Goals are the road map to your success. Many people have excellent intentions about writing goals, especially as it pertains to their profession or career. However, too often those goals or desires are expressed in nebulous terms that are not specific, measurable or definable. This lack of definition leads to frustration with the inability to achieve these goals.
For instance, they may establish goals such as, \”achieve career success\” or \”be a successful business person\”. While these individuals understand how important goals are, as a roadmap to get you from where you are and where you want to be, their goals are so unstructured that they are unable to define daily activities to achieve that desired end result.
Setting goals helps people to strive towards something and keep them on track when they use these goals to avoid temptation. We all want our lives to be exciting and challenging. Unfortunately, some individuals see setting professional goals as a chance to be boring without the opportunity to inject excitement into their lives. This is simply not the case. Goals actually help an individual to experience more excitement and challenge in their journey throughout their career and into retirement.
One of the more important goals to determine is the career or professional course of action you want to take during your working life. You must evaluate your talents and desires which can be compared against others who are successful in their careers. For instance, some career counseling centers offer the opportunity to take an interest test which then matches your interests and talents against those individuals who are successful in their careers. In other words the counselor can tell you if your interests are similar or opposed to those who are police officers, nurses, doctors, certified public accounts or chief financial officers.
The next step is to produce a road map that leads you into your chosen career path. Sometimes that means taking a more menial job than you would otherwise enjoy while taking night classes to finish a necessary degree. But whatever the cost it is, the professional goals will help the individual to define the cost and weigh it against the ultimate benefit.
By outlining a course of action and defining daily or monthly activities to achieve those goals, professionals and career oriented people are able to improve their financial status, increase their likelihood of promotion and achieve the goals they desire before retirement.
One method of defining smart goals, or those which are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely, is to ascertain the method by which your particular company or organization defines success. For instance, an individual who works for a large corporation would be able to speak with their immediate supervisor about the criteria you used in their annual evaluations. It is often these evaluations which are consulted prior to any promotion.
Some organizations place a higher value on individuals who are self-directed while others would rather an individual have a greater depth of knowledge and understanding about the particular position which they hold. Almost all corporations want individuals who are highly productive and those who are considered for promotion often exhibit professional leadership and the ability to engage others. Depending upon the organization it may also be important for employees to have community building skills or is the ability to communicate the organizational mission and project within the community.
All too often we enter the corporate world or our chosen profession with a very nebulous idea of our direction or where we intend to end up close to retirement. In many cases this is an entirely human way of feeling. It is all too easy to ignore the difficult questions about retirement or the unsettling feeling that the life we are leading today will someday come to an end and we will be the ones at the retirement party or collecting Social Security.
However difficult it may be, it is more difficult to live through a future which you ignored when you still had the ability to make changes. To that end every individual who enters the workforce should spend a few moments each and every year determining whether or not they are achieving the success they desire. It is important to identify a roadmap which will take you through your professional years and allow you to enjoy retirement in style.