One of the most missed aspects of goal setting is aligning your values to your goals.
What are values?
Your values are what you define as most important. At their core, values are your strongest emotional drivers. They are behind every decision you make, hot-wired into your nervous system to draw you towards some things and away from other things. To be clear, your values (what’s most important to you) are not things like a car or more money. You need to ask yourself, “if I had the car or money or the job etc., what would that give me?” For example freedom, power, security, recognition etc., It’s these emotional states that we define as your inner values.
What are goals?
SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-based) are really clever for short term but not so much for longer term goal setting.
Aligning values to goals.
Here is the problem – if you have a goal to receive a high academic result in a particular subject but you have a value that is high around freedom or fun and you feel that working hard for that grade will take your freedom and fun away you will not be 100% YES for that goal.
You may hear yourself saying, “yeah I want to achieve that BUT I really want freedom and fun more.” So you need to sort out those conflicts.
When you set a goal make sure you list 3 good reasons (your values) for achieving that goal.
