Goal Setting Alternatives

It never fails to amaze me how popular our goal setting articles have become. In fact it is the fifth most popular page on ayecasher.com. This tells us in no uncertain terms that self achievement is high on your priority list. If it is congratulations because you are one of the people destined for success.

In this article we are going to look at whether there is a one size fits all formula for personal goal setting because we have received so many contacts from genuine people claiming that traditional goal setting methods just do not work for them. So let’s take a look at conventional thinking on this subject:

The most common system used is to first set an outcome – what you want to achieve in the long term – then set 10 or 12 achievable goals that will take you to your outcome. This thinking is most commonly set by personal life trainers and sports coaches and is so frequently espoused that we can be forgiven for thinking this is the only method available. Your emails have told us that this is not so and we have taken another long hard look goal setting over the past three months and have come to the following conclusions:

- If the traditional system isn’t working for you then forget about it. It obviously doesn’t work for everybody and there is nothing wrong with being different.

- It is unjustifiable to rigidly follow a system that fails to produce the desired results. It may simply indicate that you require a shorter term of focus rather than the accepted outcome and goals.

- One of the people we have discussed this with claims that she is incapable of focusing on short term goals after she has set her long term outcome. Julie is one of many that this must apply to. She requires a different focus system.

- Another told us that he set an outcome of being a millionaire in five years and his first goal was to make $1,000 in one month trading currencies online. When after losing money trading currencies he just dropped everything because his one million dollar outcome was just too far away to appear realistic in his mind. (Note: I wonder how many of us have experienced this type of setback – I know I have.)

There is enough here to fill this article and dozens more on the same subject so we’ll use the above cases and suggest a different way to go about goal setting.

In the case of Julie we suggested that her mind maybe didn’t focus best on long term outcomes and she may benefit from having a very loose outcome set for a shorter period. Something like: “One year from today I want my life to be better than it is at the moment.”

The setting a goal like: “I am going to drop all of my grievances with people in my life and either remake the friendship or drop it forever.”

The reason we suggested this to Julie was because she seemed to be hooked up on things that had happened in her past that she couldn’t change under any circumstances. We knew, even if she didn’t, that there is no way forward while you have things in your mind that anchor you to the past.

Julie is already indicating that she is becoming a happier person.

John’s case is different to Julie because John started by deciding that he could buy some piece of magic software that would teach him how to be a success trading currencies. He hadn’t even taken a few years to learn what he could about currency trading before deciding that he could succeed at it. When he made around $400 from his first trade he fell into the trap of thinking that his trade selection software truly was a magic tool. His next 8 trades failed and he ran out of capital, this destroyed his self confidence because he still felt the software worked for everybody and the failure was down to him.

Today he looks at it realistically and accepts that if he lost eight consecutive trades then so too did many thousands of others using the same software. Let’s be honest and accept that world currency markets have not been subject to traditional forces during the past two years (2008 and 2009). Some countries have been committing financial suicide for the past 10 years and eventually the price had to be paid.

So what did we suggest to John?

We found that John was a walking almanac on all things sport; he had studied various sports for as long as he could remember. We suggested he start a website about sport and aimed to sell sporting goods and memorabilia to other sports minded people. He is a few months into that project now and last month achieved almost $800 income from the website. He knows he will hit the $1,000 this month and go on to much greater levels. He also knows that smart goal setting using the traditionally accepted system of setting an outcome and a series of goals to achieve it does work for him. But more importantly he understands that it can only work if you apply it to something you understand. Hopefully this will prove to be a turning point in his success.

To understand traditional Goal Setting follow this link to one of our earlier outcomes and goals articles.

For something different you may like to take a look at our product reviews section - it is growing weekly.