10 Steps to Create Empowering Goals

Setting goals can enhance the quality of your life. For example, they offer you a sense of purpose, greater happiness, motivation to improve yourself, and more personal pride. Most importantly, goals offer you a pathway to realize the vision that you want for your life. Here are the steps you should follow to create and achieve empowering goals.

1. Start with What Matters Most

The first step to creating empowering goals is to search within yourself for what matters most to you. What makes you happy? In addition to thinking about what makes you happy, you need to assess your personal values. That's because you don't want to create goals that conflict with your personal values and ethics. Otherwise, you won't really be happy. Instead, your goals should align with your values while focusing on your happiness.

2. Visualize the Life You Want

Once you understand your values and what makes you happy, it's time for you to create a vision for your life. Think about your life's meaning and purpose. Then, create visual images of what your ideal life looks like. Once you have a vision in mind, start thinking about the kind of goals it will take for you to realize that vision. Try writing down your vision and the steps it will take to achieve it.

3. Focus on Specifics

If you want to set empowering goals that will help you realize your life's vision, they need to be specific. For example, when you think of a goal, ask yourself why you want/need to accomplish it. If the goal sounds vague - or you can't really see how it helps you achieve your vision - then you need to think of a different one. The more specific a goal is, the more likely you will be able to achieve it.

4. Get Measurable Results

Goals should be timely and include tangible, measurable results so that you will know whether you have achieved them. If you don't have a way to measure your goal, how will you know whether you have achieved it? For instance, let's say that you are unhappy with your weight. Instead of just saying that you want to lose weight, you should say that you want to lose 40 pounds in four months. That way you can track the progress of your weight loss goal over the course of the four months to make sure you are on track to lose 40 pounds.

5. Know-How to Attain Your Goals

You should also know how you will attain your goals. For example, if you want to find a better-paying job, you might have to go back to school to gain additional skills and training. Therefore, you would need to know the skills needed for your desired job, as well as the school and program where you can acquire those skills.

6. Set Realistic Goals

You have likely heard the expression, "If you are going to dream, dream big." While it's fine to have big goals, they do need to be realistic. It won't do you any good to set an unrealistic goal that you have no way of actually achieving. For instance, if you are a 50-year-old with some health problems, you probably aren't going to be able to climb Mount Kilimanjaro in the next year. However, you can likely set a smaller goal of getting more exercise by taking a walk every day.

7. Plan Your Goals Strategically

Empowering goals requires strategic planning if you are serious about achieving them. For instance, if you create a goal without a clear plan of action, you won't be as likely to achieve it. Therefore, when you create a goal, you need to think out all the steps needed to make it a reality. You will also need to prioritize the time it takes to reach your goals. If you are bad about procrastinating, you need to stop that bad habit! If there are other habits in your life that stand in the way of your goals, you need to eliminate them as well.

8. Adopt New Habits

Just as you should get rid of bad habits in your life, you should adopt new habits that can help you achieve your goals. For example, let's say that you are going back to school to acquire training for a new career. You will need to adopt good study habits to successfully complete the program and be prepared for your new career. Also, achieving goals takes a lot of energy. Therefore, you need to adopt healthy habits like eating right and getting plenty of sleep each night.

9. Plan Each Day

It doesn't matter whether you set short-term or long-term goals, there's something that you can find to do every day to help you work toward achieving them. Therefore, you should plan each day with your goals in mind while focusing on making the most of your time. Think back to your vision and the steps needed to make it a reality. Then, break those steps down further into daily tasks. Once you have your daily tasks, allocate the time needed to work on them.

10. Embrace Positive Thinking

Finally, while empowering goals is very rewarding, they are often very challenging as well. You don't want to let setbacks discourage you from achieving them. Therefore, you need to learn to engage in positive thinking - even when you encounter negative events. Spending time focusing on negative things you can't change will only make you waste precious time that could be spent on achieving your goals. You can maintain a positive mindset by imagining your goals, as well as thinking about what it will be like to achieve them.

In short, you can't create empowering goals without first understanding yourself and what matters most to you. Then, you need to think about your ideal life - and the goals needed to make it a reality. Your goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, and realistic. You will need to create a strategic plan. You will also need to adopt new habits that can help you reach your goals. Make sure you plan each day wisely. Lastly, you can keep yourself from getting discouraged and giving up by embracing positive thinking.