Setting goals

There are many ways to work on self-development and self-improvement, but setting specific goals for personal growth can increase your likelihood of success. When life serves up obstacles, as it so often does, having a goal that you revisit frequently helps you reset, recommit, and recharge.
It also gives you the motivation and accountability to stay focused and follow through on your plans.

There are five principles of effective goal setting:

Clarity: goals should be clear and well-defined.
Challenge: goals should be achievable but also challenging to you.
Commitment: you should fully commit to your goals to achieve them.
Feedback: you should regularly evaluate and reflect on your goals to stay on track.
Task complexity: you should give yourself time and space to reach complex goals.

Research shows there are three factors to achieving goals:
Motivation to change
Willingness to monitor the behavior
Willpower to make it happen

All three of these have a place within SMART goals, an acronym which stands for:

Specific
When you make your goal specific, you set yourself up for success. Consider answering who, what, where, when, which and why when getting specific about your goal.

Measurable
Having a goal that you can measure will help you stay on track and reach any deadlines you set for yourself.

Attainable or Achievable
While you don’t want things to be easy, you also want to avoid setting goals that are out of your reach.

Realistic or Relevant
This goes along with attainable. There may be a goal you’ve set before and did not achieve because it was not realistic at the time. But now, under different circumstances, this goal may now be realistic.

Timely and Tangible
For a goal to be realistic it also has to be grounded within a time frame, and it needs to be real or tangible.

You can set goals in any part of your life. Some of the more common areas include health, career, financial, and education. These broader categories set the stage for the smaller goals you will work on yearly, monthly, and daily.

While some of your goals may land within those categories, it’s important to recognize that self-development goals also encompass things like learning to paint, learning to golf, and giving back to your community. You don’t have to limit yourself to the most obvious parts of your life.
 

Sources: Very Well Mind