Monitoring your goals

Most successful people have their goals in writing. No matter what your talents or ambitions, you need clear objectives to guide your actions and stimulate your mind to seek out opportunities and spot dangerous developments.

People are very casual about the essential goal setting component of career success. This article seeks to demystify this crucial process.

Writing down goals

The advantages of writing down career goals include:

crystallising your thoughts;

forcing yourself to make commitments to yourself, your family and employer; seeing obstacles and spotting patterns that will help you achieve your goals putting down timescales which relate to the achievement of these goals;

understanding the risks;

understanding what information you need and from what sources;

ascertaining who you need to rely on;

evaluating what skills you need to acquire;

forcing you to seek out and acquire the skills and techniques needed to achieve your goals having the benchmark against which you can measure your achievements.

The rule is very simple: Unless goals are written down, very much of what follows will remain a vague aspiration. Goals in writing are the foundation on which the edifice of your career will be built. It puts you into the frame of mind to start your career development in a serious way.

Relating your goals

Goals relate to the achievements you are aiming in relation to:

your family;

your personal development;

your social situation;

your job performance;

your financial aspirations;

your health;

your spiritual well-being and your values;

your image;

anything else which is important to you.

What to write down

Under the headings suggested below, or using alternative, more appropriate headings, you must capture your thoughts and then explain to yourself how these ideas and aspirations should develop in terms of:

the timescale during which you wish to achieve these goals;

the strategy necessary to achieve them;

methods of implementing the strategy;

the monitoring of the strategy;

what skills you need to acquire;

what techniques you should employ;

what advice you need;

from where such advice is available;

seeking professional career advice;

how and when to make changes to your plans;

what sort of daily or weekly work records you should keep to be constantly aware of changes in your circumstances affecting your goals;

where you must be in six or 12 months time to be on track to achieve your goals;

how your strategy compares with your current environment and what changes will be required;

what type of company, environment or work would provide you with the best opportunity to achieve your goals.

This is not the full list of headings under which to examine this issue.

You must use these ideas as the basis for self-analysis and add other ideas as time goes on.

Length of time

The initial process of writing out your goals may take a week or a month.

The sooner you start, the sooner your life will take on greater meaning and you will feel more motivated.

Goal setting and goal monitoring are not one-off or short-term activities.

They are ongoing processes. You must prioritise your activities and your time accordingly.

The timescales involved are not specific, but you are advised to work on the following basis to keep up your momentum:

Weeks 1-4: Set out your initial goals under appropriate headings (next week’s article will explain this).

Weekly thereafter: Set a fixed time in your diary in order to review and reflect on how close you are coming to your goals in your short-term plan.

Monthly/quarterly, etc: Have a more formal review (with or without the help of others) so you are constantly comparing your achievements with your expectations and aspirations.

The type of goals

You cannot be selective about goal setting. If you pick only the easy goals or the ones you think are important now, you will miss out on the crucial interaction and connectivity between diverse tasks and events.

This is because when you set yourself the goal of mastering your whole lifetime picture, you will then:

see the relevance of one experience to another;

understand comparative and competing expectations which will take shape;

appreciate patterns formerly ignored or hidden.

The competing expectations and patterns may take different forms. For example:

the type of job you feel is most beneficial to you in career development terms, may require you, eventually, to be away from your family much more than they or you would like, so you have to take that into account;

the job which is intellectually challenging now may not pay well enough, or there may be a limited career path or no job security in the future.

Life without goals

If you do not have goals, then your day-to-day activities will not be measured against anything in particular, and if they are not measured against anything in particular they are likely not to be measured at all.

You will not be able to ascertain, therefore,whether the tasks you undertake, or are allocated, are relevant to your goals and whether the experience gained is valuable for the future.

Key Questions

What commitments have you currently made to setting goals?

Are these goals written down?

Are you aware of what your short and medium-term goals are?

Do you understand precisely what you have to do to achieve these goals?

Are you sharing your goals with anybody, either at your work or in your personal life?

In what form are you going to keep these goal notes in particular?