Practice Goal Setting
Find direction. Run your practice your way.

Goal setting is a powerful process for practice planning and achievement. The process of setting goals helps you choose where you want to go in your practice life. By knowing what you want to achieve, you know where you have to concentrate your practice efforts. You'll also quickly spot the distractions that would otherwise lure you from your course. More than this, properly-set goals can be incredibly motivating, and as you get into the habit of setting and achieving goals, you'll find that your self-confidence builds quickly.

 Achieving More With Focus

Goal setting techniques are used by top-level athletes, successful business-people and achievers in all fields. They give you long-term vision and short-term motivation. They focus your acquisition of knowledge and help you to organize your time and your resources so that you can make the very most of your professional life.
By setting sharp, clearly defined goals, you can measure and take pride in the achievement of those goals. You can see forward progress in what might previously have seemed a long pointless grind. By setting goals, you will also raise your self-confidence, as you recognize your ability and competence in achieving the goals that you have set.
 

Starting to Set Practice Goals

Goals are set on a number of different levels: First you create your "big picture" of what you want to do with your practice, and what large-scale practice goals you want to achieve. Second, you break these down into the smaller and smaller targets that you must hit so that you reach your lifetime practice goals. Finally, once you have your plan, you start working to achieve it.
We start this process with your Lifetime Practice Goals, and work down to the things you can do today to start moving towards them.

Your Lifetime Practice Goals

The first step in setting practice goals is to consider what you want to achieve in your practice lifetime. Setting Lifetime practice Goals gives you the overall perspective that shapes all other aspects of your decision making.

To give a broad, balanced coverage of all important areas in your practice, try to set goals in some these categories (or in categories of your own, where these are important to you):

·         Attitude:
Is any part of your mindset holding you back? Is there any part of the way that you behave that upsets you? Are there others in the practice who need an attitude adjustment? Develop goals to develop systems to achieve and maintain good attitudes by everyone.

·         Professional Development:
What level do you want to reach in your career? Is there any knowledge you want to acquire in particular? What information and skills will you need to achieve other goals?

·         Financial:
How much do you want to earn by what practice stage?

·         Work-Play Balance:
How much do you want to work? How much time off do you want? - you should ensure that some of your life is for you!

·         Public Service:
Do you want to make the world a better place? If so, how?

Spend some time brainstorming these, and then select one goal in each category that best reflects what you want to do. Then consider trimming again so that you have a small number of really significant goals on which you can focus.

As you do this, make sure that the goals that you have set are ones that you genuinely want to achieve, not ones that others want you to achieve. 

Starting to Achieve Your Lifetime Practice Goals

Once you have set your lifetime practice goals, set a long range plan of smaller goals that you should complete if you are to reach your lifetime plan. You might develop a multi-tiered plan of progressively smaller goals that you should reach to achieve your lifetime goals. Each of these should be based on the previous plan.

Then create a daily to-do list of things that you should do today to work towards your lifetime practice goals. At an early stage these goals may be to read books and gather information on the achievement of your practice goals. This will help you to improve the quality and realism of your goal setting.

Finally review your plans, and make sure that they fit the way in which you want to live your life.

Staying on Course

Once you have decided your first set of plans, review and update your to-do list on a daily basis. Periodically review the longer term plans, and modify them to reflect your changing priorities and experience.

Goal Setting Tips

The following broad guidelines will help you to set effective goals:

• State each goal as a positive statement: Express your goals positively - 'Execute this technique well' is a much better goal than 'Don't make this stupid mistake'

• Be precise: Set a precise goal, putting in dates, times and amounts so that you can measure achievement. If you do this, you will know exactly when you have achieved the goal, and can take complete satisfaction from having achieved it.

• Set priorities: When you have several goals, give each a priority. This helps you to avoid feeling overwhelmed by too many goals, and helps to direct your attention to the most important ones.

• Write goals down: This crystallizes them and gives them more force.

• Keep operational goals small: Keep the low-level goals you are working towards small and achievable. If a goal is too large, then it can seem that you are not making progress towards it. Keeping goals small and incremental gives more opportunities for reward. Derive today's goals from larger ones.

• Set performance goals, not outcome goals: You should take care to set goals over which you have as much control as possible. There is nothing more dispiriting than failing to achieve a practice goal for reasons beyond your control. These could be bad business environments, poor judging, bad weather, injury, or just plain bad luck. If you base your goals on practice performance, then you can keep control over the achievement of your goals and draw satisfaction from them.

Achieving Goals

When you have achieved a goal, take the time to enjoy the satisfaction of having done so. Absorb the implications of the goal achievement, and observe the progress you have made towards other goals. If the goal was a significant one, reward yourself appropriately.

 When you have achieved a goal, take the time to enjoy the satisfaction of having done so. Absorb the implications of the goal achievement, and observe the progress you have made towards other goals. If the goal was a significant one, reward yourself appropriately.

With the experience of having achieved this goal, review the rest of your goal plans:

• If you achieved the goal too easily, make your next goals harder
• If the goal took a dispiriting length of time to achieve, make the next goals a little easier
• If you learned something that would lead you to change other goals, do so
• If you noticed a deficit in your skills despite achieving the goal, decide whether to set goals to fix this.

Failure to meet goals does not matter  much, as long as you learn from it. Feed lessons learned back into your goal setting program.

Key points:

Goal setting is an important method of:

• Deciding what is important for you to achieve in your life;
• Separating what is important from what is irrelevant, or a distraction;
• Motivating yourself; and
• Building your self-confidence, based on successful achievement of goals.

If you don't already set goals, do so, starting now. As you make this technique part of your life, you'll find your practice accelerating, and you'll wonder how you did without it!