writing goals

Posted by admin | Posted in Goal Setting | Posted on 05-01-2010-05-2008

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Education and learning skills represent a serious concern for parents with school going children: how well will they learn to speak and write? How far will they go with the studies? In school students are supposed to learn and acquire the writing skill, for instance, based on the activities held in class and at home during homework and assignments given by teachers or instructors. But unfortunately, the writing goals are not always met in the ideal conditions.

A possible explanation for the situation is that the writing goals may not be very well defined at the national educational level. There should be made a clear cut distinction between practical writing that we may come across on a daily basis and creative writing that some teachers seem to focus on in some schools. It is indeed very interesting to challenge your students and pupils to try something new and set the imagination free, but let us not forget that writing was initially invented to serve very pragmatic purposes the communication of information and ideas.

A clear proof that writing goals may have failed in some educational instances is that lots of people have difficulties when it comes to writing a CV or a cover letter So then, how could one expect a person to be able to create an artistically descriptive paragraph when the most basic things about him or her cannot be put on a piece of paper in a coherent, reader-friendly manner?

Another reason why writing goals are not met is the lack of practice with writing to meet the fundamental demands of our society. Home assignments are designed and given so that they are not very difficult or challenging for the child. Instead, children that arrive home, log on chat programs where they use coded language or shortened way of typing words and expressing themselves. With a decreasing shift on writing compositions in class and at home and an every growing stress on simplicity, brevity and fun in writing, our kids are losing even those skills they may have rather passively acquired in class and at home.

Moreover, writing assignments seems to depend on information that is copy-pasted from sources that do not involve personal creativity. As a result, teachers and instructors should be more concerned with writing goals and meeting them; they have to be certain that the rules related to writing throughout life for practical and social purposes are also applied and required at the schooling level.

Consequently, we should become aware that a correct guiding of an individuals first steps in his/her writing experience, a motivating description and explanation of the necessity of this skill throughout their life may make students more oriented towards achieving practical writing goals. In addition, successful writing goals will prevent further disappointment and lack of self-confidence in the building of the career.

time management

Posted by admin | Posted in Goal Setting | Posted on 04-01-2010-05-2008

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There are people who come to a point in their life when they feel overwhelmed by the tasks they have to perform either at work or at home. They could even picture the workload as something they cannot escape from, and here comes depression from behind the corner. But what they do not know is that they don’t all suffer from overworking. The only problem could be incorrect time management, and that can be fixed with a little care and some smart tricks.

According to specialists, time management is a set of tools, skills and methods designed and used to meet certain previously stipulated or well-defined goals and tasks. The concept in itself is anything but simple and should make reference to numerous stages such as the basic planning, the establishing of goals, the analysis of the time necessity, as well as the monitoring and the prioritizing steps as well.

Time is money, says the American, but you can find this words on the lips of people worldwide. In fact, this is a major principle that has stimulated the activity of lots of businesses on the way to success. Do you wonder why all this emphasis on the time-money relation?. Well, one can recover money loss by a correction performed on the initial program or action plan. One unsuccessful business scheme especially if associated with faulty time management can cost a lot and can turn one into a pretty desperate person.

Sometimes, lack of good time management in all fields and ranges of activity can lead to panic and frustration. Instead of panicking way, make a situation assessment and decide for the most advantageous course of action. Be as truthful as possible and starting from personal considerations, draw another plan that is meant to get you out of the problem you find yourself in at the moment. If your feeling is one of frustration, the one very important thing you need to do is accept defeat and acknowledge the fact that it is normal to feel that way.

However, remember you are not to feel sorry for yourself for too long, but you should take action by analyzing and correcting the situation making use of the tools of planning, scheduling and prioritizing. And this time, try to insist on time management.

smart goals

Posted by admin | Posted in Goal Setting | Posted on 03-01-2010-05-2008

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Most people are willing to start a new business project to gain more money or to start things over and independently if possible. But setting the project running is definitely not enough. What many investors are not aware of is that they forget to set smart goals to make sure that their project turns out to be successful on a long term basis. the letter of the dictionary says that goals are those states of affairs that a plan aims to achieve and that, when achieved, complete the behavior intended to achieve them. Although this may sound a bit pretentious, smart goals can often make the difference between success and failure in business and personal life alike.

The expression smart goals has been used by very many project or program designers and business people. The word smart is nowadays used mainly as an acronym, each letter representing an adjective that should describe the goals. The letter s stands for specific, significant, or stretching. M represents anything that is meaningful, measurable, motivational. A refers to the smart goals that are acceptable, attainable or action-oriented. Letter r represents such adjectives as realistic, relevant and rewarding or result-oriented. Last but not least, t is the letter of trackable and time-based.

Whether you are interested in setting smart goals related to your business or personal life, it is always a good idea to learn what steps they actually involve. People have nowadays specialized in training others on how to set, define and pursue goals. The trouble is that the institutional education that our society is provided with does not seem to focus enough on defining and teaching aspects that would make people more pragmatic and success-oriented. Smart goals and their setting or identification represent but a few of those aspects that we seem to miss in schools. It is only those who prepare for a career in economics and finance that get a grip of such aspects and that is quite a pity.

To conclude, life may reach unexpected peaks if we manage to track smart goals that match with our status and situation. High education is not necessarily a condition of success, and there are lots of cases to prove it. Most likely those people have been of a rather pragmatic nature and have had an innate talent in setting their own goals. They have made a clear distinction between what is realistic, significant, measurable, time-oriented and significant and the opposite of those. They have succeeded solely based on their intelligence and innate skill of setting smart goals.

short term goals

Posted by admin | Posted in Goal Setting | Posted on 02-01-2010-05-2008

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Personal and professional life depends on goal setting now more than ever. It is all about planning, sticking to the plan, adjusting as one makes progress and adapting, acting constantly towards one greater goal and finally achieving it. But while planning, one may realize that there are things that he or she may want to achieve in a relatively short period of time while others are planned over a longer interval. This is what makes the difference between short term goals and long term ones.

According to certain opinions short term goals must be defined according to the plan you make when you first set them. Projects that are envisaged for no more than a month could be described as short term goals, but beyond six months or more, we’re talking about long term ones. Let us not ignore the fact that the two categories are interconnected as we cannot speak of long term plans without relying on the short term ones.

We can only think and plan the former against the background of the latter. For example, you could measure short term aims for yourself in days while someone else will measure their own aims of this kind in months or even in years; that is why the relativity concept in defining short term goals as done in the previous paragraph has a very important role.

One essential aspect to consider when setting short term goals is that you need to be very specific and also very realistic about the planning. If you imagine that teaching your students past tense during the following week is a clear, defined goal, you will probably not be able to achieve it. Even more specific terms are necessary for the planning of short term goals.

Teach the difference between regular and irregular verbs next Tuesday morning in class between 9 and 11: here is the realistic version of the plan presented above. The aim as such is pretty small but it is surely realistic and achievable for a two hour period. That is certainly one of the short term goals included in a larger plan or long term goal of enabling foreign students to learn how to use past tense forms of verbs after teaching, reinforcing, practicing and testing for at least several weeks of an English course.

Hoping that this has made clear the difference between short term goals and long term ones, the only thing left is to advise you to stick to the plans you have made and demonstrate perseverance in order to achieve success.

set goals

Posted by admin | Posted in Goal Setting | Posted on 01-01-2010-05-2008

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Very practical people with a clear focus on what they want to achieve in life, set goals and make plans. Psychological researches have brought action planning more into the spot light when they revealed the necessity for good organization and positive thinking. To begin with, if you set goals, there is a final target, an end of the road where you aspire to be. The absence of objectives will make life look like leading nowhere.

In addition, the attempt to set goals will help you get more organized regarding time and effort investment. Time and energy are two resources that need to be used in a focused manner; don’t waste efforts out of neglect or because of lack of objectives and perspectives. People that know how to concentrate their actions and their time towards reaching one target will surely enjoy higher quality results than those who use time and energy in a diffused manner.

Positive motivation and the power of the will represent other factors that make set goals achievable. Once we discover the working mechanism, most of us find out about the importance of not quitting when faced with obstacles and barriers. Failures are mere stones that pave the road to success. In the absence of set goals, and without focusing our energy on the target we want to hit, we would be very intimidated when faced with hardships and failures, and we thus would not pursue the path to success.

Last but not least, set goals increase mind clarity about what is or isn’t important. Many people face the challenge of prioritizing, but perhaps their task to create priorities would be a whole lot more simplified if they remained keen on objectives and goals. Distinguishing between what is worth investing time and energy in and what is not may make struggle for success and dreams a little less tough. And since priorities are well identified and sketched under the form of a plan or strategy, you will understand from failures or little progress that the plan is not functional or that you’ve sidetracked from it.

Positive goals on the other hand should be kept realistic nevertheless. Success can be part of our lives whenever we choose, on the condition that we know how to decode the opportunities and stay lucrative in the pursuit of goals and objectives.

sales goal setting

Posted by admin | Posted in Goal Setting | Posted on 31-12-2009-05-2008

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Business success is almost impossible to achieve without an appropriate and comprehensive goal sales setting. For the beginning it is important there should be a clear distinction between the actions integrated in a plan and other random decisions you take forced by unpredicted circumstances. A working scheme represents one of the methods to make sure that you achieve something you have thought about. For those actions that do not belong to the pre-established plan, make sure you draw a plan and integrate these actions into a bigger picture that culminates with or focus on some kind of goal. If sales goal setting is not performed, you are most likely on a drifting rug that takes you nowhere where revenues and profit are.

You need to start learning the difference between pro-action and reaction. The former implies the fact that you initiate action according to a plan and that you have something very well-defined in mind regarding where you want to get with numbers and figures corresponding to sales and profit. This means that you have done your sales goal setting for at least a certain period in advance. Re-action on the other hand refers to that kind of action that assumed for survival on a highly competitive market while you are being faced only with crises out of which you struggle to get; as such, there is no profit to get you higher above the minimum survival line.

This being said, remember that sales goal setting is not enough; action is the necessary one. According to a well designed plan, you should act along the lines, adapting to all sorts of real life challenges and unsuspected situations. Supposing that you need to learn a foreign language, and you set a three-month goal to learn the basics; if you do not buy a book and get down to actually working from it, in three months you will surely see no progress, not to mention anything about goal achieving. The same thing stays valid for business, so sales goal setting remains pointless in the absence of a clear plan application.

Consequently, sales goal setting and taking action to meet goals are complementary. It would be highly improbable for anyone to think otherwise and to enjoy success quite out of the blue and without the tiniest of efforts.

professional goals

Posted by admin | Posted in Goal Setting | Posted on 30-12-2009-05-2008

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Here comes a new year with new opportunities for everyone to assert themselves in any field of activity and in any area of life. 2009 apparently is a year that does not promise too much because of the world financial and economic crisis we are already experiencing. Yet, people won’t stop setting personal and professional goals because of the recession, on the contrary, this is the right moment to think positive and work hard to reach our aims.

On the one hand, personal goals should be ever-present in our life even despite this coming year with its somber predictions. It is important that we all want to preserve our peace and happiness in the bosom of our own families. For this to come true, let us remember that we should show the same love and understanding to those around us. If concern and care have not been our strongest points so far, then perhaps it is time now to become a little more considerate and supportive towards our family members especially if we notice that the professional goals of our beloved ones are in no way going to be achieved this year.

In spite of poor career promises for 2009, let’s stay focused and preserve self confidence to win the war in the end. Family, health and job elements are all inter-related, ignoring one or suffering disappointment in a category will inevitably affect the others. Good shape and wellness of each individual represent a goal that should be maintained no matter what, and action should be taken in that direction.

On the other hand, this attitude is justified by the not so promising professional goals of 2009. But even so, the career realm should not lack goals. It is however best if our goals are a little more humble than they were last year before the financial strike we have received. Success will surely appear even if lots of efforts will be required in the direction of achieving goals.

Examples of professional goals include to get higher on the hierarchical ladder within your company, to show more commitment to the tasks and thus get a raise, to get more responsibilities and chances to get familiar with new things and thus grow professionally, to change ones job for a better one, and so on. If these professional goals aim too high and you expect too much before the recession is over, you might become exposed to exactly the opposite situation while trying to stay on the safe side. Good luck!

personal goals

Posted by admin | Posted in Goal Setting | Posted on 29-12-2009-05-2008

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Are you in your twenties and feel that something is missing from your life? Are you not sure which direction to take, what to do next? Well, there are very many people, even in mature adulthood, whohave been having the same problem. A human being needs to constantly create and define himself/herself in relation to others, the environment and the universe, which is why we so desperately need personal goals. Has it ever crossed your mind that perhaps your life is missing one big picture? That you have not set personal goals the fulfillment of which would actually boost up self-confidence and satisfaction? Negative attitudes, fear of criticism and failure are the greatest dangers: look them in the eye and face them in action!

In the absence of personal goals, the meaninglessness of one’s life could be not only troublesome but over-burdening. Therefore, you should take a bit of time off from whatever it is that you do and think about what you want to do with your life. Take each of the fields that you might set personal goals in one after another and analyze yourself. These fields of activity or of interest may differ from one person to another, yet they usually include art, family, career, health, finance, education, behavior and attitude, fun, etc.

Ask yourself whether each point is important for you, feel your way and understand what you would like to achieve. How do you picture yourself in the light of these goals a decade from now? Once you’ve set long term objectives, break them down into smaller goals that are designed for shorter periods. You can break these long term personal goals down to cover months, weeks and even days if you try your patience at this form of life planning.

There are five general criteria to consider in setting personal goals and they include time, attainability, relevance, specificity and measurability. In one word, make sure your goals are SMART. The theory of the smart goals has appeared and became widely used in personal counseling and training with great results in practice. Don’t set goals too difficult to reach. If so, and if fulfilling one hard goal has taken longer than expected, next you can establish goals that are a little easier to achieve, and the other way round.

motivation

Posted by admin | Posted in Goal Setting | Posted on 28-12-2009-05-2008

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By motivation we understand a set of principles or factors that influence one in the direction of acting for success. They say that without it we would all be but a bunch of passive, lazy people that seem to have no goal in life. And indeed, once we understood how the universe works, supposedly at a very young age, we have been involved in a motivating existence. Do you want the candy? You have to work for it just a little bit and listen to mammy. This is how it all starts. Therefore, without even becoming aware of what we undergo, we are taught the very basics of responding to motivation.

Motivation results from the reward that follows a certain action, and it is the pleasant feeling we experience that keeps us going on and on. The reward in itself may be manifest inherently, meaning that the mental and emotional satisfaction prove sufficient to repeat the action later. Yet, there is an external type of motivation too that consists in material or laudatory rewards. As a result, motivation can fall into two distinct categories as intrinsic, or inner, and extrinsic, or outer. As it may be obvious to you already, intrinsic motivation has to do with your own person and what you want whereas the extrinsic type has to do with external factors or people. The intrinsic type of motivation is also divided into two more subcategories. One is the intrinsic motivation that relies on enjoyment (let us take a hobby for example) while the other is the one that is based on obligation (like performing a task at work that we want to carry out very well only for our own sake and not for anyone elses).

As previously mentioned, motivation is one of the most important things that guides us through life. This is the factor that has made us take our first steps, that has supported us in learning how to pronounce certain words correctly, that has guided us in school years and university studies perhaps, that has made us get a job, get married, have children, provide the best for our children and want to grow old within a home full of peace and warmth. Motivation can take many forms and can be related to many things.

how to set goals

Posted by admin | Posted in Goal Setting | Posted on 27-12-2009-05-2008

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As our society progresses we come up with more and more theories concerning various aspects of our lives, each apparently smarter than the previous. Professional and personal success could not be overlooked under the circumstances. The popular and rather widespread impression about how to set goals consists in the putting together of a plan or trajectory. Without a plan or itinerary it is very difficult to achieve something on the short or on the long term.

As a result, the theory on how to set goals has grown from basic words of advice and pieces of personal experience. Thus, the definition of the goal setting process appeared. The most important of all is to make a decision about where you want to get to or what you would like to achieve. The necessary task can only be fulfilled if you see the whole process with the eye of the mind in perspective. Therefore the question of how to set goals becomes not only complex but problematic too.

Before you can have a straight answer to the issue of how to set goals, the analysis of all the circumstantial details is necessary together with the gathering of the data necessary for the goal achievement as such. Further learn on skills and resources required and be truthful to yourself about the doable nature of one project or another.

Next on how to set goals and stick to them, is gradual controlled process of moving onwards along the figured path. It is highly recommendable that you do not expect to carry out huge steps or achieve great goals immediately because failure will be waiting for you around the corner. If this should happen, review your plan and see what amends you have so that it becomes a bit more realistic.

Another tip related to how to set goals is the use of language when you formulate them. Psychological studies today, encourage us to use as much positive language as possible no matter of the addressee or the intent of the message. So why should we not stick to that when thinking if we already do it when talking to others?

Instead of saying: I wont miss my Pilates session at the gym today, a positive variant would be: I know I will miss the Pilates session today therefore I will take twenty minutes to practice at home by myself. Can you notice the difference? It is vital that no negative language is used when you set goals so that keep all the thought channels positive and open when you review your plan for the day or for the week.