If you’re unhappy with either where your life is right now, or where you feel like it’s going in the future, then it’s probably time to think about being strategic in envisioning your future and setting goals.
Strategic goal setting is an absolute superpower when deployed by people with a vision for where they’d like to be in their future.
- Maybe you don’t feel like you make enough money, and are struggling to figure out how to increase your income.
- Maybe you’re just not happy with where your career is headed, and feel that a change may be an order.
- Maybe you’re not particularly thrilled with your dating or relationship life, and aren’t sure how to fix it.
- Or maybe you’re just generally struggling with feeling hopeful for what the future may hold.
These are all common things for humans to feel.
But the answer to all of them is pretty simple.
Strategic goal setting starts with 4 simple steps:
- Decide what you want to do with your life
- Start making a plan to reach your objective
- Write down your goals to create a roadmap for success
- Review, revise, and go
It’s that simple.
A lot of people feel like changing their life for the better is out of the question.
You may even feel like it’s too hopeless to believe that you could actually make a plan for your life and achieve your dreams.
But if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my life, it’s that having a dream, turning that dream into goals, and then applying myself every day to accomplishing those goals is absolutely the best way to change your life for the better, and to start living your authentic dreams today.
But it all starts with strategic goal setting.
What Is Strategic Goal Setting?
Strategic goal setting is a process where you figure out where you want to be in the future, make a strategic plan for how you can get from where you are now to where you want to be, set goals that create a roadmap for that plan, and then execute on the plan and start putting consistent, calculated effort into the things you need to do to accomplish your objective.
A lot of people struggle with strategic goal setting because they aren’t sure how to actually use the process to create results in their life.
But in this post, you’re going to learn 4 vital steps for how to strategically envision your future and set goals to help you achieve your dreams.
Why Strategic Thinking And Planning Is Important
Strategic thinking and planning is important because without a roadmap for success, it’s going to be a lot more difficult to change your life to create the destiny you desire for yourself.
Imagine yourself living your ideal life.
- What would you be doing?
- How much money would you be making?
- What kind of family would you have?
- What kind of hobbies would you be enjoying?
- What would you be doing for a career?
- How would you be impacting the world and changing it for the better?
- What problems would you be solving?
- How would you be spending your time?
These are all very important questions.
But once again, a lot of people don’t believe there’s any reason to even ask these questions because they feel stuck and hopeless in their current situation.
But here’s the thing.
It’s never hopeless.
You actually have a great deal of power in deciding how your life plays out.
And strategic goal setting can help you to leverage this power every single day.
If you’d like to learn more about the power of dreaming big, check out this post: Dream – Dream – Dream | The Secret To Dreaming Big.
Alright, now that you know why strategic goal setting is important, let’s break it down and talk about the four main steps that you’ll need to walk through in order to start strategically turning your dreams into goals, and your goals into reality.
4 Steps To Strategic Thinking And Setting Of Goals
1. Decide What You Want To Do With Your Life
Every goal starts with a dream.
- What kind of life would you like to be living?
- How would you like to be spending your time?
- What types of projects would you like to be involved in?
- What types of people would you like to be associating with?
Asking these types of questions can help you figure out how you’d like your life to be different.
These types of questions can also help you to figure out where you’d like to be, and what you’d like to be doing in life.
In other words:
What’s your life purpose? What’s your destiny? What’s your life mission?
Of course, it’s important to figure out how you’d like to contribute to the world in a positive way.
Some people focus entirely on what they want to have. But truly successful people usually dig a bit deeper and think about how they’d like to contribute to making the world a better place.
One good rule of thumb for how to narrow down what you’d like to do with your life is to focus on things you’re passionate about.
You can also think about specific individual talents and skills you have, and see if you could leverage those to create the life you desire for yourself.
This really all speaks to discovering or creating an overall overarching purpose for your life.
If you want to learn more about how to live life on purpose, check out this post: How To Live Your Life On Purpose – 11 Steps.
If you’re struggling to pinpoint exactly what you would like to do in your future, don’t be discouraged.
This is a really big question. And to be honest, it might take you some time to figure it out.
But that’s okay.
Even if all you do today is figure out a general direction for where you’d like your life to go, that’s a great first step.
But as I often say:
You have to have a dream if you want to make your dreams come true.
Just remember to keep narrowing down a specific purpose and mission for your life as you progress. Because the more specific you get with your goals, the more power you’ll have to turn those goals into reality.
2. Start Making A Plan To Reach Your Objective
Once you identify where you’d like to be in life, it’ll be time to start making a plan.
This is the strategy part of strategic thinking and goal setting.
A lot of people visualize the type of life they’d like to have, and develop an authentic hope within themselves that they’ll reach that objective someday.
But here’s the thing.
It’s vitally important to actually create a plan and a roadmap to reach that objective.
There’s so much power in turning your dreams into goals, and actually writing down those goals to help you not only visualize what you need to do to accomplish your objective, but also to begin the process of manifesting your vision in the real world through the writing of your goals.
See, there’s a big difference between hoping for something, and writing down a plan.
Hoping for something is a great first step. But if all you ever do is hope, you’re still keeping the object of your dreams locked away inside your mind.
But when you take the initiative to write down your goals, even if those goals aren’t perfect to start with, you begin the crucial and valuable process of taking that dream out of your brain and literally manifesting it in the real world.
Making a specific plan to accomplish your life’s purpose, and then writing down your goals to outline that plan may not seem like super important parts of the process.
But I assure you that these small steps will make the biggest difference in increasing your chances of actually accomplishing your life’s purpose and reaching the point in life you want to reach.
3. Write Down Your Goals To Create A Roadmap For Success
As you create a plan to reach your objective, start writing out specific goals that’ll help you to accomplish that plan in small, manageable steps.
You may want to start out by writing out larger, overarching goals—and then breaking those goals down into smaller, more manageable small-to-medium-sized goals.
Eventually, you’ll probably want to break your goals down to such a degree that they result in lists of daily activities that you accomplish to move closer to achieving your dreams.
Once again, this can take some time and practice to get right. You don’t have to get it perfect all at once.
The simple fact of the matter is this:
Beginning the process of writing goals out on paper is important even if you end up changing those goals in the future.
Why?
Because it’s all about the mindset.
When you start writing down your goals and taking action to accomplish the things you’ve written down, you carry yourself that much closer to success.
But you also program your mind to work toward your vision, according to your plans.
And that’s an absolutely victorious and winning mindset for success.
4. Review, Revise, Go!
When you first start writing down your goals, they probably won’t be perfect.
In fact, you might not even be completely sure about what you want to do right now.
For example, maybe you have a passion for technology.
And your first thought about your life purpose may be something like:
I want to design computer programs.
That’s an awesome place to start.
But once you start setting goals and working toward that vision of your life, you’ll likely further narrow it down as you learn more about yourself and gain more experience.
Instead of just thinking:
I want to create computer programs…
Maybe you realize that you also have a huge passion for helping people to achieve their financial goals.
From this, you can get even more specific, and deduce that you want your life goal to be something more like:
Designing computer software programs that help people to manage their finances.
See, this is an example of starting off towards your dream in a general direction, and then revising your objective as you learn more about what you actually want to do.
I call this process review, revise, go.
- Constantly review your goals to make sure that they’re still in alignment with your dreams.
- If needed, revise those goals to make sure that they fit with your current vision for how you want your life to be in the future.
- Then, of course, it’s time to go. It’s time to do the work needed to start checking items off of your goal to-do list.
This is a winning strategy for overall long-term success that’ll empower you to truly realize your life’s purpose and make it a reality.
Conclusion
There you have it.
4 steps to start and accomplish the process of strategic thinking and setting of goals.
All that’s left now is to get to work.
Remember, it all starts with a dream.
Then you turn that dream into a plan.
Then, you start writing that plan down to create goals for yourself.
Then, you start acting out your purpose in life by achieving those goals one at a time.
Eventually, if you follow this roadmap, you’re going to find incredible success for yourself.
All you have to do today is get started.
You’ve got this.
I believe in you.
It’s time to turn those dreams into goals.
Best wishes…
Jay O’Donnell