Start Using SMART Goals
Goal setting is serious business. Improving the quality of your life is a serious business. Effectuating positive change in your new NOW day-to-day existence is serious business. So, when you set a goal, don’t take it lightly! That is old NOW behavior and you don’t want it creeping back into your Mental Plane.
When you have an ambition, treat it with respect. When you decide to make changes in your daily life, do it with a new NOW attitude that will get things done.
One of the ways to ensure that you’re setting behavior-based goals is by using the “SMART” system. SMART goals are goals that have been vetted to exclude wishes, hopes, and daydreams from the process of change. They don’t depend on fate or a chance to make them happen. Quite the contrary. They rely on discipline and hard work as fuel to move them forward.
SMART is an acronym that stands for goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound. SMART! These are the qualities that define behavior-based goals.
SMART goals are not concerned with what you plan on doing tomorrow. Instead, SMART goals focus on the here and NOW. A smart goal is always asking “What are you doing today, right NOW, to get the result that you decided you wanted?”
The answer to that question can be difficult, but only if you’re paying lip service to your personal goals. If you have a definite idea of where you want to be in a week, month, or even a year, then behavior-based goal setting can help you get there. SMART goals enable you to keep your promises to your true self.
In the next section, we’re going to look at the individual elements that make up a SMART goal. We’re also going to take a look at the difference between personal behavior and results and how using SMART behavior-based goals can get you to where you want to go in no time flat…like, right NOW!
Takeaways for This Section
- Reaching your goals requires more than simply setting an endpoint;
- Behavior-based goal setting is about doing the things that need to be done, on a daily basis, that keep you moving forward in your new NOW, creating the endpoints that you have chosen NOW;
- In order to understand behavior-based goals, you first have to understand the reason for setting goals in the first place;
- One reason you set goals and make plans is that you are aware of change in the world around you;
- All the changes that you experience are, from your perspective, due to the passage of time;
- Understand that, as a human being, you have a finite amount of time available to use;
- Like everything, you will break down and be broken down in the end;
- The process of entropy guarantees this result;
- Therefore, while you set goals and make plans because you are aware that the clocks of your life are ticking, all you really have to work with is living in the NOW today;
- Behavior-based goal setting recognizes this fact;
- Behavior-based goals are not about dreaming and wishing, they are about doing the work that needs to be done in order to submit;
- One of the ways to ensure that you’re setting behavior-based goals is by using the SMART system.
- My book “Small Choices Create Smart Change: Your Success Handbook for Living in the NOW” is all about using SMART goals to keep your promise to your true self to never miss another moment of your extraordinarily amazing gift of life.