Setting meaningful goals

- Often, the practice of setting goals doesn't help you to actually reach goals. Meaningful goals, on the other hand, will help to keep you moving forward even when you experience hard times. I'm Gemma Leigh Roberts, a chartered psychologist and author, and I'm going to teach you how to create meaning based goals that will help to boost your performance and wellbeing in the areas that actually matter to you. Firstly, when you are setting new goals, focus on the meaning behind them, rather than only thinking about the end result. So rather than aiming for a promotion or a particular salary or specific position, make the goal something that holds meaning for you that you can connect to. You might find that a goal of being promoted actually is meaningful for you because it means that you are more financially secure, which creates security for your family, or you'll be doing work that's important to you. Connect to this meaning and make that your goal. So in this case, security for your family or meaningful work, not the specific job or salary. The beauty of this approach is you don't have to get that specific promotion. You might be able to figure out other ways to achieve security or meaning at work. Next, get a bit flexible with goals when you need to. Rather than setting yourself binary expectations, such as I will never work on weekends or I study every day, you might need to be a bit more flexible. Some days or weeks, you just won't be able to facilitate the standards that you've set yourself. Life isn't static. Demands on your time will go up and down. Imagine you have a really important presentation on Monday morning and you need to run through your presentation on Sunday to feel confident, breaking a rule that you've set yourself of no weekend working. If you have very fixed goals and standards, you're going to feel like you failed. So focus on the principles, rather than the rules. A principle of family time, for example, could take a different form every week. This gives you the flexibility to make that principle work for you in the best possible way each week. My final coaching tip is don't compare yourself to others or set goals with anyone else in mind other than yourself. Instead, check in with where you are today versus where you were yesterday or last year, and focus on that progress, and not what other people are achieving. Ask yourself if you are happy with the decisions and progress that you've made, and if not, think about what you can do differently going forward.