jump to navigation

Personal growth: Achieving broad goals via specifics June 25, 2014

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal growth, Goal Setting and Realization.
Tags: , , , ,
add a comment

One of the traps we can fall into in self-improvement is in setting too many vague and overly broad goals without also establishing specific goals (within our general goals) that can be broken down into smaller tasks or projects.

Examples of vague goals:

Improve my knowledge of current affairs
Increase my understanding of personal development principles
Doing a better job of organizing my time
Establishing more quality time with my family

These are admirable objectives, but if not augmented with specific goals and sub-tasks, they can be a frustrating exercise and remain merely good intentions.

Wide/broad goals need to be (1) subdivided into specifics, (2) then quantified and (3) then be incorporated into a timetable.

For improving our knowledge of current affairs, for example, the sub-goal could be to read (on- or off-line) authoritative, quality newspapers, blogs, and magazines.

Then quantify by choosing a specific number you will read, and which ones.

Finally timetable this by establishing the time of day, week, or month that we will do this plus the amount of time we will devote to this activity.

We need to periodically remind ourselves that taking a systematic and specific-actions approach to our broad goals will result in less frustration and more actual achievement in our self-improvement efforts.

Our overarching goal is to better ourselves; but this can’t happen without an action plan.

Personal growth: Thinking, planning, taking action June 11, 2014

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal growth, Goal Setting and Realization.
Tags: , , , , ,
add a comment

In our self-improvement work, there can be a temptation, or more accurately, a tendency, to do a lot of thinking, somewhat less planning, and even less actual action on our overall objective of improving various aspects of our lives.

We enjoy taking in information and advice about personal growth and, in our minds, we plan or envisage what our lives would be like once we implement our “program.”

Envisaging outcomes can be emotionally fulfilling and gratifying, and because of the enjoyment we get from this early stage of engaging ourselves in an improvement program, we can become stuck in that phase and not make much real progress in actually realizing life-change outcomes.

This thinking stage is not necessarily “day-dreaming” but without rigorous planning, concrete results are harder to obtain.

I came across an interesting comment on planning which can offer a way to move from thinking to action:

“It is much better to conceive of planning as ‘writing’ rather than as ‘thinking.’” (1)

The logic of this is that it is more effective and productive to have a precise written plan to execute rather than trying to achieve results by means of thoughts in our minds, which can be vague and less precise than a written plan.

The end-game is taking action on our overall goals, and we can move closer to this objective by having a plan in writing.

(1) This comment was one I wrote in a notebook, but unfortunately neglected to write down the source.