Goal Setting Step 2: The True Goals Discovery

Duration: 45 minutes (3 exercises, 15 minutes each)

The purpose

With these exercises:

You will dream…

You’ll come up with new ideas…

And you will be able to imagine your life the way you want it to be.

Why so many exercises?

Probably just one of them will do the job. The problem is you don’t know yet which one will be it.

Our idea is to be able to “explore” your life from different points of view, to look at your inner world from various perspectives and ultimately to give wings to your dreams. For this purpose, we offer a set of tools.

Instructions:

• No limits on your resources;
• Assume you can achieve anything;
• Dream big;
• Have fun.

And don’t be afraid to be spontaneous and overly ambitious in this exercise.

In the next step, we’ll help you organize your goals and set them in small and feasible parts. But for now we are looking for something else – to pinpoint those seemingly impossible and grand visions of yours.

And one more thing – do not forget that you have to be completely uninterrupted while doing this exercise. “Unauthorized personnel” and smartphones are not allowed 🙂

Exercise 1: The Three Questions

This is one of our favorite “dreaming” exercises. We owe it to Vishen Lakhani.

Consider each of the questions below for about 90 seconds. Write anything that might come to mind or from deep within yourself for these 3 super-short brainstorming sessions.

1. What EXPERIENCES would you like to have in your life?
2. How would you like to GROW as a person?
3. What could be your CONTRIBUTION to Life?

Exercise 2: Your roles in life

This is discussed by another “guru” of ours – Steven Covey. We were inspired by him to devise this second exercise.

Here you focus on your roles: in the family (son/daughter, brother/sister, spouse, parent), in your social circle (friend, classmate) and in your work environment (leader, manager, employee, entrepreneur), etc.

1. Make a list of all your roles;
2. Against each write down why it is important to you;
3. Write also how you see the expected progress for each of these roles (there may be several things).

Exercise 3: The areas of life

You may have already heard of the popular notion “Wheel of Life”. It allows you to visualize your current status by listing the most important spheres of your life. Then you evaluate your satisfaction with each of them on the scale from 1 to 10.

We like the part where you deal with the most important areas of life. However, there is no evaluation at all. Here we don’t want to give grades, but focus on how many points you would assign to each if it were perfect in the way you can imagine it.

In this exercise, you have to choose which ones are most valuable to you. Here are a few of the more common ones:

• Health and fitness
• Family
• Friends
• Relationships
• Personal finance
• New skills
• Environment
• Entertainment
• Career/Mission
• Personal and spiritual growth.

Feel free to choose from the above, or to write down all of them plus some of your own choosing.

Finally, write down for each how you want to make any enhancement in it. Maybe you need to exercise a bit more often, or improve a relationship?

 

Continue to step 3 of the goal setting process