Personal Goal Setting and Running Marathons 

 Jared Winston

  Personal goal setting is a powerful tool you can use to bring yourself success, increasing both your confidence in yourself as well as increased respect from colleagues and family members.

Unfortunately, personal goal setting can be tricky and is often challenging for people who are not used to organized their goals and tracking their achievements. For this reason, I wanted to write a few words on how to successfully set your goals and improve your lives.

Everyone who is serious about personal goal setting should think of life as a marathon: if you never have been in a marathon before, running to win is not only unrealistic, but also very frustrating and disappointing. But if the first time you race you run just to finish the course, then the next time you will be more prepared and will be able to finish in a better position than your initial marathon.

Eventually, if you train and race enough, you will achieve a top ten position in the marathon. This principle applies on personal goal setting too: your first goals should be easy to achieve; the next goals should be a bit harder, and so on.

Eventually, when you have "raced" enough, you will be able to easily achieve your more difficult goals, and of course the rewards will be all that more satisfying. There is no point in setting goals that are too difficult to achieve! If you are not well prepared, then you will very likely fail, and that will be an ugly low blow to your self-confidence.

After all, you can't ask a man to build a house if you don't teach him how to lay down a brick first.

Like at school, successful personal goal setting is a step-by-step learning process where you think about what you did right and about what you did wrong, and thus you get better at doing it day by day. If you have a big, lifetime personal goal, you should "chop it" into smaller goals, easier to achieve, and set a reasonable "deadline" to achieve it. That way, you will get rewards sooner, and your self-esteem and confidence in yourself will grow little by little. 

Besides, if you complete small daily goals you will complete larger goals without even noticing it! Personal goal setting is all about patience and proactiveness. Patience will be useful when walking towards your long term goals one step at a time and proactiveness will help you to take real action for completing your every day goals. Success doesn't happen all of a sudden: it takes planning and, most of all, action and decision.

If you really want to success artistically, improve your career or enhance your lifestyle, then you should start getting serious about your personal goal setting.

Copyright Jared Winston, 2006. All Rights Reserved.

• If this crash course in goal setting wet your appetite then stop by Goals and Motivation and read our extensive free goal setting guide where we discuss everything from setting career goals to relationship goals.

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