Why Is Goal Setting Important For Self Improvement and Motivation?

Why is goal setting important for self improvement and motivation? In the course of a given day, many things compete for our attention. We easily get distracted, our energy scatters. If we aren't careful, if we aren't proactive in solidifying our intentions for the future, we can easily spend our days riding the waves of inertia and putting out fires.

Yet, where are we in this picture? How long will it be before we start to wonder where all of our passion and motivation has gone? Setting smart goals can help us reconnect with who we are and where we want to go.

Why Is Goal Setting Important:

Focus

The benefits of goal setting are many, yet perhaps the number one gift of effective goal setting is focus. Goals keep us focused on what we have determined is important to us. This clarity helps us from becoming overwhelmed and paralyzed by all of the things that seem to constantly be coming our way.

Imagine spilling a bucket of water on the floor. What happens? Not much. The water and it's energies - scatter. What happens when you use a hose? The water then comes out with tremendous force. This is the power of focus. What a hose does for water, smart goal setting can do for our finite energies and resources.

Why Is Goal Setting Important:

Self-Discipline

Self-discipline never sounds like much fun, yet it's one of the keys to getting all of the fun things that we want. Effective goal setting creates the perfect environment for us to exercise and strengthen the muscles of self discipline.

Giving ourselves a clear and specific goal to achieve sets us up for a challenge. It puts some pressure on us and asks us to mobilize our talents and capabilities to serve our intention. Without a goal to strive for, we are easily controlled by the whims of the mind. With a goal to achieve, our mind becomes 'gainfully employed' and we can harness it to our aid.

Why Is Goal Setting Important:

Declutter

Like the sheers used to prune a tree, smart goals can help us prune the non-essentials from our life. Without clear goals to help remind us of our priorities, non-essentials quite easily take up the whole of our time. Then we wake up one morning and wonder what has become of our life.

Periodically reviewing our goals helps us decide what should stay and what should go. Taking this inventory can be applied to all aspects of one's life: our habits, beliefs, repetitive thought patterns, and relationships. Taking stock in this way helps ensure ongoing personal growth, self improvement and motivation.

Why Is Goal Setting Important:

Clarity

An important aspect of writing smart goals is that they force us to think and get clear about what we want. We look for the right words to express our goals, and when we find them, we are rewarded with a surge of positive energy and motivation.

Through this process we learn what truly excites and motivates us, and by doing so we establish a clear connection with our subconscious mind. A vague or confused goal statement reflects vague and confused thinking - which will set the scene for vague and confused results.

Why Is Goal Setting Important:

Letting Go

"Nothing contributes so much to tranquility of mind as a steady purpose - a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye."

~Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Novelist)

I wish there was a goal setting study or research that measured the amount of tension and anxiety that comes with 'not knowing'. On second thought all we need to do is take a close look at ourselves and our own lives to know the answer.

When we don't know where we are headed, when our path is foggy and unclear, when we don't have a purpose to rally our energies around - we feel lost and insecure. We feel tense and anxious. We find it hard to relax because we feel there is nothing to 'contain' us. We can't let go.

This is when smart goal setting can help. Any smart goal will do. Once the 'intellectual eye' has been given something to focus on, we can finally let go, relax and move.

Why Is Goal Setting Important:

Self-Awareness

Setting out to achieve our goals brings us face-to-face with ourselves. We discover strengths we may never have known we had. We also come up against some of our worst weaknesses, and be called upon to fully accept them, or to work on leaving them behind.

Achieving our goals may require learning new skills, 'seeing' with new eyes, contending with mind habits that threaten to hold us back, and facing our fears. With each goal - either set and achieved or failed and lost - we learn something about ourselves. We learn about who we are and what we really want. We become more self aware.

Pursuing our goals, we may discover that what we thought we wanted, isn't really what we wanted at all. Great! We no longer have to ponder, procrastinate, or try to anticipate the future. We can put hesitation aside and simply choose to move in a different direction. Going after our goals can help us find out sooner, rather than later, what it is that we really want and what it is that we're really good at.

Why Is Goal Setting Important:

Fresh Thinking

When we aim for something new in life - something we have never done or lived before - then chances are good that a shift in thinking will be required. The process of writing smart goals, itself, can be seen as an exercise in new thinking that aims to eliminate self sabotage or unhelpful subconscious thought patterns. For example...

"It's May first and I'm stepping on the scale. The dial shows 120 pounds", sounds a lot different than, "I hope that by May first I will be able to weigh 120 pounds. It's just that...". The defeatist thinking betrayed in the words of the second statement must be left behind. There are other goal setting mistakes to avoid when writing smart goals.

Goal setting that stretches our comfort zones sets us up for a challenge. We either let go of our old ways and grow into the achievement we want; or we give up on our goals instead. Setting smart goals is a powerful method to get us to think clearly about what we want and to solidify our intentions.

Related out-of-the-mind self improvement and motivation articles:

SMART Benefits Of Goal Setting

Goal Setting & The Subconscious

Overcome Fear With Goal Setting