Productivity Coach's Corner: Set Your Goals

Goal setting is a simple yet important process. Notice, we do not say simplistic, but it can be easier to set and achieve your goals. Goals are rarely just met; instead, we identify a course and continue to change our intended outcome as we approach the original goal.

Identifying objectives is really about creating and maintaining directed intention. What is most important to you? Where would you like to point your time, focus, and resources this year? Consider the areas of finance, professional development, family relationships, career enhancement, and community involvement. Write down some specific goals from these categories of life. You will identify a future that looks different from today.
Two reasons to develop goals are:

1) Goals engage your creativity; and
2) Goals enhance your awareness.

Creativity: Clearly identify what you want. Let your mind describe the full experience. Write a list, cut out pictures of magazine articles, or print Website pages. Whatever you do, gather the images to visualize progress and celebration of your goals.

Awareness: Once you are committed, your senses are heightened, and you begin to notice new information all around you. Your world seems to respond by providing new information to get closer to that goal.

This has much to do with goal setting. If you have seen everything about a project you are managing, stop and reconsider. Look at the backside; raise your perspective; initiate a new way to focus on that thing; find something you have never seen before and use it to your advantage. "Your automatic creative mechanism is teleological—it operates in terms of goals and end results," said Maxwell Maltz (author of "Psycho Cybernetics").

Then experiment. You do not need to take my word for it. Try it yourself. What would you like to experience over the next year? Write a list of five specific objectives you would like to have achieved in your calendar on the exact date one year from today. Through effective and deliberate goal setting, you can achieve all of this and more. Direct your focus toward something and see what shows up.


Jason W. Womack, MEd, MA, and Jodi Womack, MA, founded their personal development education company, which enhances organizational performance through customized training and coaching. For more Workplace Performance tips, visit www.JasonWomack.com.