Setting Professional or Work Goals

Setting professional or work goals can be a group or individual activity, but they share the same advantage over setting personal goals in that there is usually a framework, related to the activities of your business or profession, around which the goals are decided on.

The flip side of this is of course that there are restrictions on your goals. These restrictions come in the form of having to compromise in order to agree goals if you are in a group situation, budgetry restrictions, logistics restrictions etc etc.

However, setting goals in your professional life is important if you want to achieve. In many instances personal goals can be interwoven with professional goals, and this can have a synergistic effect as long as the goals are compatable.

A good example of how to go about setting professional or work goals can be found at The Marketing Manual .

Although dealing with how to construct and implement a marketing plan for any business, the process that it teaches is equally applicable to goal setting in both a professional and personal context.

Set Your Goals

If you are trying to set your goals for the year/month/project/career/personal development - there is little doubt that you actually want to achieve them. Why else would you bother to set your goals if you weren't intent on reaching them?

But as we have all experienced at some stage in our lives, goals setting and attaining those goals are two very different enterprises.

I believe that this is the case because most of us make a fundamental mistake when we get round to goals setting - especially, but not exclusively, when we are thinking personal development goals.

The fundamental mistake we make is that we set goals in isolation. In other words we neglect all the other parts of our lives that will have to change in order to attain our stated goal. Obviously, this immediately and decisively greatly decreases the likelihood of us reaching our goal.

The trick then is to build our goal setting into a process that enhances our chances of reaching our goals, rather than inhibiting them!

For a more in depth look at how you can greatly improve your chances of actually reaching the goals you set yourself, take a look at this Free Video

Goals setting

Goals setting is one of those fundamental requirements to attaining what you want out of life.

The classic case of collective goals setting is the New Year's Resolution. How many of us haven't made them year after year, and how many of us have actually seen those resolutions through to completion?

Goals setting is, more often than not, like those New Year's Resolutions - more reliant on hope than constructive action.

And as the saying goes - Hope is not a winning strategy!