Goal Setting 
Goal setting is a very powerful tool for all areas of your life. Goal setting gives you long-term vision and short-term motivation.
Goal-setting helps you:
- Achieve more.
- Improve performance.
- Increase your motivation to achieve.
- Increase your pride and satisfaction in your achievements.
- Improve your self-confidence.
Research (Damon Burton, 1983) has shown that people who use goal-setting effectively:
- Suffer less from stress and anxiety.
- Concentrate better.
- Show more self-confidence.
- Perform better.
- Are happier and more satisfied.
Goal Setting Helps Self-Confidence
By setting goals, and measuring their achievement, you are able to see what you have done and what you can do. Achieving goals gives you the confidence to strive for higher and more difficult goals.
Setting Goals Effectively
Remembering that goals should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Action-oriented, Realistic, and Time-oriented), and following the below guidelines should help:
- Use positive statements: 'Study More' is a much better goal than 'Don't Slack Off'.
- Be precise: include dates, times and amounts so that achievement can be measured.
- Set priorities: this helps you to avoid feeling overwhelmed by too many goals, and helps to direct your attention to the most important ones.
- Write goals down to avoid confusion and give them more force.
- Create small sub-goals: if a goal is too large, it can seem that you are not making progress towards it. Keeping sub-goals small and incremental gives more opportunities for reward.
- Set performance, not outcome goals: take care to set goals over which you have as much control as possible - goals based on outcomes are extremely vulnerable to failure because of things beyond your control (bad weather, injury, or just plain bad luck). If goals are based on personal performance, skills or knowledge, you can keep control over the achievement of your goals and draw satisfaction from them.
- Set Goals at the Right Level:
- slightly out of your immediate grasp, but not so far that there is no hope of achieving them.
- account for personal factors such as tiredness, other commitments and the need for rest, etc.
Goals may be set unrealistically high for the following reasons:
- Other people: parents, friends, society.. can set unrealistic goals for you or pressure you to do so.
- Insufficient information: If you do not have a clear understanding of what you are trying to achieve and/or of the skills and knowledge required, goals may be unrealistic.
- Expecting your best performance: It is better to set goals that raise your average performance and make it more consistent.
- Lack of respect for self: If you do not respect your right to rest, relaxation and pleasure in life then you risk burnout.
Goals may be set unrealistically low because of:
- Fear of failure: as you see the achievement of goals, your self- confidence should increase, helping you to take bigger risks. Know that failure is a positive thing: it shows you areas where you can improve your skills and performance.
- Taking it too easy: if you're not prepared to stretch yourself and work hard, then you are extremely unlikely to achieve anything of any real worth.
Achieving Goals
Take the time to enjoy the satisfaction of having achieved your goal! Reward yourself! Absorb the implications of the goal achievement, and observe the progress you have made towards other goals.
Success Feedback:
- If the goal was easily achieved, make your next goals harder.
- If the goal took a long time to achieve, alter your timeframes.
- If you learned something that would lead you to change goals still outstanding, do so.
Failure Feedback:
Ensure that you learn the lessons of the failure...
- Maybe you didn't try hard enough - examine the reason for this.
- Maybe your technique, skills or knowledge were faulty and need to be enhanced.
- Maybe the goal was unrealistic.
Feedback turns everything into a learning experience. Trying something, even if it does not work, often opens doors that would otherwise have remained closed.