Leadership Skills and Personal Growth Start by Setting Your Goals

CommandReady created the Forgedin84 program to help you develop your traits and leadership characteristics.  We do this through support from others in the program, insights into techniques to aid personal growth.  We also share experiences that help guide you through pitfalls vs best practices.  One of the most basic steps in both personal growth and in leadership is goal setting.  You can achieve little in life without first setting your goals. 

Setting Your Goals

Our goal through all of this is to guide you to become the best leader you can be by guiding you to become your personal best.  Sadly, neither leadership development nor personal growth will become permanent unless you take the time to set your personal and leadership goals.  Until you set the goal or goals you want to achieve, nothing you learn will become part of you.  Step one is setting your goals.

Prioritizing your Goals

If you only have one goal, this will be a short step in the process.  If you have a chain of goals you hope to achieve, you need to prioritize those goals.  This will help you focus on the important steps to goal achievement.

Writing Your Goals and Planning Achievement

Once you identify the goals you want to reach, and prioritized you can create your plan on how to achieve the goal or goals you identified.  Writing those goals on paper or typing those goals onto a page is critical.  Seeing your goals helps you organize them by priority.  It helps you devise a logical plan to achieve them.  It turns them from ideas in your head into reality on “paper” that you can hold yourself accountable for reaching.

You can and should refer to your Goal plan regularly.  Add notes on your progress.  Include notes regarding obstacles you are encountering and how you solve those obstacles.  Though this is only for your own reference, by recording your progress, obstacles and solutions, you may see a clearer map to your goal achievement.

Setting Goal Target Dates

Setting goals without an anticipated date of achievement is still just dreaming.  The deadline makes it real.  That means you need be set realistic completion times.  Staying motivated is critical to personal development.  Staying motivated is also critical to leaders.  Setting realistic completion dates for steps toward your goal helps you keep your momentum going as you progress to your goal.

Anticipating Benefit of Goal Achievement

Motivation can be strengthened by visualizing achievement of your goals.  Think about the benefits of reaching your goals and how that will impact you or your project or team.  Enjoy the thought.  Then use it to motivate you throughout the steps toward your goals.  Great.  You laid the groundwork for personal growth.  You created your target goals, wrote the goals you want to achieve and crafted a plan, for goal achievement.  Then you set the deadlines for the steps that lead to your final goal.  As long as you employ your drive and discipline to achieve those goals, you will reach them.  Now CommandReady can help you stay on track and achieve your goals.  We offer bite sized modules with easy to digest information that you can devour one at a time. Learn and absorb new methods of developing the leadership skills you need at a pace that works best for you.  Contact us for more information about Forged in84 and what that program can do for you and your team.