Smart Goal Setting

Determining your true goals creates the foundation for the rest of your smart goal setting process. As you have many different facets to your life, you're goals probably span many general aspects of your life. For instance, people often set goals for the following popular categories:

Career
Family
Financial
Health
Vacation

Other examples of goal categories are:

Personal Development
Spiritual
community
Social
Relationships

As you determine your focus areas for smart goal setting, laser in on sub-categories of broad categories for better focus and results. For instance, let's say you decide to focus on personal development. This covers an array of subtopics such as leadership skills, interpersonal skills, technical skills, money management, etc... You will be better off if you drill down to your specific focus area. For instance, let's say you want to improve your financial situation. There's income generation, savings, budgeting, reducing debt, investing, etc.... After careful consideration, you determine your best course of action is to reduce debt and control your spending. Can you see how focusing in on subcategories will help keep you focused on goal achievement?

As you prepare to set your goals, rank what area of your life you'd like to work on first. It's important that you do not try to tackle everything as once. If you determine your top five goals and then focus on one goal at a time, exert continuous focus effort, and complete it before moving onto the next goal, you will be surprised how much you are able to accomplish.