We hear so much about goal setting and the importance of having a personal vision for yourself but why? Why are these practices so powerful and what does an optimised way of approaching them look like? 

To start its important to define the terms as they can be quite misunderstood. Your vision is your destination, its what some might see as long term goals. It’s what you want for yourself, what kind of life you want to have and who you want to enjoy that life with. What you want to do and how you want to be remembered. It’s something that evolves as we do and develops overtime. Our life experiences and the lessons we learn along the way bring shape to our vision and help us refine it. The clearer it is, the more guiding it is to how we show up in the world and where we want to go. 

Goals are the necessary stepping stones or building blocks that take us closer to our visions realisation. They go hand in hand, the clearer our vision is, the more obvious our goals are and with each goal’s completion, it brings greater clarity to our vision and what our next goals should be. 

The key to successful goal setting is in the scale of your goals and the time frame that’s given for completion. Oftentimes goals are too big and set over too long a period of time. In these cases goals become more burdensome than complimenting and all the more challenging to achieve which can knock confidence and slow progress. Goals instead should be focused within a short time frame, ideally no more than two weeks. This keeps them relevant to your vision and all the more achievable which compliments your confidence and helps move you forward in a more aligned fashion. 

A way to approach this is to set aside an hour every two weeks to work on your vision and set the complimenting goals to get you there. Over this hour you take the time to think about your vision, the life you want to live and how you want to be remembered. You give yourself the space to really think about it, what it looks like and feels like. The clearer your vision is, the more achievable it becomes and the easier it is to set complimenting goals to get you there. 

Your goals don’t need to be big, instead they’re small, achievable actions and tasks that will take you a step closer to the realisation of your vision within two weeks ahead. This set duration helps to keep your goals focused, achievable and aligned with your vision. This is impotant, sometime people in this can go a bit mad. 

In the two weeks that follow, you take action and get stuck in to the goals that you’ve set for yourself. In working on them, you’ll either achieve them or you won’t but most importantly you’ll learn some valuable lessons along the way. These learnings bring greater clarity to your vision and the necessary steps to get you there. You then use these at your next allocated time to review and refine both your vision and goals for going forward. 

As this process repeats itself over and over, the learnings and accomplishments add up and accelerate you on your path. They bring with them a clarity in terms of who you are and want to be, focus towards where you’re going and a mass of productivity along the way. Its the kind of practice that if you do it properly for a month, you’ll never stop.