best ones. Now make a ‘to-do’ list for everyday for every separate day of the week. Make sure you include the smallest step on this list that it will take in achieving the goals you are setting. Make sure when you complete these small steps; you congratulate yourself and also measure your own progress at the end of the day. 

 

Achieving Success Through Career Coaches

No matter at what level presently you are in the career you have chosen; or maybe by default you have landed in that particular career; it is always worth it to consider the training and advice of a career coach. This would surely help you in reaching the next level and achieve success. 

 

Generally, career coaches would be referred to at only critical times. More often than not critical situations can be avoided by using a career coach. This as well forms a part of any ongoing program for personal development. In a lot of fields, preparedness and planning are a must have during critical times. 

 

It makes the progression of any career smooth if there is a regular use of a career coach. They help not only in finding a way to success not just in the current career but also if one is planning a career change soon. A professional coach could also guide you on the right path if you want your career to progress on a particular path keeping in mind ambitions like retiring early. 

 

The major area where a professional coach would make a difference is when you are trying to get a promotion. They can help with development and training, thus improving your conditions and pay. If the career coach you approach is experienced enough, they would help in more than one area and they may also encourage and advice by drawing on the experience he has had in his past from his clients. 

 

If the career coach is well trained professionally, he would bring long-term benefits that would be more than what you expect for the fee. Hence, investing in a professional career coach can be advisable. As well an experienced coach would help you to draw a chart of your weaknesses and strengths while helping you to focus on the main aspects you would need to achieve success. 

 

A few consultants, if noticing some potential in you, would advise you of career paths you haven’t even thought of considering such as starting a small business or trying consultation rather than a regular job. 

 

Before you select your career coach, it is advisable that you look around and make sure to compare qualifications, course charges, training and experience.

 

Budgeting – The Elemental Financial Management Tool

A carpenter utilizes a set of home plans to construct a house. If he didn’t the bath may get overlooked altogether. Rocket engineers would never start construction on a fresh takeoff booster without a detailed set of design specs. All the same most of us go blindly out into the world without a glimmering of an idea about finances and with no plan at all.

 

Not really smart of us, is it? 

 

A money plan is known as a budget and it's essential to get us to our desired financial goals.

 

Without a plan we'll drift without direction and wind up isolated on a remote financial reef. 

 

If you've a spouse or a domestic partner, you ought to make this budget collectively. Sit down and work out what your joint financial goals are…long-run and short-run.

 

Then design your route to progress to those goals. Each journey starts with one step and the opening move to accomplishing your goals is to make a truthful budget that both of you are able to live with.

 

A budget ought to never be a financial famishment diet. That won’t work for the long run. Arrive at reasonable allotments for food, apparel, shelter, utilities and insurance and earmark a reasonable amount for entertainment and the occasional luxury items. Savings ought to forever come first before any outlay.

 

Even a little amount saved will help you accomplish your long-run and short-run financial goals. You are able to discover many budget forms on the net. Simply utilize any search engine you decide and type in “free budget forms”.

 

You’ll acquire lots of hits. Print one out and work with it with your spouse or domestic partner. Both of you'll need to be happy with the outcome and feel like it’s something you are able to stick with.