How to Set a Goal

It is essential to set a goal for yourself often to become a better version of yourself. It is crucial for your mental health to set a goal or more to keep you motived and give your life more purpose.

All businesses set goals for them to grow and thrive. The same happens for individuals. Goal development allows you to figure out what you want to be and determine how to get there.

Your priority should be your mental health and wellbeing. Therefore, it is essential to set a goal that maintains this. When you decide to set a goal that focuses on your mental health and wellbeing, you open doors for further goal development.

In other words, achieving goals that make you feel good will allow you to aim for goals that improve your lifestyle. Therefore, strengthen your mental health before deciding to set a goal for your career, family, and so on.

Goal development doesn’t have to be anything significant. Goal development is different for each person. However, the best way to set a goal is to develop those that will allow you to create further ones. For example:

• Improving your mental health- journaling, meditation, gratitude, mindfulness, etc.
• Improving your physical health- eating well, drink plenty of water, exercise more often, etc.
• Creating a good support circle- joining groups of like-minded people, etc.

There are three types of goals. These are:

• Outcome goals
• Process goals
• Performance goals

Outcome goals focus on the outcome that you are aiming to achieve. In other words, it tells you nothing about how you are going to achieve your goals, simply what they are. For example, you may be aiming to save over £2000 in six months. That is your end goal, but there is no explanation of how you will get there. Setting a goal like this will allow you to know exactly what you want to achieve as a result.

Process goals are behavioural goals we give ourselves to reach an outcome goal. Therefore, to get the outcome goal of saving over £2000 in six months, we may set ourselves the process goal of putting aside a quarter of our monthly wages. To set a goal based on your behaviours will allow you to change your habits and achieve outcome goals as a result.

Performance goals are the standards we set ourselves the standards for how we will achieve our performance goals. Therefore, to save a quarter of our wages, we may set up a direct debit into a separate bank account and stop buying things that are not necessary.

Something to remember when you are going to set a goal is that it should be SMART. In other words, any goals that you set yourself must be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound.

Goal setting and goal development are great motivators and will help you thrive in whatever you put your mind to. However, the importance of SMART goals is that they allow you to keep focus. As a result, they give you a sense of direction and push you towards achieving them.

When goals are specific, they are easier to accomplish. In other words, we know exactly what the goal is. Furthermore, it is easy to identify whether it has been achieved. Therefore, to achieve success, setting a specific goal means you can work towards it one thing at a time.

An excellent example of a goal for a business is to reduce the sick days of employees due to mental health problems by at least half within one year. Although this goal is based on a business setting, it is easy to set a goal similar to suit your personal needs.

When we measure our goals, it is much easier to see if they have also been achieved. This example will help reduce the sick days by half.

Therefore, the company can strive to get sick days reduced by 50 percent. In addition, then it can evaluate its results according to its aim.

There is no point in setting a goal that isn’t going to be achieved. In other words, unrealistic goals could result in failure. That is not to say that you shouldn’t aim big but aim big within reason. When setting your goals make them stretching.

An attainable goal is to reduce mental health-related sick days by at least half within one year is attainable. However, it takes time and effort. In other words, you can do this if you invest time and money into supporting employee’s mental health and wellbeing and encouraging open communication.

It is crucial for you to set goals that you can control. In other words, make sure that the success or failure depends on your efforts. Therefore, don't set the goal of reducing the mental health-related sick days by one hundred percent. Doing so would mean that nobody is off ill.

However, regardless of what the business does, they can't control circumstances in employees’ personal lives. Therefore, even if a company invests a lot of time and money into their staff’s mental health and wellbeing, they may still have to take time off due to mental health.

Goals must be timed to have the determination and drive to achieve them without spending too long on them. Therefore, if we achieve the goal, we can move on to creating more goals for ourselves.

However, we can evaluate why we didn’t and try again by setting a new time frame. None timed goals can result in little progress.

Written by Amy Bamford