Life goals make you to keep moving forward with a clear direction.

“Life is too short to be living somebody else's dream.”

─ Hugh Hefner

What is the role of goals in our daily life? How important is the impact of goal setting on our future? And, how to properly set goals in your life? These are just a few questions which will be answered in the current article. As you remember, we have talked about finding our life values and hope in previous articles. I would strongly recommend you to take a look at those articles before reading this one. If you’ve already read those articles, you would probably feel how closely related are the subjects of life values, hope and goals.

Let’s take a brief look at the gist of those articles here. In the article about life values, we understood that our values are deeply rooted beliefs and life stories that we have subconsciously created in our minds. And, our closeness or distance to that story defines the level of our happiness in life. If you’re far away from your desired life values, you’ll be sad or depressed. And if you’re very close to your life values or at least moving toward them, you’ll reach an internal level of happiness and satisfaction.

In the other article about hope, we talked about the significance of having hope in our lives. There, we discussed that having hope for a better future is the essence of life for everybody. It’s in the nature of human beings to always want more and hope for something in the future. Without having progress and hope for a better future, your soul will be decayed.

So, now it’s time to talk about our life goals and show their importance in our lives. We would also talk about the relevancy of goal setting to the subjects of life values and hope. If I want to define goal setting in just one sentence, I would say a life goal makes you keep moving forward and gives you a clear direction throughout your daily life. Assuming that you have recognized your life values to know what you really want in life, then you have to set your life goals to move toward your desired life story. For example, if health is one of your top life values, then you could easily set your goals based on that value. Let’s say you’re overweight and would like to lose some weight or you eat too much meat & junk foods and would like to have a healthier diet. Then, the only things you need are just a pen and a piece of paper. Write down your goals on a piece of paper or on your computer (Do it how you’re comfortable with). Now, you know what you really want, you know what is your outcome and you set your goals for that outcome with a time-frame. Depending on your outcome, your time-frame could be anywhere from 1 day to 10 years. Make a detailed clear plan for achieving your goals and pick up different strategies to arm you with solutions when facing difficulties and failures. Of course the way to set goals depends on you, and it could be done highly different for people. For instance, you could set daily goals for yourself to give you clear daily directions. On the other hand, you could also set long-term goals which give you a detailed map down the road for coming years. After setting goals, it's time to be prepared for making decisions, taking actions and being as flexible as possible along the way. As we have already discussed about decision making and personal flexibility in previous articles, we skip those subject here. 

The most critical part about setting goals is that it could easily be influenced by your external environment. So, you have to be very careful when setting your goals. Try to set your goals based on your internal beliefs and desired life story (the things you really want in life), not based on the external influences and distractions you get from your circumstances.

As mentioned before, setting goals in life gives you a clear direction and purpose to move forward. The important part is to not just wander around with having blinded superficial goals in opposite directions which won’t make you satisfy in the end. It is highly likely for some people to accomplish something (a goal) and to be unsatisfied with the achievement. That could be clear signal that your goal was not assigned based on your internal belief system and life values. Instead, it might have been some superficial thing that you thought you liked to achieve just because you saw it in the other people’s life. Of course a little bit of dissatisfaction feeling after achieving a goal is reasonable, since ambition and wanting more is in the nature of human beings. No matter you’re poor or rich, no matter you fulfilled a goal of earning 100$ or 100,000$ you may still want more. Never forget that no matter which level of life you’re in, you have to have something to look for in the future.

As the last words you should realize that goal setting is a vital step in a person’s life. Notice that goal setting (either short-term or long-term goals) based on your life values gives you a clear direction and it provides you with the energy to keep moving forward.