What a week! I hope you all are feeling happy and confident that you had the best week possible in your chase for college and future opportunities! With new semesters starting and the looming thought of new year's resolutions, I thought it would be the perfect time to talk about strategic goal setting!
Now this isn't your typical, "I want to get an A" goal setting. This is goal setting with focus and steps to help you achieve your goals and gain that feeling of accomplishment! Let's get started ...
- Define your goal - What is it that you want to accomplish this week, semester, or year? Is it getting an A, is it gaining more followers on Youtube, or is it loosing weight? Whether it is academic-related or more personal, you need to accurately define this goal. Be specific in your goal. You need to quantify it so that you have something to aspire to.
- Quantify your goal - Now that you know what you want to accomplish, it is necessary to put some numbers or some adjectives to it. So you want to get an A, great, but where do you want to get that A? In Bio? In Class Participation? Gym Class? ... etc. You want to get healthy, does that mean eating more salads or working out three times a week? I don't know about you, but I am more likely to work out everyday if my goal is to lose thirty pounds, than if my goal is to "get healthier." Think about it and structure your goal so that taking steps to do it, will be easier. That brings us to ...
- Make your procedure - How ya gonna do it folks? How are you going to map out your days and your weeks so that you have no choice but to succeed in accomplishing your goal? Your goal is to raise my GPA (1.), by increasing all of my classroom grades by five points (2.), and I am going to do this by a). using my commute to school to read my notes, b). stay after school twice a week to work in the library and meet with a teacher, c). locate one classmate who I can study with the week leading up to a test. These three procedures are all small, but very doable aspects of helping this student reach their goal.
Your goal will seem more manageable when you break it down into actionable items that can be worked into your schedule easily.
- Create Check-Ins - If you've ever seen The Biggest Loser on NBC or any of those weight-loss shows, you know that they do a check-in at the end of each episode to see what was lost. Make a check-in a regular part of your goal. For the student above, it could be checking on their grades in each class on Fridays, or if your goal is to increase your number of youtube followers, have a check in at the same time every two weeks. Once you know the numbers, think about what happened that week to help you reach your goal or give you a little setback. Use this as fuel to continue working towards your goal. If you fell off the wagon, then create a new procedure to counteract that until the next check-in. We are all human and we make mistakes, but what's important is to keep working hard to accomplish those goals that you have set!
Setting goals is a part of growing and improving to help us reach a better spot in life. Set yourself up for success by following those four steps so that once you are done with the semester, the year, or even this week. You know that you worked as hard as possible and did everything in your power to accomplish them!
What are the goals that you have set for yourself and how are you accomplishing them? Feel free to comment below or tag me on twitter at @Chasing_College.
enjoy the chase,
skylar
