Achieving your goals
Setting goals is not a difficult process; reaching those goals is where the difficulty lies. Laura A. Rader has come up with 6 step strategy to help students achieve their goals:
- Choose a specific goal and write it down.
- Decide a time when your goal will be achieved.
- Develop a plan to achieve your goal.
Deduce how much time and effort is going to take to realize your goal. Figure out how you are going to fit your efforts into your schedule. The more complex the goal, the more complex it will be to plan. - Visualize yourself accomplishing your goal.
If the goal is one that the student really wants to achieve, imagining the feeling of accomplishment after achieving that goal will provide encouragement. - Work hard and never give up.
Life is unpredictable, and problems may arise that were not expected. Imagine a student who has set a goal to attend class every day but misses some school because of a family emergency. In these kinds of cases, it is crucial that the goal setter realises that the failure was circumstantial and not due to their ability. This may require counselling from a teacher, parent or the student’s peers. - Self evaluate.
This is an important step that may be overlooked. After achieving or failing to achieve a goal, the goal-setter ought to evaluate their performance. They should consider both what they did well and what they could improve on. This will lead to a greater sense of self-understanding and higher likelihood of achieving future goals.I don’t find any of Rader’s steps to be surprising or complicated. This is an extremely simple strategy that I believe will be very effective.