Personal goal setting

The following piece of advice could easily change your life.

Take a day off, sit down and write out all the things you want from your life. This should include the following:

• Career goals – positions you would like to achieve; how you would like to develop within your company; where you would like to see yourself in two, three and five years
• Personal goals – write down everything you have ever wanted to achieve – the places that you would like to visit and everything you have always wanted out of life
• Domestic and family goals – what you would like to achieve for your family; what the family would like to do together (e.g. improved relationships, going on holidays, plans for putting children through college)
• Educational goals – your further development; courses you would like to attend; qualifications you would like to attain.
• Material goals – things you want to obtain: e.g. car, house, sporting equipment, clothes, things for the home or the office, new stereo, etc.
• Physical goals – improving your fitness, learning a new sport, attaining a particular weight or measurements, developing a skill (e.g. to be able to run 10 kilometres, lift l00kgs).

Next break each outcome down into things to do – and then do them! This is where most goal setting fails – people write down the outcomes they want to achieve and then find that this is far too big a job to tackle, lose heart and never get started. The next chapter will help you to avoid falling into this trap!

Completing this exercise is a personal achievement and should get you steaming down the right track – now what about your staff? Can you use this exercise as a development tool for your department? How can you persuade them to not only do it, but also to share it with you?

This might take some effort but, even if you can only get them to identify the key areas they are interested in or some of the work related goals, you’ll be on the right track.