Personal Goal Setting And Running Marathons

Title:
Personal Goal Setting and Running Marathons

Word Count:
467

Summary:
Personal goal setting is a powerful tool you can use to bring yourself success, increasing both your confidence in yourself as well as increased respect from colleagues and family members.


Keywords:
personal goal setting, goalsetting, setting goals


Article Body:
Personal goal setting is a powerful tool you can use to bring yourself success, increasing both your confidence in yourself as well as increased respect from colleagues and family members. Unfortunately, personal goal setting can be tricky and is often challenging for people who are not used to organized their goals and tracking their achievements. For this reason, I wanted to write a few words on how to successfully set your goals and improve your lives.

Everyone who is serious about personal goal setting should think of life as a marathon: if you never have been in a marathon before, running to win is not only unrealistic, but also very frustrating and disappointing. But if the first time you race you run just to finish the course, then the next time you will be more prepared and will be able to finish in a better position than your initial marathon. Eventually, if you train and race enough, you will achieve a top ten position in the marathon. This principle applies on personal goal setting too: your first goals should be easy to achieve; the next goals should be a bit harder, and so on. Eventually, when you have "raced" enough, you will be able to easily achieve your more difficult goals, and of course the rewards will be all that more satisfying.

There is no point in setting goals that are too difficult to achieve! If you are not well prepared, then you will very likely fail, and that will be an ugly low blow to your self-confidence. After all, you can't ask a man to build a house if you don't teach him how to lay down a brick first. Like at school, successful personal goal setting is a step-by-step learning process where you think about what you did right and about what you did wrong, and thus you get better at doing it day by day.

If you have a big, lifetime personal goal, you should "chop it" into smaller goals, easier to achieve, and set a reasonable "deadline" to achieve it. That way, you will get rewards sooner, and your self-esteem and confidence in yourself will grow little by little. Besides, if you complete small daily goals you will complete larger goals without even noticing it!

Personal goal setting is all about patience and proactiveness. Patience will be useful when walking towards your long term goals one step at a time and proactiveness will help you to take real action for completing your every day goals. Success doesn't happen all of a sudden: it takes planning and, most of all, action and decision. If you really want to success artistically, improve your career or enhance your lifestyle, then you should start getting serious about your personal goal setting.

Copyright © Jared Winston, 2006. All Rights Reserved.

BONUS : Title:
Personal Power Maps and Creative Ideas

Word Count:
1036

Summary:
An article on using your own resources and strengths in order to come up with creative ideas and initiatives. This simple technique will allow you to map interesting routes for personal creativity and development. Includes a detailed explanation and the author's personal example.


Keywords:
creative idea, creative ideas, creativity, creativity tools, original ideas, presentation ideas, creativity articles, creativity e-books, personal creativity


Article Body:
At about the same time I started to think about building an Internet website, I considered my personal strengths and resources. It occurred to me that it might be a good idea to make a list of all the things I have in my life, as well as the things I have learned and skills I can use. This could help me come up with new directions for my personal development. After I've started writing these things down, I decided to call it "Power Maps" as they outline my sources of power, and could also show me ways to turn my strengths into more powerful actions. In this brief article I will try to demonstrate how I do this, hoping you can do the same. I use my own Power Map as an example, so you also get a chance to know me better...
I began by writing down the major categories of things I do and am related to. Here is what I came up with:

Family & Friends
Places I know
My Studies & Work
Languages
My Hobbies & Pastimes

Try to make your own list now. It doesn't have to be similar to the one I made or even have the same logic or structure. Just try to think of the major things that make up the person that you are.
Next, I added more details to each major category - ending up with many of the things I consider to be my sources of power and knowledge. This is what it looked like by now:

Family & Friends

My wife
My children
My mother, sisters & brother
My friends


Places I know

Israel
Europe
South America

Argentina
Chile
Peru
Bolivia
Brazil


South East Asia

India
Nepal
Thailand




My Studies & Work

Human Resources
Management skills training
Thinking, Innovation & Creativity
Philosophy
Computers

Web programming
Database planning
Online & computer games


Myself as an employee


Languages

Hebrew
English
Spanish


My Hobbies and Pastimes

Capoeira
Diving
Board games



Seeing all that I have in my favor, I already started to feel stronger!
If you want to get the same feeling - take a few minutes to list many of your own sources of power.

Turning power maps into creative action

Now it was time to start thinking how I could turn all those resources into something I could make or contribute. In other words - come up with new and useful things I could do with all I have. What I came up with was consisted of things I did before and could do better or on a larger scale; things I haven't done before but believed I could do; and some other creative ideas that just came up.
In order to distinguish these action ideas from the resources I already listed, I use an undeline for the action items. I am sharing some of these with you:

Family & Friends

My wife
Help your wife pursue her dream
My children
Write children's books
My mother, sisters & brother
My friends


Places I know

Israel
Knowing what it's all about
Europe
South America

Argentina
Chile
Peru
Bolivia
Brazil


South East Asia

India
Nepal
Thailand




My Studies & Work

Human Resources
Management skills training

Tools for planning
Small Business Handbook

Thinking, Innovation & Creativity

Improved Memory Techniques
Building a Personal Thinking Center

Philosophy
Computers

Web programming
Database planning
Online & computer games

Principles of development
Review best games on the web



Myself as an employee


Languages

Hebrew
English
Translation tips
Spanish
Learning tips


My Hobbies and Pastimes

Capoeira
Diving
Board games

Playing tips
Designing & Inventing





Now I had something I could work with. There were other things on the list - this is just to show you the general idea. I am sure that if you try to complete your own Power Map now - you'd have many action ideas.

Bringing it all together

With such a detailed Power Map, you can start looking for practical ways to harness all that power to interesting development possibilities. The strongest creative ideas would be those that combine as many strengths and action items as possible. Consider the creative ideas website I have built (see resource box below) - it combines my power at: English, Internet, Creativity, Management training, and more.

I truly hope this can help you become stronger, more creative, and ultimately happier. If you liked this article and the Power Map tool, you should check out the Resource Box Below for a constantly growing source of ideas and creativity tools.