Reviewing Your Goals

In previous articles I have spoken about the importance of setting goals and targets to get things done and now I am going to talk about another vitally important way to improve your results: a monthly goal review session. Setting goals is definitely a habit you should start to develop if you want to improve your results in any activity. A goal gives you a definite target to work towards and helps focus all your mental effort on achieving a task. The ability to master goals setting is absolutely vital to improving your success in any venture.

We are all creatures of habit and once we have set our goals and targets it’s important that we take time to review our progress every week or so to see how we are doing and assess how far away we are from achieving our targets. It is easy to get really motivated and excited by the initial stage of setting a goal and then to lose focus on your target as time goes by. This is something that happens to most people when they start using goals to help them improve their lives. To avoid this happening, the best thing you can do is to review your written goals each month. This step of reviewing our goals is an important one because it keeps us focused on what really matters, achieving the results we want. Without a structured review then you will find yourself losing sight of the objectives you originally set out to achieve and find that you have drifted far away from the direction you set out in.

A good review session shouldn’t take much more than an hour or so but in that time you should consider what actions you have taken to reaching your goal, how effective they have been and also if you need to change your plan to achieve better results. You should ideally review your goals every one to two weeks. Part of the process of achieving any goal is to make mistakes and then correct them. We need to continually change our thinking and not get boxed in to working on a method that is not producing the desired results.

You could sum up the formula for achieving goals and success in any endeavor like this:

Take action - analyze - discover mistakes - correct mistakes - take a new action

The idea is that you repeat this cycle over and over until you eventually find a path that leads to the achievement of your desired goal or target. People do not usually achieve their goals without making a few mistakes along the way and this is perfectly normal and acceptable. Do not assume that if you do not achieve your results first time that you should give up. A normal part of the road to achievement in any field is to continually make adjustments to your initial plan and correct and mistakes you make. If you do not make any mistakes then you won’t have anything to learn from. Always think of failure as the feedback you need to succeed. Eventually you will have learned enough from your mistakes to find the correct course of action for achieving your goals. The key is to be analytical and persistent in your pursuit of success.

In our review sessions we should ask ourselves some fundamental questions about our progress to date. What have we done to achieve our goal? How well is it working? What can we do to improve our results? Be honest with yourself and if something is not working then find a way to fix it. Gather all the feedback you can and apply what you learn to setting a new path for the achievement of your goal.

Taking the time to have a weekly goals review session will help you reinforce you goals and give you more motivation to achieve your targets. Always analyze your progress and think about ways in which you can improve your performance. The more honest and accurate your goal review sessions are, the more quickly you will achieve the results you desire.

I will leave you with one of my favorite quotes on setting goals.

“A dream is just a dream. A goal is a dream with a plan and a deadline.”