Often we read books or we heard people saying about setting challenging goals. We heard that good goals needs to be challenging enough but not impossible to achieve. This means that the challenging goal that we set needs to be practical and achievable.
If a goal is too easy, then we will have no motivation to achieve it at all. However if it is too difficult, we will feel frustrated and totally give up.
But how difficult is difficult? How challenging is challenging? I think this varies among individuals. Everyone have their own standards and definitions of challenging and difficulty. Take for example to generate an income of 5000 per month. It may be easy for a professional who have a few years of working experience, but for a fresh graduate this may be a challenging goal. For a professional jogger it may be easy to jog for 10 KM in less than 30 minutes. But for a beginner jogger he may start to worry whether he can complete the 10 KM jog at all.
So how can we set a suitable goal for ourself? For me I discovered a good way to do this. First I need know what is my current standard and position. For example in my job I can set a goal to get an increment of 10% of my income in 1 years time. This seems not difficult for me because I can continue to do what I am doing in order to achieve this. 10% increment of salary is pretty normal. I just have to work extra hard to ensure that I get a good performance. But is this goal challenging enough for me? I don’t think so. The goal doesn’t inspire me to put extra effort to achieve it.
A challenging goal in this case will be, I set a goal to increase my income to 100% in a year time. Now I know that if I am continue to do what I am doing, I wouldn’t be achieving my goals. I will have to plan and think hard on how should I achieve this. I need to to extra things, I need to put in extra effort, I need to do things differently. I may need to evaluate many possibilities like job hopping, generate a second income, do a part-time job, or totally change my career path. The goal will stretch me good enough and made me move out from my comfort zone. This is a challenging goal!
How about if I set my goal to increase my income to 1000% in a year time? This seems to be too difficult to me. Imagine if my income is 3000 per month now I am targeting 30000 per month in next year. This can be overwhelming and made me give up totally.
So a challenging goal should be something that require you to move out from your comfort zone. For example you will not be able to achieve the goal if you continue to go to work at 9am and go back home at 5pm. However it has to be achievable.
http://www.victor-fam.com/2006/06/20/set-challenging-goals/
Source: www.ezinearticles.com
