Personal Goals & Values

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Personal Goals & Values

Having personal standards can be a very useful and helpful way to motivate yourself to accomplish your goals.  Within personal “standards”, there are goals and values, which are both equally important. 

Personal goals are pretty self explanatory-they are goals that you set for yourself to achieve in the future. There are a few different categories of your life that you can make goals for Is there a level you want to reach in your career, what do you want to accomplish?

Financial-How much do you want to earn?

Education-What is something you would like to learn more about?

Hobbies/Enjoyment-Do you want to get better at something 

Physical there a weight goal you want to reach? Do you want to build more muscle?

Attitude-Is there something you want to change your attitude about? Or would you like to improve your attitude overall?

Community Service-Do you want to do more for the community? What goals can you set for yourself to achieve these objectives?

A helpful thing to think of while setting these goals, is to use SMART goals. 

S-Specific

Make your goal specific, for example, if your goal is to lose twenty pounds, make it more precise. Make a target weight that you want to reach, instead of “lose twenty pounds”.

M-Measurable

Make your goal measurable. In things like attitude, it may be hard, but in, for instance, community service-hours of public service are measurable. 

A-Attainable

Your goals should be attainable, but not overly simplified.  You can make several smaller steps to achieve a bigger goal. And for a smaller goal, don’t make it something extremely simple to do. In summary, make your goal a balance between easy and challenging. 

R-Relevant 

A relevant goal may be pretty simple to understand but having a relevant goal just means having the outcome of your goal be something important. While hobbies and pleasurable activities are significant in our lives, you can sort your goals by priority, and what is more relevant at the time.

T-Time-bound

Now, goals aren’t meant to be accomplished in two days, but it’s important to make sure to keep track of time while you are working towards your goals. To further specify your goals, you can set a day/week/month you want to achieve your goal. 

Using SMART to help you set your goals and make you efficiently and realistically set your ambitions. 

What are personal values? They are the things that we find important, characteristics that motivate and guide us to make decisions. Examples of characteristics that someone may value are kindness, honesty, loyalty, and many more. We are all different so we have different personal values. For example, you may value freedom, so if you live alone, you might enjoy it. However, some may value intimacy, so living alone might not be as pleasurable for them. According to Andrew Blackman on Envato tuts+, here are some questions to get you thinking about your values. 

  1. What’s important to you in life?
  2. If you could have any career, without worrying about money or other practical constraints, what would you do?
  3. When you’re reading news stories, what sort of story or behavior tends to inspire you?
  4. What type of story or behavior makes you angry?
  5. What do you want to change about the world or yourself?
  6. What are you most proud of? 
  7. When were you the happiest?

Some of the answers to these questions can tell you what some of your values are.  Also from Andrew Blackman-here are some examples of different behaviors/characteristics that people value:

  1. Achievement
  2. Adventure 
  3. Courage
  4. Creativity
  5. Dependability
  6. Determination
  7. Friendship
  8. Health
  9. Honesty
  10. Independence
  11. Integrity
  12. Intelligence
  13. Justice
  14. Kindness
  15. Learning
  16. Love
  17. Peace
  18. Perfection
  19. Security
  20. Simplicity
  21. Sincerity
  22. Spontaneity
  23. Success
  24. Understanding
  25. Wealth

The list above are just a few of the many things that people value, yours can be similar or very different from the ones above. 

Why are personal values important? As I said before, these values are what guide us to make decisions. If we become aware of these values, we can help to fully understand the reasoning behind our decisions and help with goal setting. Your values can inspire your goals. If someone said one of their values was kindness, this could help them set a goal to be kinder or practice a better attitude towards others and themselves. Having personal values can also help to reevaluate your lifestyle. If learning was an important characteristic of yours, think about it. Is learning a big part of your life? What are you doing to help yourself to keep learning every day? It can be small, little things like installing a trivia app or reading a couple of interesting facts every day. Even small contributions towards your goals make a big difference, especially in the long run.  

All in all, having personal goals and values is a really helpful thing that you can incorporate into your lifestyle. They can help you to reach your goals and understand yourself a little bit better.

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