Whenever you achieve something worthwhile you have probably either consciously or sub consciously realised a goal. Goals are useful as they keep you focused on your specific purpose. They can act as reminders, incentives or as steps that can assist you in doing the things you want to do.

The Purpose?
Goal setting is used widely; it is used by top-level athletes, business-people and high achievers in all fields. Goal setting can also be a more formal process for career and personal planning. The process of setting goals and targets for your career allows you to:

• Stay focused on your objective
• Decide what is important for you to achieve in your life and to start, step-by-step, achieving these goals.
• Be in control of where you go in life. By reflecting on and then recording exactly what you want to achieve, you know what you have to concentrate on to do it.
• Separate what is important from what is irrelevant. Goal setting helps you work out what not to concentrate on, what decisions to choose in relation to your goals and it keeps you focused away from distractions.
• Motivate yourself to achievement. It gives you long-term vision and short-term motivation. It focuses your acquisition of knowledge and helps you to organise your resources.
• Track and record your progress and achievements.
• Increase your self-confidence as you develop your level of competence in achieving your goals. This is very important, as self-confidence is critically important during the job searching process and many organisations place a high value on this quality.

How to Begin Setting Goals
You can create goals on several levels. You can create larger scale, overarching goals related to your personal and career wants and needs. You can then create sub-goals and tasks under different areas of the larger goals. You can also create short, medium and long term goals. Once you have stated and recorded your goals, you can break them down into the smaller targets and tasks that will take you towards your long term goals. Once you have a plan, you start working towards achieving it.

Goals should have the following qualities:

1. Specific and Measurable: Set a precise goal, putting in dates, times and amounts so that you can measure achievement. What exactly will you be doing when you achieve your goal? When specifically will you do it? Who else, in particular will be there? If you do this, you will know exactly when you have achieved the goal and can take complete satisfaction from having achieved it.
2. Observable: defined as an action. You should be able to 'take a picture of yourself' doing it and set definable limits so that you know when and whether you have completed the goal or not.
3. Small Steps: A goal can be broken down into small observable steps. Each step should be observable and specific. A series of mini-goals to attempt one-by-one. This helps to clarify the reality you face. (A question you could ask yourself is "what is the smallest goal I can set that would give me some sense of progress and accomplishment?").
4. Important and beneficial to you personally.
5. Focus on the presence rather than the absence of something.
6. A beginning rather than an end.
7. Realistic and Achievable within the context of your life: Keep the low-level goals you are working towards small and achievable. If a goal is too large, then it can seem that you are not making progress towards it. Keeping goals small and incremental gives more opportunities for reward. Derive today's goals from larger ones.
8. Include time lines and target dates. Time lines can provide motivation for you to continue working until the problem is solved. They also place limits on how long you are willing to wait for an active response to your efforts.
9. Prioritised: When you have several goals, give each a priority. This helps you to avoid feeling overwhelmed by too many goals and helps to direct your attention to the most important ones.
10. A challenge: they may be hard work, but are personally worth achieving. Just as it is important not to set goals unrealistically high, do not set them too low. People tend to do this where they are afraid of failure or where they are lazy! You should set goals so that they are slightly out of your immediate grasp, but not so far that there is no hope of achieving them.

Career Goal Setting Plan
The following table provides you with a simple outline of the factors you may want to consider and identify when setting and analysing your goals.

Balance Your Goal Setting
To give a broad, balanced coverage of all important areas in your life, try to set goals in some or all of the following categories: (from www.mindtools.com)

• Artistic: Do you want to achieve any artistic goals? If so, what?
• Attitude: Is any part of your mindset holding you back? Is there any part of the way that you behave that upsets you? If so, set goals to improve or cure the problem.
• Career: What level do you want to reach in your career?
• Education: Is there any knowledge you want to acquire in particular? What information and skills will you need to achieve other goals?
• Family: Do you want to be a parent? If so, how are you going to be a good parent? How do you want to be seen by a partner or by members of your extended family?
• Financial: How much do you want to earn by what stage?
• Physical: Are there any athletic goals you want to achieve, or do you want good health deep into old age? What steps are you going to take to achieve this?
• Pleasure: How do you want to enjoy yourself? - you should ensure that some of your life is for you!
• Public Service: Do you want to make the world a better place by your existence? If so, how?

Links For Goal Setting Resources
Sample goals: www.mygoals.com
Goal setting tips: www.mygoals.com/helpGoalsettingTips.html
20-minute goal setting tutorial: www.about-goal-setting.com

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