Select SMART Goals to lead your Successful Career in the Right Direction

"You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream." –C.S. Lewis

It is praiseworthy to announce new goals in your social circle. However, your professional decisions should not be misleading your career; walking through the smoke of uncertainty and a few incredibly wrong choices crawling you in the wrong direction leaves you in a state of internal conflict.

The intention of an individual committed to any endeavor should be to design Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time-bound goals to leave no space for mismanagement, as the SMART goals were intended by George T. Doran in 1981 in his Management Review to allow every person become smart by setting up action-oriented goals.

The following list of SMART goals can be relatable for many, whether you are a school or college student, enthusiastic job seeker, hopeless or active struggler, an unsatisfied or successful professional or budding entrepreneur.

Specific: You need to know sooner or later what will be your profession. In case you have not decided yet, or you want to get a clear picture of yourself to stand confident in front of a mirror or targeted audience, you must take personality tests available online for free of charge. After answering strategic questions, you get to accept your core values, enduring strengths and major weaknesses. The more you get to know about your day to day responsibilities, the more you can prepare yourself to fulfill them with utter self-confidence.

Once you know you want to be a doctor, your next step is to figure out whether you will be a licensed heart surgeon or a general physician. To keep confusion out of the loop, you keep a clear impression of the reality in your subconscious mind that you are going to bring up soon. The specific goal can be any particular salary figure as 1,40,000 INR per month or the projected amount of weight loss as 10 Kg as the specific target. The following statements do suggest why a specific part of setting up the SMART goals is extremely important:

· You have to precisely know what the tasks for each day are, to avoid wasting time as a distraction is scattered all over there. In this way, you can keep yourself focused on a specific goal according to which you can remain on track.

· The need of the hour for the education system is to ensure students feel motivated, which is possible by setting up the correct goal. The performance of the student will increase if they are not bombarded with irrelevant and unclear goals.

· The professionals working in every industry are always running out of time, which makes them feel stressed. You need to organize your hectic routine by keeping a self-organized to-do list to hit the consciously chosen target. You tend to be a lot more productive to concentrate hassle-free, even in a chaotic environment where everyone else is making noise.

Measurable: When you seek to purchase flawless and attractive gold, you cross-check the units of a carat that it possesses to protect yourself from getting fooled. You need to measure your specific actions against a standard scale, whatever you have set out to invest your money, time and efforts on. The number of placements on record is the measure of how worthy a particular college is. You have to set up the standard parameter to ensure you are making the right decision, as trying to move back will cost a lot of money and time. For instance, if you are learning a foreign language for professional purposes, the weekly practice test will be regarded as a reality check apart from qualifying for the certification exam. The following ways lead to how you can measure your goals such as:

· The source of measuring your progress can be your seniors, such as teachers, lecturers and experts in your subject area to share genuine feedback with you.

· If it is a professional course, not just attend the class as where you can be measured by active participation in discussions, sharing what you learned and completing assignments with high scores.

· If you have a business idea in your mind, your expected topmost performance level has to match up with the standard criteria to call it either success or failure. Your financial performance can be measured against the projected Return on Investment (ROI) for each year.

· It is advisable to be accountable while relying on frequently talking to a few people you can open up yourself with so that you can track your progress while comparing the truthfulness in your past conversations.

Attainable: The main reason for living a dissatisfying life is not achieving the expected outcomes resulting due to a lack of planning the career. The associated problems are emerging in the form of not acknowledging the talent, developing personal and professional issues and not following the interests. It is due to dependency on traditional strategies upon which many people and institutes rely to date. The need to move on from the past is to accept innovative steps that tend to be attainable with practice. Therefore, your goals can be attainable when they get aligned to the present and consider the futuristic possibilities.

A lack of sufficient funds can not drive you toward your dream destination. Your health status must be fit for the journey you are embarking on to call it an attainable goal. As you plan a vacation, business or education, you need to calculate an estimated budget. Only if you contain the required amount you continue with the strategic plan. The following ideas deal with changing the thought process to accept you can achieve anything you are motivated and strategic about, such as:

· A research study confirmed that striving to achieve is connected with the concern to get succeed in the short-term to exhibit a high level of motivation. When we consciously know we are proximate to the long-term target, it is possible to draw in more efforts. The boundless flow of learners with the upsurge of motivation to acquire a foreign language end up using a bunch of strategies.

· Breaking down a complicated piece of structured work is the key to unlocking the potential to aim high while your actions match up with each word.

· You come up with an attainable goal when you beam with sheer confidence that you will go any way to reach out to the most admirable person you follow, making you think your goals are attainable.

Realistic: Making incremental progress is way better than not progressing at all. You can continue your routine while sticking to atomic habits, motivating yourself to improve the automatic habits you find no longer useful, but still, you are stuck with them. Try waking up 5 minutes early each day rather than deciding to wake up at 5 AM in one go. In this way, you will be rewiring your mind to attain the realistic goal, as it is a psychological fact that making a big change takes time. It can be 5 minutes each day. The following strategies are helpful to make yourself real as it is the demand of every endeavor you step into.

· When you are headed towards a very distant destination, it is better to not take risks and turn the navigation on. Not living in a world of illusions is the tendency to be realistic, knowing the importance of each footfall. Otherwise, you might be rushing in the wrong direction with no reverse gear. Therefore, it is recommended to write down your goals somewhere that you can come back to so that you take more action and less overthink.

· A long term goal seeks out a clear path which can be confusing if you don't know whether you should go left or right at a certain point in time. At worst, you may even need to take a U-turn and waste your energy, time and money wandering here and there, getting no clue about what to do next. Though, recharging your mind with positive thoughts is a way to connect all dots even if there are certain things not going in your favor. For example, after stepping into different disconnected careers, you might be working as a fresher again. However, you may think of starting your own company in the future for which you need diverse experience.

· The sign of being unrealistic is to avoid making excuses for missing out on strict deadlines, business meetings and action-oriented targets. People do not like those who are clearly telling lies and procrastinating on their important goals due to illogical facts.

Time-bound: It is certain that you are going to either miss or hit the target with a fixed deadline looming around the activities you are pursuing. This sense of clarity is the purpose of choosing the goals while keeping the strict deadline so that you end up taking action. If you are not clear about the date you are supposed to submit the work to the client, there is hardly any chance you will be trusted again.

Time boundation is a crucial technique in story-telling, attracting two characters to share as much as they can before they separate again. Similarly, the same approach works out well in every aspect of life as we have limited time to talk and more results to produce daily, suggesting time management as a skill to master. Success in professional and personal life is all about leveraging your best efforts timely.

When you reach on time, your value increases, leaving nobody to doubt you. However, when it is an emergency, reporting to the concerned person on time is the right duty. The following ways work well for everyone who is committed to working:

· As a lot of day-to-day tasks are really boring in nature, there is no alternative but to complete them on time. It gets really frustrating when you are a creative person who is responsible for finishing off on time while sticking to a fixed pattern or flexible yet exhaustible projects. It is very reliable to use the pomodoro technique, which can be implied by working in the segment of 25 minutes, after which you take a break of 5 minutes. Whatever is going on in your mind, you note it down on a piece of paper to check it out during that short break, in addition to utilizing it for a short walk or talk to gain energy again. When you are done repeating this strategy four times, you are now ready to take big breaks as long as 20 minutes to 2 hours.

· While venturing into a new course, you need to ensure how much time you will dedicate each day to cover the entire syllabus in multiple revisions. Every coursework is planned to keep a certain tentative date on paper to stick to it so that everyone moves in an organized manner. The course management system has emerged as a technological solution to keep students, teachers and parents in the loop from the time new enrollments occur to the final assessment. The importance of this technological shift is to utilize extensive data so that goals are not only constructed early but regularly tracked till the completion of the course.

· A lot of career-oriented people tend to work flawlessly to meet the deadline as they develop and upgrade their skills, considering the timeliness associated with a project. Since there are only consequences associated with not meeting the deadline, the motivation tends to be higher while progressing further, and the stress level increases if the deadline is coming close.

In conclusion, we are bound to get physically tired and mentally frustrated if we keep putting all our efforts in the wrong direction. Therefore, the practice of setting up unclear goals will probably lead to nowhere as every dreamer is bound to have a functional pair of eyes to enjoy the sight of a peaceful future. While it is good to set a new goal time and again, when it comes to career, we do not go to school and college all our life. Also, changing the chosen career and business, again and again, may lead to trouble as we only have limited time to explore certain things. Designing SMART goals sets up our feet to walk through not only the desirable path but also acquire more unpredictable success at any age, time and place.

The journey of setting up a career in your chosen field can be a daunting task for any beginner as, along the way, hurdles may not sound like milestones initially due to any level of performance turning into futile attempts. However, when you start living a successful life, such former learning experiences get turned into wisdom after getting a brutal slap on the face with toxic comments, self-doubts and awkward silence. If you plan your career around SMART goals, you fine-tune your life into order having no need to face frequent setbacks.