How to set Next Year’s Goals

Have you set any goals recently? If you haven’t, then you’re not going to get anywhere –remember the Cheshire cat from Alice in Wonderland? Alice met the cat at a fork in the road and asked it which road she should take. The cat asked her where she wanted to go (her goal) and she said that she didn’t know. So the cat told her that any road would do.

It’s the same for us. If we don’t know where we want to go (no goal) then we can take any road, because there is no difference between one road and another.

But knowing WHAT you want to achieve (your goal) is only 1 part of getting there. You also need to decide on the action to take to achieve your goal. Knowing that the right hand fork leads to your idea of bliss won’t help if you sit down and never move.

You also need to set a timescale. “Sometime” is the same as never – it will remain a dream. A goal with action and a timescale is an objective.

SO WHAT ACTION ARE YOU GOING TO TAKE. AND BY WHEN?

Example

I want to brush up my foreign language skills for a holiday at the end of January. I have some CDs with lessons. My GOAL is to brush up my language skills by the end of January. The ACTION I need to take, is to listen to those CDs. And there is no point listening to them in one session the night before I travel. I need to set a timescale. I have 30 lessons and I know lessons 1 – 10 fairly well, so I just need to brush up on those. I could decide to listen to those lessons by the end of December. After that, I have a further 20 lessons to cover and 3 weeks to do it. That’s basically 1 lesson a day. Each lesson is only 15 minutes, so that’s very achievable. My action then, is to listen to lessons 1 – 10 by the end of December and then do 1 lesson a day for the next 20 days.

I have set  a GOAL and the ACTIONS and a TIMESCALE (which is achievable). So I have my OBJECTIVE – to listen to 30 lessons in the next 4 weeks. That will help me achieve my goal of brushing up my language skills by the end of January.