Who wants to set goals and yet fail? Sounds stupid isn’t?
In this article, I will focus on 4 caveats that can corner you and make you helpless.
Goal setting boosts your productivity. It makes you organized, professional and helps you achieve more. It boosts your self esteem and confidence too. By following a strategic goal plan it is easy to get inspired, move in the right direction and achieve something. Your goal need not be too big or fancy, even smaller goals sometime need action plans and strategies to get done.
One of the most important advantages of goal setting is that it gives you a purpose to work on so that you focus your mind and energy onto something without wandering. You save a lot of time and energy this way, which means you are being productive. Now, you may have heard/read all this somewhere or you may know these already. You know that goal setting is good. But there are indeed some caveats as with any technique.
Caveats are not so obvious, not so easy to find, but can act as trap and make us fall! With goal setting, the caveats are nasty because all we expect is a shiny outcome, but there still is a very good chance for the occurrence of these:
Over confidence
Oh I have set my goal. I always am perfect. I do work at working hours, I have an organized work pattern, I know my plans, I have many plans (A, B, C and so on), I don’t smoke, I sparingly drink coffee, blah blah blah.
Some who are used to setting goals become obsessed with it. They are simply over confident. For them, setting goals itself gives the sense of accomplishment. They usually talk about goal setting too much, talk about how perfect they are, talk about their professional achievements that came up as a result of their organized work pattern and so on. Things won’t be affected much in the beginning but in the long run these people can’t have friends, and gradually they can’t set effective goals too (since they spend most of the time appreciating themselves!).
Obsession
Obsessed with setting goals? You can’t believe this right? Believe me, I know quite few people who are obsessed with goal setting- they can’t do a little thing without a formal motivation (goal) and an action plan. They treat every task or an action as a formal thing however small or trivial it can be. They get this obsession by setting goals too much. That is, they set goals everyday for all of their personal and business activities and goal setting therefore becomes a crucial part of their life. Thus, it becomes a habit whatsoever, so they can’t do anything without a proper and a formal treatment. So don’t overdo goal setting!
Makes you lazy
Can you believe that goal setting can make you lazy sometimes? That is true actually. When you have everything on paper two things can happen
(i) you either think that you have almost done everything. Ya the plan is in the paper- when you read it, the plan says you meet X, get Y names, process N files, get it checked by M people and file the results. It is done! Isn’t? No it is not! But it is so very normal to have this feeling that it is done.
(or)
(ii) sometimes it also happens that when you see a very long list or a difficult goal, you procrastinate.
In both of these cases you simply put the goals in the paper and never give a chance to get them accomplished. Even more sad fact is that most of the times the items on the action plan are not even given a single try.
Over expectation from outside
This is dangerous. When your boss finds out that you are always a person who can take up anything and can tackle it in a systematic way, he always prefers you! When your colleagues find out that you can do things in an organized manner with nice plans and stuff, they come to you for help on things that they can’t handle themselves. Even more, when you lack perfection or miss a deadline, that becomes so unusual that people are surprised. This can’t be helped and is one of the bad effects of setting goals.
Article by JaneSheeba
+Jane is the founder of Problogging Success. She is an expert blogger, consultant, freelance writer and blog designer. Don't forget to get your hands on two FREE Ebooks she offers.
Jane has written 287 awesome posts for Problogging Success.
Jane, for me is one of the best influencers to me when I first started my blog, back then in earlier 2011. I couldn’t go a day without checking her blog for tips and guidelines to make the way for myself. One thing I can say about her is that, she is just a person someone has to look up to if you want to remain productive as a blogger – she updates her blog consistently, have another work apart from the blog and some other family things. I envy how she manage time to do all these things without one disturbing the other.
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