Choosing And
Setting Personal Goals

Welcome to the Setting Personal Goals page. This web site is about setting and achieving personal goals. To see more goals articles please go to our achieve your personal goals or setting goals pages.

There are two separate stages of successfully setting personal goals. First, you need to choose your goal. That's what this page is all about.

Second, you need to plan the detail of the goal that you've set. I deal with that planning in my setting goals page.

Most people fail to achieve the goals that they've set.

Why is that? Well, according to Dr Maxwell Maltz the author of PsychoCybernetics, one of the three main reasons is that most people choose the wrong goals. They choose goals to which they have no burning desire to achieve.

We choose many of our goals in a half-hearted way like New Year's Resolutions, or sometimes they are imposed on us by other people, or maybe we set them because we feel we 'should' set a particular goal. So we're never really committed to many of the goals we set.

That brings two problems. First, we are very unlikely to achieve a goal we don't passionately desire. Second, if we do this too often, we build up a self-image of being a 'quitter'. Then, when we do set a goal we really believe in, our self-image doesn't believe we're serious - and it's extremely difficult to achieve goals which our self-image doesn't believe in.

The other issue is that, if we follow a tendency of setting personal goals that we don't really want to achieve, we may end up with a life we don't want. In The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People Stephen Covey likens this to leaning our ladder against the wrong wall. So you might strive for years to achieve a goal, gradually progessing up the ladder. But when you eventually get to the top and look about you suddenly realise that you're in a place you never really wanted to get to.

So when setting personal goals it's vital to choose a goal that you have a burning desire to achieve. Achieving this goal will add to what you want in life - and you are more likely to achieve it anyway.

Napoleon Hill talks about this in his classic 1937 self help book Think And Grow Rich. Although the goal on which the book focuses is making money, the principle applies equally to achieving any other sort of goal. Napoleon Hill says the first step towards riches is desire. Whatever goal you choose, make sure that you have a burning desire to achieve it.

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