6 Common Goal Setting Mistakes

Goal setting has positioned itself proudly at the forefront of self-development for a fair while now. It’s an important tool for any professional today, and most of us have probably engaged in a goal setting session at one stage or another.

The question is, to what extent is our process actually effective?

Goal setting is a tool that can allow us to lead a life by design, where we are consistently achieving bigger and bigger things that ultimately lead us to a life we’re looking for; rather than simply reacting to our environment without much thought as to where we want to go. To do that, though, we can’t only set goals. We have to set goals effectively.

And, as so many New Years resolutions are written and forgotten, we find many goal setting sessions to be no more than simply that: A session.

I would identify the most common goal setting mistakes as follows:

1. Setting unrealistic goals

Sometimes we set a goal too big to make sense. What I mean by that is, we actually give ourselves a sneaky ‘out’, where we can say to ourselves at the end of the time frame ‘that one was a bit unrealistic anyway, I was never going to reach it’. We take the opportunity away to actually challenge ourselves because we have this statement to fall back on.

Goals — especially short term goals — should be challenging enough to drive us to the next level without being so unrealistic as to justify if we don’t…