The Importance of Goal Setting Chicago IL

Goal setting is an important and highly essential part of the career planning process. For one, it allows you to remain focused and keep your sights set on the things that you want to achieve. Secondly, but just as important, it enables you to begin to establish a plan to work toward something meaningful. The SMART acronym is well known and will help you develop a guideline as part of establishing a plan of action to achieve your goal.

Specific

When you define a specific goal, it is laid out before you to help you understand what you want to achieve. From there, you can begin to develop your plan of action. A critical part of goal setting is writing down what your focus is. Unless you write it down, you will likely forget and move on to something else. Writing things down makes them real and allows you to focus your efforts on taking the necessary steps to achieve success.

Measureable

Measuring your progress is important to allow you to track your growth. Therefore, you should define a set of criteria that will enable you to evaluate your success. Consider setting milestones that will allow you to review your progress at different points to realize how far you have come. This will keep you motivated and interested in the process; and it will allow you to keep setting new benchmarks.

Attainable

It is important that you set goals that are realistic. You want to be challenged but need to understand the scope of your capabilities to attain success. This does not mean that you should lower your expectations. Set your sights on a goal that will engage you and allow you to explore things out of your comfort zone. Your sense of achievement after reaching your goal will be that much more rewarding.

Rewarding

Sometimes it’s hard to maintain a strong motivation level. When you are really working hard to achieve something, the process can be slow. This can hamper your desire to forge ahead. Consider what you are working toward and give yourself mini-rewards as you go. This will help keep you focused and committed to seeing the process through to the ultimate reward and success at the end of your journey.

Timely

I know in the past I have covered information relating to setting timelines for things and how to avoid procrastinating. Setting timelines will allow you to keep pace and avoid putting things aside to pick up ‘at a later time’. Keep your focus on what you want to achieve, keep notes, and plan accordingly so that you meet your goal. It will truly be gratifying to see the final and successful results of your efforts.

Debra Wheatman, CPRW, CPCC is the founder and Chief Career Strategist of ResumesDoneWrite, a premier career services provider focused on developing highly personalized career roadmaps for senior leaders and executives across all verticals and industries. Debra can be reached at:

DWheatman@ResumesDoneWrite.com
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