Tell yourself what you want from your personal goal setting, but in detail and with a plan for how to get there. Most people won’t do this. They will not plan, but simply content themselves with vague notions of "I want to be better off" or "I want a promotion". As the saying goes, by failing to plan, they end up planning to fail. These people will stay where they are, drifting through life, buffeted by forces that they don’t control. If that is their deliberate choice, then so be it and who are we to criticize? But if these drifters have simply gone with the default option, because they weren’t aware that other alternatives existed, then that’s a tragedy.

Give yourself the option in your personal goal setting process. Whether you choose to exercise it afterwards is your affair, but the odds are that when you see everything that you can do, that you can be, you won’t even think twice about going after what you want like a greyhound after a rabbit. The first thing to do is to get started on your personal development plan. We already said that many people don’t go after what they want, and not being able to get started is one of the reasons. Whatever technique you use, this is a critical moment. Once you get just a little bit started, you’ll gather momentum more and more easily.

Brainstorming to get it all down on paper

Here are a couple of personal development techniques that you may like to consider. The first one is to jot down on a piece of paper whatever comes into your head that seems connected with what you might want. If you find yourself sitting there in front of a blank piece of paper, grab a general interest magazine or newspaper and flip through it for a minute to see what that might inspire. Just go with the flow and generate ideas for 15 minutes or so, without any thought of ordering or evaluating them at this stage. When you have made your life goals list, the next stage is then to start rearranging the items in order of priority for you, but not before.

You can also do things the other way round and note down the things that have been buzzing around in your head for the last month or so. By the nature of things, you’ll probably find that once written on paper, there are rather fewer things than you might have imagined and the list starts to look quite manageable. Make sure that you order the list by priority. That way you’ll have a better chance of making progress on the self improvement items that count most, especially as life’s surprises in the future may prevent you from doing absolutely everything that you wanted to.

For each item, you can then start to add in the necessary detail that will put you on track for converting your wishes into reality:

1.What is the timeframe for achieving this life goal? 2.What will happen if I achieve this goal, what’s the payoff for me personally? 3.What will happen if I don’t achieve this goal, what are the negative consequences? 4.What might I need to have done before, in order to succeed with these life goals? 5.What roadblocks might I need to tackle, whether due to me or to outside events?