Page 22 - 3.2

JIMINY SELF-HELP HANDBOOK 22

Personal Goal Setting and Proactivity

Personal goals are the expressions of the things we want to achieve in life. We set goals for our career,
our health, and our life in general. Undeniably, goal setting is everywhere and make us feel more self-
motivates and positive-minded. We are often encouraged to think about the next milestone. However,
what we do not think about enough is about the process and steps of setting personal goals.

We can find easily different models for goal setting in the self-help literature. For example, in business
world, SMART (acronym stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound) is a
helpful mnemonic way to create goals. Setting SMART goals can help to clarify our ideas and focus our
efforts, which allows us to allocate resources in a way that promises the most return and the highest
chance of achieving these goals.

Time-bound

Realistic Anchor your
goal to a
Your goal
Attainable specific time
must be frame
Measurable Be doable and
responsible have the right
Specific Establish and honest amount of
concrete about what challenge
Be specific criteria for you can
about your measuring reasonably
goal progress accomplish
toward the
attainment of
mini-goals

Also, the positive psychology offers a useful three steps framework for setting life goals:

1. Goal design – in this first step, we should define goals that are concrete endpoints (i.e. clear and
detailed), approached-based (i.e. workable towards) and breakable into sub-goals
2. Pathway generation – after having designed our personally meaningful goals, we can start thinking
about different potential pathways (A, B, C) for achieving them, and on what resources will be
needed to pursue each one of those same pathways
3. Overcoming obstacles - when setting life goals, it helps to consider the possible barriers that might
arise and self-reflect about potential strategies we might use to deal with them
Despite the way chosen to set our goals, prioritise them is crucial. Prioritising is about identifying the
most personally important life goals we have defined, write them down and then do a ranking. To do
so, we can use a scale of 1-5 or 1-10, or whatever works for us, as long as we systematically apply the
same ranking system to all of our goals. The most important ones should stand out – Is it feasible or
realistic to focus on the top five goals? Or is three a more viable figure?