Goal setting - define your path to success

Goal setting is a key to progress and success by many people, but a lot of people do not set goals within their daily lives. Why? I think that most people have not been taught goal setting as it is typically not mentioned in school and friends and family members either do not talk about it or do not have them set for themselves.

Photo credit: Pixabay

A researcher named Edwin Locke studied goal setting theory and noticed that people who set detailed and specific goals performed better than people who set basic / easy goals. He produced 5 guidelines for goal setting which gives the user a way to write a defined, realistic and achievable goals.

First, lets review basic goals and well defined ones. A basic goal would be someone around new years day timeframe stating 'my new years resolution will be to lose 20 pounds'. This person will go through the first month and may start working out a little and easing off on the fast food or maybe the quantity eaten only to fall back to his or her own lifestyle.

With the same goal, a well defined strategy to achieve that goal will be one that is highly accomplished. One can say, I'm going to lose 20 pounds by increasing my walking to 8 thousand steps each day, working out with light weights including core exercises 3 times per week, eat healthier by eating more fruits and vegetables each day, cut out all high fat foods and limit / reduce the portion size at lunch and dinner.

Photo credit: Pixabay

Edwin's goal setting guidelines:

1. Clarity. As mentioned in the above paragraph regarding the well defined strategy, goals must be detailed and with clarity. They should include exactly what you will do in order to achieve the goal.

2. Challenge. The goal should have a moderate amount of difficulty to keep you motivated. It is easy to produce a goal like 'I will walk 3000 steps each day for a week'. While it is a goal, it is one that is achieved with a minimal amount of effort.

3. Commitment. Write your goal down and post it somewhere visible each day, it can be the refrigerator door, in your car, on your computer or even on the home screen of your phone. You can also share your goal with friends and family for increased accountability. (As they may as you how you are doing in the near future)

4. Feedback. This will show you how you are progressing towards your goal. Goals all have different criteria and data points which can be measured on different time frames. In the weight example, the data point will be getting on the scale. Document your achievements on a spreadsheet, word doc or on your phone to look back on your progress.

5. Task complexity. With goals that are complex, you will need to give yourself enough time to achieve it especially if the goal is with something that is new to you. It may be something like learning a new programming language. The learning curve should be accounted for which adds time.

The Steemit site and your account here is a great place to start your goal setting as there are a lot of metrics and data points that can be measured and achieved.

• Increase your reputation: Many people will look at this number (next to your screen name) and determine to themselves if they will open the post or not. Typically, a low reputation score will either mean that you are new or may have a lot of down votes which suggests that many of the posts from the user have low value. Posting good content will result in more upvotes which increases your reputation.

From Steemwhales sorted by 'Rep', the highest of the high here

• Increase your Steem Power: The ability to upvote someone and grant them SBD and increased Steem Power is highly coveted on this system. Most if not all of the initial users of this site have high Steem Power and is a highly valued metric. (Not to mention the increase in account value) You can purchase Steem Power though the Blocktrades site by converting your BTC, ETH and other tokens. Again, generating Steem Power comes with many people upvoting your blog post (Especially whales), so 'work' and specific goal setting must be done in this category.

• Consistent posts: You may want to set a goal of writing one or two posts per day. I know writing takes quite a bit of time and some people write effortlessly while other struggle. (I'm the latter myself...) You may want to take at least one interesting photo per day to share depending on where you go. (This is much easier than writing...) The colorchallenge is always a good place to start.

There are so many more goals that you can set for yourself on the Steemit platform. It does take time, effort and 'work', just like any other goal. (Set them on the smaller side at first and accomplish them!)

Every user would like to become more successful with this platform as it is not only unique, but a great place to make new virtual friends, share stories, experiences and generate a savings account for that rainy day.