Let me be clear, goal-setting techniques are super important. They will for sure lead to goals that will bring you to a higher level in life. Sometimes you can set goals and you truly believe that they will bring you to the next level, but the results can be disappointing. It could be that you replete yourself physically or mentally with the result you cannot experience the results of the achieved goal fully.

Or maybe you're so committed to reaching your goal that you strip away the balance you had in another dimension of your life. Another possibility is that your goal motivates you and suits you very well, but is just simply not a fit with your personal life.

Or what I detect nowadays is that people have the most amazing motivational goals that suit their personal lives but the end result does not really satisfy them. These are goals that are not in line with their values and identity.

On a football field, the lines indicate the play field and the inner lines determine a successful game. These four pillars determine successful goals. In your job for sure you have best practices that you follow. Consider these four the best practices to always include for a strong goal.

If you make a lovely dish for Christmas, you want it to be perfect. So you follow a recipe step by step seamlessly to create a proven good dish that represents how you want to treat your guest. Consider these four to be the different steps in your recipe that you should follow. Of course you can improvise by making the dish a little spicier, but you should always take the into account.

If we don’t adhere to these guidelines, the football match becomes an unorganized riot, your job performance will be under par and your dish will be a complete mess.

Goals are literally amazing, but sometimes we can lose ourselves in the pursuit of our goals. When we set a goal to run a marathon within 3 hours, it could be that we neglect our mind. Sometimes we also want to read a book or watch a documentary. Or whatever works for you.

A balanced life is a prerequisite for a happy and fulfilling life. All your activities during your week should be centered around the physical, mental, social and spiritual domains of life. The same counts for goal-setting. You don’t want to only set goals in one or two domains. It is important to challenge yourself in all four domains. In that way, all four domains will stay at the forefront of your mind and you’ll feel balanced.

Then the third pillar: goal-setting in harmony with your personal life. You know those people who say that they have no restrictions in their lives. They take life as it comes and do whatever they want. These people don’t exist. It is an illusion. We all have restrictions to a certain degree. That could be a child, a mortgage or your job that you love. But it can also be a country or city that you are attached to or the routine to go for a morning walk. 

We human beings just build a personal life throughout our existence. If you set goals, it is very important they are in harmony with your personal life. If they are not, your personal life will pull you back while you try to progress towards your goal.

Eventually, it all boils down to that we need to know our values and that we need to organize our lives around them. We can decide not to, but that will result in negative outcomes like depressions. For that reason, you need to make sure that all your goals are also value-based. You can have goals that are congruent with your body & mind, suit a balanced life perfectly and are in line with your current personal life, but as long as they are not value-based they will still be goals that will not make you happy over time. Find out more in our goal-setting course.