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When it comes to losing weight, moving up the ladder at work, or any other achievement that you may aspire to in life, there is nothing more crucial than learning how to write goals that will boost your confidence. If you set your goals wrong, you will deflate your confidence with failure. To avoid this, make sure your goals are both realistically attainable and very specific.
The biggest blow to your confidence comes when you realize you have failed to reach a goal you put out great efforts to achieve. This is what happens when you set goals that are not realistically attainable.
Let’s take weight loss as an example. If you say you want to lose thirty pounds by the end of the year and it is already mid-November you have next to no chance of actually achieving that goal. When the end of the year comes you will be disappointed no matter how much weight you did manage to lose.
A more realistic goal may be to lose eight pounds in a month. That is about two pounds a week, and you have room to lose even more and surprise yourself. Instead of setting yourself up for disappointment you have now set yourself up for a confidence boost.
If you want to keep your mind trained on the hope of losing three inches despite this lower goal, there is no harm in that. In fact, it may push you to work harder and increase your chances further of reaching that two inch goal.
If you reach your goal of six pounds you will feel successful, but if you reach the higher mental goal you will feel an extra surge of satisfaction. Either way, you come out a winner.
Realistic goals are great, but you will not be able to determine if you have met them if they are not specific. Writing very specific goals will help you keep on track in the short term. They will also help identify success when it is finally achieved.
Going back to our example, a general goal would be to say you want to lose weight and look better. You have not defined exactly how much you want to lose, a pant size you want to fit into, or any other concrete measure by which you can judge success.
To get specific, you can amend this goal to say you want to lose six pounds and fit into a specific dress for New Year’s Eve. As long as the dress size is realistic, you can now measure progress by trying on the dress occasionally and you will know exactly when you meet the goal.
Resist the temptation to sit down and toss out your goals quickly. Learning how to write goals successfully requires some thought to what you really want in life. Get real with yourself! Then you can set multiple specific, realistic goals which will eventually boost your confidence and take you where you really want to be.
