Goal Setting

Mental Health Training

I want to talk a little about goal setting and goal achievement, which quite truthfully is probably the most overdone topic in any genre in the world.

Everybody has done a goal-setting exercise at some point, whether it was in high school or in college or university or their first job.

I realize that we've all done it, but the truth of the matter is very few people, in the grand scheme of things in this world, anywhere on the globe, very few people have goals written down.

What that tells me is that very few people actually know what they want.

Why is that? Why do so few people know what they want? I believe it's because a lot of us are programmed, from a pretty early age, to not acknowledge that we can have what we want.

Instead, we're told what we should be doing and what we shouldn't be doing, and we should follow this path to be successful. You should do this to make sure that you have enough money when you grow up to do whatever it is you need to do.

They never actually think, "Well, is that really what I want? What if I want to spend my life travelling the world?"

A lot of times, somebody that says that will just get laughed at or mocked, that that's not a realistic thing to want.

But here's the thing. You can want anything you want, but it's up to you to create it.

A lot of people, and maybe this is you, the very first thing you need to do when it comes to goal setting is have an acknowledgement with yourself that there are things that I want me to don't have right now.

It could be some pretty big things that you're looking at like I'm at a job that I hate. I don't want to be here. What I want is to do X.

By coming to that realization, the next step is to translate that into something you can control, which is where goal setting comes into place.

Acknowledging that it's okay to have wants, then defining what those wants are. Next, turning that into a goal.

So, "I don't want to work here. I want to travel the world. Let's set a goal that 12 months from now, I'm not going to be in this job. I'm going to be travelling at that point."

How do you make that become a reality? That's when the real work kicks in, the goal achievement.

Setting the goal is really the easy part. It's the fun part. Figuring out the rest is much, much harder to do.

But that's where your real test of character comes in.

Goal achievement can't happen without goal setting. But goal achievement also can't happen without commitment. So that's the big equator in this whole thing.

The level of commitment you have to making your goals become a reality.