By Ann Weaver.
On the writing community I’m a part of, some of us have been learning about S.M.A.R.T. goals. I’d heard of them before, but I only just got to read about them throughout this training. Though they taught this goal strategy for writers, it’s good for absolutely anyone.
Today, I’ll be sharing a bit about them and how you can use the S.M.A.R.T. goals system to prepare for the future as a girl becoming a woman.
S: Specific.
Instead of making a vague goal such as, “I want to learn how to cook better”, make goals that actually have specific ends. If you say that you want to be a better cook, that may be great, but you have nowhere to start. You could mean that you want to make more flavorful dishes, learn to prepare meals more quickly, or improve your practical skills such as slicing fruit and boiling vegetables.
To make your goals more specific, find one skill you’d like to improve on within the next six months. Think of how you can break that down into smaller steps, then make that into even smaller steps. The best way to improve is to make short-term, easy-to-understand steps to obtain a specific goal.
M: Measurable.
Once you’ve made your goal specific, you need to make it measurable. This usually means including a number in your goal. If you want to learn to cook and you’ve made your specific goal “I want to learn to prepare meals more quickly”, you have to decide what “more quickly” means to you. Perhaps it means finding 30-minute meals to prepare and then aiming to actually make them in 30 minutes.
When you make your goals measurable, you can know whether you’ve actually improved on your objective. Saying “I want to make five 30-minute meals this week” and being able to check off each meal is a way to track your progress as time goes on.
A: Achievable.
A goal is no good if it’s too large to complete. Each goal must be a challenge, but if it’s too much, you’ll grow discouraged after you fail to reach it after awhile. For example, if you make the goal to prepare five 30-minute meals each week, but you have extracurricular activities on some afternoons and it would make you too tired to prepare a large meal every evening, change the goal to something more achievable- perhaps you could say, “I want to ensure that three of the five 30-minute meals I make is very simple.” (30 minute meals are usually simple anyway, but this might be a sheet pan dinner or crockpot meal. But I digress…)
Learning to make goals on the balance between not too difficult and not too easy takes time, but it’s definitely worth it. You may want to make each goal very easy, then work it up to where it’s challenging, but not exhausting. Your energy will start slacking if your goals are too large!
R: Relevant.
Ensuring your goals are relevant can be difficult. After all, we’re still young. How do we really know what will be relevant to us in a few years? A safe way to go is to make goals related to womanhood and motherhood. However, you still have to watch out to make sure your goals are relevant and assistive to you personally. Goals that are made to measure up to someone else’s goals are not relevant to you at all. Learning to cook quicker meals to outdo your friend is probably not a good reason to make this goal, while working towards it in order to prepare for your future is a much better objective.
Look over your goals and see what’s truly helping you move forward in your overall priorities in life. Not only in the next year or two, but even the next five or ten years! We are never too young to prepare for the time when we will be wives and mothers. Though shorter-term goals are certainly not bad, make sure you look further ahead in order to keep your aspirations personal and assistive in the long run.
T: Time-bound.
Along with all the previous steps, your goals should be time-bound. In other words, your goals should have deadlines in order to challenge and motivate you to actually get them done. If you don’t give yourself a hard and fast due date, you may never make progress. In our example, you could say, “I want to be able to make 30-minute meals within the correct timeframe before the end of four months.” This way, it doesn’t take you two years to learn how to keep your cooking time within the limit- you have a timeframe that you need to achieve your goal within.
The best way to remember your timeframe and not delay it is to put it on a physical calendar. Yes, a digital one may work, but it’s much easier to reschedule your goals there without a second thought. If you put the end date for your objective on a physical calendar, you can’t reschedule your deadline without leaving a large, obvious scratch where you’d put the date down before. It just makes it more apparent that you did not attain the goal in time, and motivates you to try hard not to scratch out the date.
So there you have it! Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound goal setting in a single post. There’s only one thing to look out for: don’t lose sight of the big picture. Your largest specific goal can easily get lost in the distance, and though you may be completing great goals, each of them need to be steps that build on each other to gain a more complicated goal. Once you’ve reached that goal, make more. Soon you’ll be making S.M.A.R.T. goals without even realizing it!
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