Goals
Goals
A Road Map to Vitality
After your first step, you wanted to run. After your first somersault, you wanted to do a back flip. After you landed your first job, you wanted a better one.
You've had goals all your life. Each time you accomplish a meaningful task you feel a surge of pride and exuberance. Like most women, goals are an essential part of your life. They give you vitality and energy; they keep you going.
"Goals presume there is a future worth living," says Marilee C. Goldberg, Ph.D., a psychotherapist in private practice in Lambertville, New Jersey, who specializes in cognitive and behavior therapy. "They can keep you moving forward, which keeps you optimistic, and having something to look forward to can help you feel younger."
"Goals sustain a woman's sense of well-being and purpose. It's just natural to feel better about yourself and feel worthwhile if you're being productive in some way," says Barry Rovner, M.D., a geriatric psychiatrist at the Thomas Jefferson Medical Center in Philadelphia. "It's this basic: Like your heart needs blood, your mind needs to have a focus or a goal," he says. "People without goals feel lost and adrift."
They Do a Body Good
All of us have goals, including the mundane ones like paying bills on time. In fact, in any given week the average woman is fulfilling dozens of goals that may include reaching a sales quota at work, getting home in time to see her daughter's soccer game or taking an evening stroll with her husband, says Paul Karoly, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Arizona State University in Tempe.
"We all have the same general desire in life, and that is to get from point A to point B," Dr. Karoly says. "At the core, that means having goals and learning to navigate toward them. Studies indicate that people who have reasonable goals are more satisfied with life and feel better about themselves."
Goals can also help you keep your mind and body in peak condition, says Dennis Gersten, M.D., a psychiatrist in private practice in San Diego and publisher of Atlantis: The Imagery Newsletter. "If you don't have goals, what happens? You won't be motivated to maintain your health and keep up your body," he says. "Your life won't have meaning and you won't feel complete. So having goals makes you whole spiritually, physically and emotionally. And being whole can make you healthier and relieve stress."
Goals prevent boredom, and that's important because boredom can put you at higher risk for disease, says Howard Friedman, Ph.D., professor of psychology and community medicine at the University of California, Riverside, and author of The Self-Healing Personality.
"Something's going on there, but we really don't know how it all fits together," Dr. Friedman says. "It may be that when you feel challenged by a goal, it triggers a psychophysiological process in the body. Or it could be that people who have goals do other positive things like eat better and exercise more."
In addition, difficult but achievable goals may be more invigorating than goals that are perceived as easy or impossible, Dr. Karoly speculates.
"If you see the task as either easy or impossible, then you have no motivation," Dr. Karoly says. "If you see it as reasonably possible, then it's worth your while to try it. When you do, your heart rate may increase and you may feel more energetic."
Is Your Goal Really a Dream?
Imagine you want to drive from New York to Los Angeles. But when you get in the car, there's no road map and the highway has no signs. You'd have no way of knowing how far you'd traveled or if you were going in the right direction. That's what it's like to have a dream or vision without goals.
Goals are the road maps, the highway signs, that help you stay on course so you can fulfill your dreams, Dr. Goldberg says. Dreams or visions are often difficult to fulfill simply because they're vague. Goals are specific.
"People get confused about the distinction between goals and visions, and that sets them up for failure," Dr. Goldberg says. "Saying 'I want to be popular' is a vision, not a goal. That statement has no criteria to measure if you're making progress and is impossible to fulfill. A goal would be 'I'm going to phone ten people and ask them to have coffee with me, and I won't stop trying until one of them says yes.' You can measure that. You'll definitely know if you made the phone calls and whether someone said yes."
Mapping Your Strategy
Your goals don't need to be grandiose or spectacular to energize you, says Dr. Gersten. But whether you're trying to spend more time with your family, organize a yard sale or raise $1 million to build a new community center, the more carefully you shape your goals, the more likely your dreams will be transformed into reality. Here's how.
Write 'em down. Committing your goals to paper will make them more tangible to you, says Dr. Friedman. Keep your list in a conspicuous place and check off your goals as you achieve them. Be sure to include a mixture of easy goals that will encourage you, such as reading the newspaper every day, and several more difficult ones that will challenge you, like increasing your productivity at work 10 percent.
Do first things first. After you list your goals, decide which ones are most important to you and start working on them. "People often do the least important things first, and the things that are really important to them never get done," Dr. Friedman says.
Be picky. Try not to spread yourself too thin. If you have more goals than you can realistically accomplish, you'll drain your energy and feel discouraged and depressed. It's better to have one or two well-defined goals that are meaningful to you than a dozen less important ones, Dr. Friedman says.
Love your goal. Choose goals that you feel passionate about, and you'll be more likely to follow through on them, Dr. Gersten says. So if you start collecting silver spoons, but your heart really isn't in it, you're probably not going to stick with it. But if you're a devoted tennis fan, odds are you'll be more successful if you start collecting autographs or other memorabilia.
Go for the positive. "Instead of concentrating on what you don't want, create a goal that expresses what you do want," Dr. Gersten says. Positive goals are more pleasurable and more effective than negative ones. If you say, for example, "I won't eat eclairs," you're focusing your attention on a negative goal. That can actually make eclairs more tempting to you. A better goal would be "I'm going to eat a more balanced diet that includes more vegetables, fruits and grains. Then if I want an occasional eclair as a treat, I can have one without feeling guilty."
Be real. Goals not only need to be specific, they should be realistic, Dr. Goldberg says. If you say you're never going to watch television again, that's probably not realistic because goals that include absolute words like "always" or "never" seldom are achievable. A more specific and reasonable goal might be to limit your viewing to no more than two hours of television each evening.
Make it good for you. A goal that is torturous to achieve or jeopardizes your health isn't worthwhile. "Some women will say 'I'll kill myself to do this thing,' " says Dr. Goldberg. "You have to take your well-being into account no matter what your goal is. So if you want to plant a garden, but you have a sore back, forcing yourself to get down on your knees and do it is a poor idea. If it's really that important to you, ask a friend or pay someone to do it."
Set deadlines. Without time lines to nudge us along, many of us would never reach our goals. "Setting a deadline doesn't mean that you're bad if you don't make it," Dr. Goldberg says. "But a deadline does give you a point in time to shoot for. Then if you haven't accomplished everything you'd planned when time is up, forgive yourself, re-evaluate your plan and reset your time line."
Divide and conquer. Chopping your goal down into several intermediate steps will make it seem less overwhelming and more achievable, Dr. Goldberg says. If you want to set aside $2,500 over the next two years for a trip to England, you're probably going to have a harder time saving the money if you set your sights on getting the whole amount than if you find ways to save $3.50 a day or $24 a week.
Involve your friends. If you tell a friend about your goal or, better yet, get her to help you work on it, you'll be more motivated to stick to it, Dr. Friedman says.
Find an idol. If someone you admire has achieved a goal similar to yours, use that person for inspiration, Dr. Gersten says. Put her picture or quotes in a prominent place like on your desk or refrigerator. Take a moment each day to imagine the thrill of achieving what she did.
But don't compete. You should learn from the success of others, but you shouldn't set out to outdo them. If you're a songwriter, for example, you should study the works of the great pop artists, but you shouldn't feel like you need to sell more recordings than Madonna to be a success. "You'll be less stressed and more creative if you try to be the best that you can be, rather than try to be the best in the world," Dr. Gersten says.
Let go of your ego. Prepare yourself for rejection and criticism. In fact, you should welcome it because criticism can help you focus your goal. "When you begin working on a goal that is important to you, you should put your ego aside and let people chop your work up," Dr. Gersten says. "For example, I'm writing a book, so I gave it to six friends and asked them to tear it apart. Then I paid an editor to do the same thing. As a result, I had to completely reorganize the manuscript. But if you want to successfully reach your goal, you have to open yourself up to criticism like that."
Forget perfection. If you think you have to do something perfectly, you'll probably never achieve your goals. Remember, you don't have to do something perfectly. "You want to do your very best, but your goal shouldn't be perfection," Dr. Gersten says.
Keep your perspective. Goals are fine, but if they interfere with your family or social life, you could be headed for trouble, according to Brian Little, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario. "Your goal might be to lose 20 pounds, so you begin jogging for an hour every morning," he says. "But unless you talk to your husband, you might not realize that he enjoys talking to you during that hour because it's the one time of the day that you can be alone together before the kids get up. So your goals not only have to fit your needs, they also have to be timely, fair and take the social needs of others you care about into consideration." In this case, instead of jogging for an hour, perhaps you could compromise and do it for 30 minutes twice a day.
Envision success. Imagine that you've already achieved your goal and people are praising your effort. It may motivate you to accomplish the goal and do it well. "I imagine the book that I'm writing is at the top of the New York Times best-seller list, and that makes me want to create the best book that I can," Dr. Gersten says.
Treat yourself. Give yourself rewards, such as a new compact disk, a manicure or a nonfat frozen yogurt when you complete a goal, no matter how small, Dr. Goldberg suggests. It serves as an incentive to set and accomplish new tasks. And don't forget to give yourself a pat on the back.
Update your goals. "It's important to reassess your goals every six months because circumstances may have changed, and some goals may not fit your needs anymore," Dr. Goldberg says. If that's the case, don't hang on to it. Let it fade away and then choose something else that is important to you now.