Career Goal Setting

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Career goal setting is an excellent way to motivate yourself and to ensure you are actively moving your life in a direction of your choice. If you set your goals well, you'll gain a sense of control over your place in the world and have an overriding set of priorities that inform your day to day decisions.

Achieving your objectives can give you a feeling of accomplishment that can inspire you to pursue even more challenging accomplishments. Alternately, when you're struggling to reach a milestone you've set for yourself, if you've framed that ambition as a well defined objective, you will be better prepared to persevere, regroup and rethink your approach until you finally accomplish the task at hand.

Setting Meaningful Goals Happens on a Variety of Levels

Lifetime or long term objectives include things you want to achieve across the span of your life. Then come your medium and short term goals, which are milestones you'd like to reach in the next several years or the next several months. Finally, many people also set daily targets to keep themselves focused and working towards their larger scale objectives.

In addition to spanning a variety of time frames, goals also span a variety of areas in your life. All aspects of your life are interconnected, so when you are setting career objectives, it will be important to consider the things you'd like to achieve in all aspects of your life. That way you'll ensure that your professional goals won't conflict with other values and plans connected with other aspects of your life.

Goals can involve your job, education, family, finances, personal development, physical fitness, community, and hobbies and interests. When you know your major priorities in a variety of areas of your life, you'll be better equipped to set meaningful, achievable goals for yourself.

Also, keep in mind that career goal setting should be somewhat flexible. Don't let yourself abandon an objective just because it's presenting some challenges. However, your values and needs will change across your lifetime, and your goals will need to evolve to reflect those changing priorities.

Career goal setting helps you to organize your time and assess your progress towards any accomplishment. It can challenge you to accomplish things in a set period of time. When you set your targets, you decide what is important in your life, distinguish priorities from distractions and provide a benchmark for recognizing and celebrating achievements.

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