“If you have a dream, it’s your duty and responsibility towards yourself, to make it come true. Otherwise, you are just a dreamer.” – Marco Pierre White
How do I make the persisting dreams that I cannot get rid of a reality? Where do I start and what does this process look like?” If we don’t figure this out, then we will one day experience regret for ignoring its nagging voice, because we were too scared to take action to turn these dreams into reality. The answer is that through personal goal-setting and achievement you make your dreams a reality… Some people get carried away when it gets to the personal goal-setting process. They would include the whole suite of dreams, aspirations, purpose, vision, mission, objectives, goals, and measures. Generally, I like to keep things simple and not overcomplicate them.
“Visualising your dreams have its own power to complete your dreams. So, visualise to accomplish.” – Diya Raj
Firstly, complete the Balanced Wheel where you use a hub and spoke model where the different areas of your life are documented at the end of each spoke. There is no limit to the number of areas that you might have in your balanced wheel, but the only proviso is that you need to have enough to ensure that your life is not reliant on a few or even one area only, like your career. Balance in life is important, because if you only focus on your career, for example, and you lose it, then you have nothing left.
“Everything in life… has to have balance.” – Donna Karan
It is also important to ensure that you have a dream in all or at least most of the areas on your balanced wheel. My balanced wheel consists of religion and church, family, friends, my business, The Character Company (NGO), my hobbies, and my self-development areas.
Secondly, assign a main personal goal to each of the dreams that you have for each of the areas in your balanced wheel. Then break this main personal goal down into smaller supporting goals, which you need to achieve to support and collectively make your main personal goal(s) a reality. Summarise your main personal goals and supporting goals in a Personal Goals Scorecard to track and regularly reflect on your personal goal achievement progress. Remember to include planned achievement dates, your completion percentage, and your celebration activity upon achievement of each main personal goal.
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” – Peter Drucker
So, what is the risk if we decide to not set ourselves personal goals? Without goals in life, you live on autopilot. You become a floater and the danger of becoming a floater is that you end up in a retirement village one day, feeling empty that you have not achieved enough in life. I know people who started living on autopilot in their forties already, who are not willing to celebrate and experience life up to their last day on earth – PLEASE don’t do this to yourself…
If we don’t translate our dreams in life into setting ourselves personal goals, which we continuously refine and update, then we will die one day at the age of say 80, only to realise that we didn’t do justice to ourselves when we look at what we have achieved over our lifetimes.
“The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short, but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.” – Michelangelo
What if our timing is out and we don’t achieve what we have set out to achieve in time? Well, the reality is that life happens, and things don’t always work out as we planned them. As long as we don’t use this as an excuse to achieve our dreams, our goals. As long as we then put it behind us, regroup and focus once again with everything that we’ve got, on doing the things that will allow us to achieve our full potential and will make us proud of ourselves. This is why the personal goals scorecard is not a static document and why we need to regularly update it. To review it and adjust it continuously, form part of the process of achieving our goals.
“If your plan isn’t working, change the plan, not the goal.” – Darren Hardy
Written by:
Hekkie van der Westhuizen, PhD.
“If you are interested in the topic of Self-Leadership, please look out for my exciting new Self-Leadership book, launching in August 2021”
