As the new year begins, most of us feel that we need to make changes, want to improve something about our life, make new plans, do new things and leave old habits behind. Most people start off with great intentions and yet only very few get successful in achieving their goals. Before we know the year goes by and we come to realise that most of our goals are still left unaccomplished. In other words, we remain goal setters instead of becoming goal accomplishers.
Ever wonder why we get successful only in achieving relatively a small percentage of the goals we have set out to achieve? The reasons can be many, but the key to whether we go on to become goal-accomplishers or remain goal-setters depends mostly on our willingness to improve ourselves. Having some personal growth or self-improvement goals can be a powerful force in accomplishing your resolutions and long-term goals this year.
If you want to make real changes in your life, you need more than temporary inspiration and desire. To continue to stay focused, you need to possess certain individual skills, habits and traits. Your personal strengths and weaknesses also affect in achieving your professional goals and objectives. In other words, the degree to which you are successful in accomplishing your goals is directly related to the degree in which you excel in and balance certain areas or principles of your life. Also working on yourself can prevent self sabotaging patterns of thoughts and behaviours thereby making you more effective, efficient and more determined in achieving your priorities.
Why are personal growth goals important
We pay a high value on learning only up to a point. However, many of us stop actively seeking to learn, grow different areas of our lives when we grow up and move into workforce. We get used to the daily grind of work or feel so overwhelmed with all of the responsibilities and engagements that we forget the importance of learning or improving on personal front. The result is that we hesitate to push ourselves beyond limits, create new possibilities and to become better at what we do.
Often we focus on professional growth as it tends to focus on tangible performance related goals. However, personal and professional goals always go hand in hand. The fact is that your professional success and development just doesn’t depend on your subject/domain skills and knowledge, but it also is a result of what you are as a person. It’s great about being passionate and dream about something. But if your personal traits and attitudes do not match with your goals, you remain incongruent.
Things like how you perceive yourself, your decision-making, how you communicate and engage with others, envision your future and your possibilities, they all impact your abilities to get things done professionally. So, if you are to pursue your long to short term goals, you’ve got to look at how it is that your individual traits, attitudes or behaviours are contributing to achieving them. And whether the areas you are operating are actually going to enable you to persevere.
Benefits of personal growth
- Successful goal-accomplishers are actually the ones that make time for their personal development and growth. In order to be a goal accomplisher, to get the outcomes you desire, or to become an agent of change for your own life, it is important to craft some personal growth or self improvement goals.
- Personal development and self improvement goals are an important part of both understanding yourself and pushing yourself to reach your highest potential.
- How are you ever going to know whether you are investing your time wisely into endeavours that are going to help you move forward in life or whether you are just being busy. They improve your output in workplace, greater efficiency and increase your productivity.
- It helps you become better person on the whole, developing your strengths and also working on your weaknesses in a different ways, allowing you to grow, evolve, and become the best possible version of yourself.
- People who choose to invest their time and energy into personal growth find that their strongest attributes actually become stronger. In the process, they would also improve on their weaker areas.
- Setting new areas of improvement, you explore new opportunities from professional perspective and from a personal point of view. Focusing on improving your personal attributes help you build new work or personal relationships, discover new passions, new skills to branch out into other fields of work, engage with others to work deeply, and so on.
- Since It involves working on new habits, learning new skills, and practising new strategies to achieve your goals, it also results in your professional growth.
- Personal growth goals enable you to manage your inner and outer expectations to make well -informed decisions.
Goals that can help you become a goal-accomplisher
At the root of personal growth is becoming aware of your thoughts and how they are affecting your emotions, behaviours, habits and outcomes. Setting personal growth goals can mean a lot of things. While there are many ways you might implement personal growth goals into your professional development, to start with here are few areas to focus on to improve. Operating from these areas, you can find that things you constantly struggled with, energy levels, work/life balance, motivation all naturally fall into place.
Core values
No matter what your goals are, when it comes to accomplishing them, we always operate from what we are or from our values. Values are the foundation of our life. They are what we believe in and determine most of our choices. Since your values influence your goals-personal, professional, business, or organisational, it is important to know what your core values are.
Despite their importance, many simply adopt the values of their parents, or the dominant values of society. But this might lead to value conflicts, and might not take you down a path that you would want to achieve your goals. By truly understanding what your values are, you can be more congruent in your efforts to achieve your goals.
Here are some questions to ask. What values am I presently living in accordance with? Does my personal or professional goals reflect my values? Am I spending my time on things that matter to me most? Do my values bring me happiness? What values can lead me to my desired goals in areas of personal/career/work/ or business in coming days? For each goal, ask yourself whether it aligns with your personal value. If not, why are you doing it? Focus on goals that do help you live in accordance to your values.
Responsibility
Approaching your goals with an attitude of excuse rather than responsibility keeps you in self-destructive cycle of victimhood. People who operate from this mindset generally buy into ideas such as ‘I am a victim’, ‘I am entitled to things’ or wait for perfect circumstances. Not taking responsibility for the choices you make keeps you in a state of powerlessness relative to yourself and your life. You get successful only to the degree that you assume responsibility. This means that you should be willing to be honest, work hard and take risks to ensure that you achieve the goals you desire.
If you want to be in control of your life experiences, and view your future events in positive light and in terms of seeking and creating opportunities, you should develop personal responsibility for your choices, decisions, actions , habits and behaviours. Ask yourself, What are the responsibilities must I live by? How personally responsible am I in my goal-seeking endeavours? Do I hold myself accountable for my mistakes, actions or failures? What changes can I initiate today to become more personally responsible coming year? Be accountable, know your priorities and acknowledge your failures and mistakes.
Read more : How to take personal responsibility
Possibilities
We often get so caught up in a day that we lose our zest of life. We forget to create new ideas, dream of new possibilities or forget to think of what we could do or become. Growing your own talents to build confidence is an important goal. Your talents can help you grow in your career, negotiate a raise or a promotion, contribute better to organisational goals,and be seen as a leader. Not having enough confidence in your potential limits your options, prevents you from seeing the possibilities that exist for you to grow and improve.
By identifying what you can grow in and offer that is in line with your dreams, you can begin to hone what is or isn’t an opportunity for you. Asking yourself, What am I good at and What talents can I improve? How is my career in the arena of possibility? Which areas of my life can i improve to create more opportunities to move forward with my goals or dreams? What are the possibilities for me to grow, improve and challenge my status quo? How can I increase the possibilities of accomplishing them coming year?
Emotional intelligence
When it comes to achieving success, whether it’s at the work, or in developing leadership skills, or pursuing your goals, your emotional intelligence is the key. Since emotional intelligence includes understanding the needs, emotions and perspectives of those around you, you can better manage working relationships with colleagues, negotiate, influence or deal with people and conflicts effectively. Also, it helps in developing better self-control, dedication and cultivating perseverance.
It helps you understand how your emotions your actions or limit you from achieving your goals. Making emotional intelligence as one of your personal growth goal for future helps you improve your ability to manage, control and adapt your emotional responses in a way that allows you to accomplish a task or reach a goal.
Ask yourself, How well do I understand my emotional responses and those of others? Am I willing to accept my negative emotions or imperfections? What are my emotional triggers? How do I react when someone doesn’t measure up to my expectations? What are my emotional strengths and weaknesses? Self observation improves self-awareness which is the building block of your emotional intelligence.
You can better harness your emotions to motivate yourself and others to take action, commit and turn your intention into action and achieve your personal and professional goals.
Perseverance
Usually when we start something new, we have motivation and inspiration, but after encountering difficulties and obstacles or if things take too much time change, we begin to lose our enthusiasm. It is often difficult to leave our comfort zone or to do things differently or do things you have e never done before. This is why perseverance is an important personal growth goal to develop to up your determination and to achieve future success.
The most successful are not the ones with most achievements, but are the ones who take risks, persevere through challenges with a will to achieve. Recognise all of the hard work that will be involved in achieving your goals. Then assess the risks and challenges in achieving some of your goals.
Here are some questions to ask yourself: What are the obstacles I will face? How will I overcome those obstacles? What other skills do I need to overcome this possibility? What kind of risks are worth taking in pursuing my goals? Which comfort zone is preventing me from taking risks? What kind of attitudes do I need to persevere through challenges? What will things be if I overcome these possible challenges?
Focusing on these questions will help you prepare for the times when you need perseverance and inner fortitude. Preparing yourself equips you to know whether or not an opportunity is right for you. And you will be able to make an informed decision about your future based on your talents, confidence and knowledge.
Vision
You can have the most grandiose set of goals. But if you are not clear on why you want to achieve them in the first place and why you want to be there, then you find it quite difficult to hold yourself accountable and remain motivated in the pursuit of your goals. If you are not clear on how your goals are going to help you to fulfil your core values or meet your priorities, you are not going to remain motivated. Your vision of achieving these goals improves your motivation. Vision backed up with action will help you achieve your goal.
If you have a vision, then this can become your reason to stick to the process of your goal-pursuit. Assess your performance and your desires to classify your goals and use these goals or areas of improvement to create a clear vision. Makes your goals, specific, measurable, actionable, realistic and time-bound. This helps you carve out required resources.
Ask yourself, What really drives my goal-seeking endeavours ? What larger perspective do my goals serve? Why do I want to achieve my long and medium term goals? What does my goals mean to me? It invokes the right intention and unites your strengths with the goals you have in your mind.
To reflect,
So, what are some of your personal growth goals that you could set for yourself this new year?
How consistent are you in keeping up with your resolutions?
Are you clear of your priority goals that you eventually want to accomplish?
What is that one concept, idea or vision that can make you stick to the process of goal-pursuit?
Which areas of your life can you work on improving to create more opportunities/possibilities?
In what way are you committed to the process of improving yourself?
How congruent are your long-term goals with your values, strengths, attitudes or behaviours?
How can you assume more responsibility for the goals you seek to achieve?
To conclude,
Beginning of a year is a perfect time to reflect, introspect and reset some of your personal growth goals. You can make these areas of improvement as your new objectives to improve your skills, strengthen your abilities or become more effective in your personal or professional endeavours. Focusing on them creates space for more opportunities to be successful in bringing some of your priority goals to fruition.
If you are to move forward in reaching your goals, positively and effectively, you must never settle for what you have. Your effort should be to reach for more significant outcomes than what you’ve currently achieved. And the process of personal growth helps you in doing so. Only when you make a conscious effort in becoming more virtuous, stronger and more responsible that you can go on to achieve your full potential and accomplish what you set out to do.
The swiftest way to triple your success is to double your investment in personal improvement
Robin Sharma
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