Goals and Outcomes

Identifying specific goals or targets to aim for and monitoring your progress towards them can be instrumental in helping you to achieve important life changes.

The goals that you set yourself should be related to the personal outcomes, i.e. specific personal benefits, that you want to achieve and they should be goals that you can sustain.  For example, if the outcome you want is to achieve fulfilment in your personal life or in your career, then setting yourself the target of earning a large sum of money may not give you that outcome even if you are lucky enough to reach it.  

If the outcome you are hoping for it to feel better about yourself, going on a crash diet may give you a short term feeling of well-being if successful, but if you then are unable to sustain the weight loss your self esteem is likely to fall again unless you are able to find other ways of building up your self confidence.

For further suggestions about goals please see refer to my article about goals and outcomes in coaching - Please note that the article is primarily written for coaches but it may also be of interest or use to people thinking of having coaching or setting goals for themselves.

SMART Goals

Generally it is said that goals should be "SMART" to be effective. The letters in SMART can be used to stand for different things, all of which are important, including:

If your end goal is something that seems very distant from where you are now, you may want to set yourself interim targets to achieve, along the way to reaching it. You should also set yourself specific actions to carry out that you think will help you towards your next target.