Many people feel as if they’re adrift in the world. They work and put in so much energy, but they don’t seem to get anywhere worthwhile. The key reason that they feel this way is that they haven’t spent enough time to think and reflect about what they want from life and haven’t set themselves formal goals. After all, would you set out on a major hike with no real idea of the challenges you will meet and how you will handle them? Probably not! Every year, many people, in the corporate world, parents, and leaders set goals for the new year. These goals are typically ambitious and that’s probably true for you as well. Yet how many times have you set a New Year’s resolution and even gone ahead to make New Year’s resolution vision board just for it to fizzle out after January ends?

If your resolutions rarely come to fruition, it’s time to rethink the way you create goals. No matter what your goal is, perhaps you want to onboard new clients, decrease turnover, bring new technology into your office, build a new house, start a new family, start a new business, etc. According to Forbes, it is right to take the right approach before setting big goals for the year, and make a solid plan so that they become a reality.

Setting goals gives you long-term vision and short-term motivation. It focuses on your acquisition of knowledge and helps you to organize your time and resources so that you can make the most of your life. By setting SMART (specific, measurable attainable, relevant, and time-bound) goals, you can measure and take pride in the achievement of those goals, and you’ll see forward progress in what might previously have seemed a long pointless grind. You will also raise your self-confidence, as you recognize your ability and competence in achieving the goals that you’ve set.

Goal setting is a powerful process for thinking about your ideal future, and for motivating yourself to turn your vision of this future into reality. The process of setting goals helps you choose where you want to go in life. By knowing precisely what you want to achieve, you know where you have to concentrate your efforts. You’ll also spot the distraction that can, so easily, lead you astray. Set your goals on several levels:

• Create your big picture of what you want to do with your life (in let’s say 5 years) and identify the large-scale goals that you want to achieve. Consider what you want to achieve in your lifetime, this is because setting lifetime goals gives you the overall perspective that shapes all other aspects of your decision-making. To give a broad, balanced coverage of all important areas in your life, try to set goals in some of the following categories: career, financial, education, and family. Spend some time brainstorming these things, and then select one or more goals in each category that best reflect what you want to do. Consider trimming again so that you have a small number of really significant goals that you can focus on.

• Then, you break these down into smaller and smaller targets that you must hit to reach your lifetime goals. Once you have set your lifetime goals set a five-year plan of smaller goals that you need to complete if you are to reach your lifetime plan. Then create a daily to-do list of things that you should do today to work towards your lifetime goals. Review your plans, and make sure that they fit how you want to live your life.
• Finally, once you have your plan, you start working on it to achieve these goals.

Above all, it is important to remember that failing to meet goals doesn’t matter much, just as long as you learn from the experience and correct the mistakes that failed you last time.