Though commonly misunderstood and undermined, goal-setting is an important aspect of your personal development process. Certainly, there is no endpoint to personal development, as there is always more to learn from, throughout your entire life.
One thing for sure, goals never end, you will always find yourself setting new ones as your life changes and shifts with age.
Setting higher goals, as you grow, that will help you improve as a person is a must. Now you may be asking yourself, “How do I even set a goal? I have no idea what I want from life”.
Though this answer is so simple many overlook the answer because they are looking outward rather than inward for the answer. These goals should concern your character development, integrity, and authenticity.
5 Personal Development Goals
These are the five most important traits you should set a goal to work on throughout your personal development journey.
Discipline
In today’s world, people look for motivation when they have to do something that requires a bit more effort. This motivation mostly depends on external factors, thus making it unreliable and unsustainable.
Instead of motivation, you should center your goals around developing better discipline.
This will help you to power through unpleasant tasks and things that you do not like doing that are part of your work. There is always that part of the job that is less shiny than the rest. For example, as a business owner, you may have to do the toilet scrubbing after total strangers use the bathrooms all day before you can afford to hire a janitorial company to take care of it for you.
It is one of those jobs that you may grit your teeth through, but you will not find a person who is prouder of a sparkling clean, and great smelling bathroom than a business owner who is presenting it to the public.
Focus
Everyone knows that overwhelming feeling when you have too much to do and instead of taking time to hammer out a plan you start multi-tasking, bringing yourself to burnout and anxiety quickly.
If you set the goal of improving your focus and attention span, these things will happen less often. As an end result, you will easily accomplish what once seemed impossible by focusing on small pieces of the whole and accomplishing a little at a time.
Creativity
We tend to live in an environment where logical thinking is required therefore less creative time is available. Set a goal for spending more time with your creative brain, whether that means brainstorming ideas, or creating art.
Using your creative muscle often will help to keep fresh ideas flowing and allow you to see more solutions than you do problems.
Positive Thinking
You may have laughed and joked about Will Smith’s lengthy speeches about the “power of positive thinking”. However, Will is on to something.
It all starts with human nature, the brain was literally designed to look for the worst possible outcome, in order to mentally prepare for whatever comes its way. This is known as living in survival mode, fight or flight mode, and a number of other phrases that have been used for this mentality.
Such a survival mechanism, however, isn’t really applicable in the modern-day world, where you have access to multiple solutions to any problem. Going out of the front door each day does not create a scenario in which you may have to fight a tiger, lion, or bear to death.
Set a goal to catch your overactive brain in those moments and come up with the best possible outcome that can happen if you take positive actions.
Decisiveness
All of us have probably missed a massive opportunity at one point or another, because of indecisiveness. Set a goal to develop the way you recognize and act upon opportunities that life presents you.
You must be equally as proactive in recognizing what isn’t going to work for you and doesn’t serve you well and being ready and willing to reject these things. No is a powerful word and it should be used with intention.
Decisiveness is a key trait you should aim to develop on your personal development journey.
Conclusion
When engaging in your own personal development, you should try and look for things in yourself, which you can improve. Set a goal to observe yourself, your reactions, behaviors and try to make a conscious change. Also, look out for patterns that follow you both internally and externally.
Do you keep attracting the “same persona” in different people who don’t know each other? Do you feel like you keep repeating the same cycles with people, places, and things? This would suggest that you are doing something that is creating the same outcomes.
Remember that goal-setting and achieving are always for your greater good!
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