To achieve visible career results, you need to use a goal-setting approach. This approach should be applied regardless of the industry in which you work and the job responsibilities you perform.
Ideally, every employee should love their job and be fully involved in it. It is at the workplace that we spend the bulk of our lives, so our profession should be connected with what we love and what we enjoy. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. We are forced to earn our living, and not every person’s hobby can develop into an activity that brings him money.
However, if a person sets career goals for himself, then he can bring inspiration and passion to any job, no matter how motivating it is. So whether your work inspires you or not, setting career goals is a step forward towards success. Planned goals will help you stay on track even in the most difficult periods and will remind you of why you are doing all this, what you are striving for and where you are going.
The world is full of people who reach certain heights in business and prosper. But there is also a type of people who, despite clearly setting career goals, never achieve them. Often this happens because they abandon their obligations due to too slow progress towards their plans.
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If you still don't want to give up on your plans, but at the same time you are not ready to feel empty, disappointed and dissatisfied while doing your daily routine, check out these tips that will allow you to work more efficiently. Such methods will allow you to confidently pursue your professional goals, without deviating from them if some difficulties arise.
Set achievable goals
One of the main reasons why so many people abandon the goal setting approach is the inability to formulate their own goal so that it is achievable within a certain time frame.
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We often see people who work in the same field as us, and at the same time earn a lot of money and are at the top of Olympus. But to reach such heights requires a lot of hard work over a long period. But let's be honest, it also requires a little luck. And in some areas of activity, luck plays a key role. This doesn't mean you should doubt that you can achieve what you want on your own, but you should be realistic about your current situation. However, you should not be upset if something does not go according to plan.
You shouldn't set too high goals; most likely, you will realize that they are simply unattainable, and then give up without achieving them. They must be realistic! First, analyze the industry you work in and find out what people who have been in this business for a long time have actually achieved. If this suits you, then be patient and move forward.
Determine your starting point and set intermediate goals on the path to success. But always keep an eye on the new opportunities and chances that come your way. Perhaps they will allow you to achieve your main goal much faster. Be realistic and be prepared to adapt to changing conditions and partially adjust your goals if necessary.
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You must understand that it is up to you whether you achieve success in your professional field or not. At the same time, you must adequately assess what you ultimately plan to receive.
How to know which direction to go
The first thing you should do is determine the direction in which you need to go. One of the most frequently used exercises by psychologists, the “Balance Wheel,” will help you with this. Drawing up your own balance wheel is an extremely simple and quick task, which nevertheless is an excellent tool for self-knowledge, giving you the opportunity to better know and “digitize” your personality. With the help of the balance wheel, you will reduce your implicit and inexpressible feelings and sensations to clear numerical indicators, accurately determine your current position in various areas of life and the goals to which you should go.
To draw your balance wheel, take a sheet of paper and draw on it ten nested circles, divided by diametric lines into eight equal parts. Label each of the resulting eight sections as:
- Health and beauty - this category includes not only health and beauty in themselves, but also fitness, sports, appearance, and the like.
- Career - this category includes not only the development of your career, increasing your salary and improving working conditions, but also any achievements at your current job, in business, or in some side projects
- Finance - this category includes your financial well-being, increasing your wealth, building an investment portfolio, buying real estate and cars, and so on...
- Family and relationships - this category includes both love relationships and sex, as well as leisure time spent with family, raising and educating children, and communicating with relatives.
- Relaxation and entertainment - this category includes the time that you devote to yourself personally - not to development, not to work on yourself, but simply to do nothing, play a video game, travel to interesting places, just have fun.
- Self-development - This category includes personal growth - activities that you want to learn, books that will give you something to read, podcasts that you will learn something new from, and so on...
- Creativity - this concept includes not only creativity in the usual sense of the word - some hobbies and the creation of something, but also any giving of a part of oneself to the world - charity, blood donation, publication of educational posts. Combining such different activities may not seem logical at first, but it actually makes sense.
- Friends and environment - this concept includes socialization, networking, communication with friends and interesting people
Now for each of these categories you need to set a scale and determine for yourself what ten out of ten is the coolest possible. For example, in the Health and Fitness category it could be a body like Apollo, and in the Career category it could be working as a CTO at a large company.
After you have set the scale, you must honestly answer the question for yourself: how do you assess your current position on this scale from one to ten and paint as many arc sections in the category as the number of points you gave yourself on it. You should end up with a picture similar to this:
The wheel of balance well highlights those areas of life that it is advisable to start working on first. If you have a career score of eight and a relationship score of two, then even a small amount of relationship effort will improve your life far more than a huge amount of career effort—the Pareto Rule applies here too. Only by keeping your life in balance can you become happy.
Now you know your current position in each category, but how do you formulate your goals from this? To do this, you need to determine how you will get the next point on the wheel. For example, let's say you have a score of 4 in the Health and Beauty category, where a score of 4 is excess weight, messy hair, and baggy clothes, and a score of 10 is a fitness model body, perfectly fitting clothes, and great hair. Now you need to understand what a 5 on this scale is. How much effort does it take to move one step from your current position to your ideal? For example, going to a hairdresser and getting a fashionable hairstyle there will move you from 4 to 5, going to a stylist and going with him to buy yourself well-fitting clothes will move you from 5 to 6, starting to eat right and going to the gym for three months will move you from 6 to 7, and so on. This way, you will formulate simple and discrete goals for yourself, the achievement of which will dramatically improve your life.
How to find out your true desires
Sometimes, when determining the next steps for each of the categories in the balance wheel, we cannot accurately determine our true desires. We write down what seems right, true, socially approved to us, but which in fact is completely unnecessary for us, and investing time and effort in this activity will turn out to be a complete loss for us. How to fix this?
There is a very simple and effective way to reveal your deepest desires. Imagine that doctors discover you have an incurable disease, give you a fatal diagnosis and give you a terrifying prognosis - you only have a month to live. You will not have pain, you will not be bedridden, but in exactly a month you will die. What do you want to be sure to do in such a short time? Or imagine that tomorrow you are killed in a car accident on your way to work. What unused opportunities and undone tasks would you regret?
Maybe you have always dreamed of going to Paris, climbing to the top of a mountain, going fishing, learning to skateboard, going to a Metallica concert, whatever... Everyone will have something of their own - some childhood dreams, sexual fantasies, unclosed gestalts .
The answers to these two “dying” questions, as I call them, will give you an understanding of your true desires, the fulfillment of which you constantly put off, assuring yourself that you will still have time. A person imagines himself immortal - this feature of the work of our psyche allows us not to go crazy. But only the fear of imminent death can awaken in us an understanding of what we really want. It is not at all a fact that the satisfaction of identified desires will bring you pleasure or make you happy, but we can say for sure that after the fulfillment of these desires, peace and tranquility will come in your soul.
What's not so easy about this exercise is that you have to actually believe that you are going to die. To set yourself on the right wave, you can watch tearful films like “And in My Heart I’m Dancing,” read the suicide notes of cancer patients, listen to the stories of people who suddenly lost loved ones in car accidents or other incidents - this will give you the right mood to understand what you must I would like to have time in my life and what is really valuable. You also just need to try not to lie to yourself and not make up things that you don’t really want, but what you think is the “right” thing to want before you die, and not try to get rid of what you think is wrong to want, but what you you want to do it passionately (well, unless you really shouldn’t try heroin or dismember your neighbor). Your gut will show you the way, just relax and trust your instincts.
Don't neglect routine tasks and try to make the most of them
Most likely, you do some kind of monotonous work every day. You come to work in the morning and spend 8 hours doing the same type of things. This lifestyle is typical for most of us, but it doesn't necessarily mean you're working hard and productive. There is nothing stopping you from putting things off except your own laziness; you can sit throughout the entire working day and do nothing useful, and postpone project deadlines from day to day. This leads to the fact that your work does not bring any visible results.
Therefore, you need to find time every day to focus on what you are doing. But in order to understand what you are doing wrong and change your behavior pattern, you need to fully immerse yourself in your daily routine. The main idea is that you need to focus on your work to ensure, within your capabilities, that you make it as effective as possible.
Everyone understands that a person cannot remain productive and efficient for 8 working hours, but if several hours of routine are replaced by short periods of deep concentration, then progress will not be long in coming. Your goals are set first in your mind, this is the mental routine you need to move towards your goals.
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Don't overwork yourself
As mentioned above, it is almost impossible to stay focused on business for a long time. Your productivity will begin to wane after 45-50 minutes of vigorous activity, and attempts to move forward will become pointless. It is necessary to stop regularly and take short breaks, this will allow the brain to rest a little and return to business with renewed energy.
If you work non-stop for hours, you will achieve nothing. An hour of focused, productive work followed by 7 hours of tired, ineffective tinkering is counterproductive to achieving your goals. At first glance, it will seem like you're making progress because you've worked so hard, but in fact you'll be moving much slower toward your goal than you would have been with a structured approach to your work.
Working hard and being tired harms your mental and physical health and also reduces your motivation levels. Psychologists recommend taking a 10-minute break every 45 minutes. It’s enough to just get up from your desk, take a walk, make yourself a cup of coffee, chat with colleagues on abstract topics, or do something that doesn’t require much mental activity. Such simple actions will help you reduce emotional stress. Do this throughout the working day, and it will allow you not to feel excessive moral stress or pressure, that is, it will make your movement towards the goal more pleasant.
Leave time for rest
You simply must have free time; if work is constantly on your mind, it can drive you crazy or simply lead to overwork and stress. No matter how much you want to achieve your goals, work is work and it takes a toll on your health and appearance. Even if you love your job very much, still give yourself the opportunity to take a break from it.
You will appreciate the time you spend working and the time you spend free from work only if you have enough time in your life for both leisure and work. Manage your time wisely and maintain balance.
Digging without a shovel
Sometimes our life plans resemble the old joke about a worker who was ordered to dig a hole, but... was not given a shovel. One goal is not enough; you also need a tool to achieve it. Most often, this tool is our knowledge and skill. If you are going to eat foods rich in vitamins, you need to know which foods to look for which vitamins. Otherwise, there will be no balanced diet! It's like going to a bike race without learning how to ride a bike. Or demand from your teenage son that he sit at the computer less, without explaining to him how to occupy the free time.
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Break down your goals into smaller ones
If you set yourself just one goal, and it is global, then you should not expect that every day will provide significant progress towards achieving it. In order not to feel that days and weeks are passing in vain and you are not getting closer to what you want, it would be advisable to break down each global goal into smaller ones.
At the beginning of each year, think about your goal that you want to achieve this year and work towards it. But to make your work more productive, set yourself monthly goals, as well as small daily achievements that you will work towards this year. Remember that daily goals should be easy to achieve. Naturally, you will have to make daily efforts to complete them, but they should not drive you into depression and disappointment. This approach will keep you motivated and make you feel like you are always moving towards your goal. This will help you achieve significant results even in work in which you are not interested and which does not inspire you.
If you've been following the above tips for a long time, but still feel dissatisfied, then it's time to make a big change. This is normal, don't be afraid to change something and start building a new career in a different field. When starting your career in another field of activity, do not forget about the need to clearly formulate your goals, scrupulously plan the time frame in which you intend to achieve them, and leave time to simply enjoy life and every new day!
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Urgent means important
Without setting deadlines for our goals, we, without noticing it ourselves, act like the careless schoolboy from the children's song: “... I’ll get it done on Monday!” After all, it’s never too late to catch up... And if it’s never too late, then why do it now? It’s easier to postpone the not most urgent – and therefore not the most important – task until better times. And do what needs to be done today.
Set a deadline for the start of decisive action, and sometimes for its successful completion. For example: “I’m signing up for the pool in the evening”, “Today I’m buying wallpaper and starting to glue it in the room”, “I’ll call my colleague at 15.00”, “From today I’m doing gymnastics every day”, “Tomorrow I’m starting to prepare for the English certificate exam and in two I’ll repeat everything that’s necessary in a week.”
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