entrepreneur
The Advantages of Behavior-Based Goals
When you think about the advantages of behavior-based goals, a few things come to mind immediately. You may be excited to get more done, or get promoted, or increase your leadership skills, or just lead a happier life in general. All of these things are possible with a little hard work and dedication, but setting the right goals makes it much easier.
Increased Productivity
Being a goal-oriented person means making the most of your time. When you start to act on behavior-based goals, you’ll naturally find yourself getting more done. In fact, one of the biggest reasons that people seek change in the first place is to increase their productivity. With a few simple changes, you can stop procrastinating and accomplish a lot more with a lot less stress.
Behavior-based goals like cutting down on procrastination, managing your time more effectively, and concentrating on the task at hand can all help to increase your productivity. Instead of making explicit goals like finishing a report in record time, focus more on staying positive and motivated. You’ll get more done and find yourself experiencing less stress while you do it. You may even end up enjoying the process.
Win Friends and Influence People
Other people are drawn to motivated, goal-oriented individuals; they just appear to be more naturally charismatic. Use behavior-based goals to make the people around you feel valued, and you’ll find yourself making friends and effortlessly leading others. Set out to be the sort of person you want to have around, and friends and coworkers will give you their respect and seek you out for advice.
Making Yourself Marketable
Employers love people who set goals and, more importantly, act on them. They routinely promote people who have a clear idea of what they want to accomplish. Behavior-based goals can make you more marketable and help you rise to the top of your profession. When you think about the sort of people who are leaders rather than followers, you’ll start to see that behavior-based goals are key.
In order to make yourself more marketable, set behavior-based goals that encourage positive interactions and improve your ability to manage stress. Tell yourself that every time you talk to a client or coworker, you’re being given an opportunity to prove yourself competent, valuable, and trustworthy. Before you know it, you’ll see yourself grow into the leader you’re capable of being.
Living Your Best Possible Life
One of the biggest advantages of behavior-based goals is increased personal satisfaction and self-worth. When you’re killing it at work or interacting in a positive way with friends and family, you’ll find yourself becoming happier and more self-assured without even trying. Use behavior-based goals to become a better listener, set aside time to relax, and connect with the ones you love. Your quality of life will improve practically overnight.
Managing Time
“Time is what we want most, but what we use worst.” ― William Penn
Time Management can be a rather misleading phrase. While science fiction has been rather fixated on the subject of managing time via numerous ways, like the idea of time travel, not one person on this earth can really manage time. As a human, the only thing that you can hope to attain is to successfully manage your life’s events in the most efficient way possible for you to have adequate time left for other things that you need to accomplish. Time is the one that manages itself, in every sense of the word.
Was there ever a time in your life when you wished for more time? Did you ever want time to pass even more quickly? There are instances when time seems to fly while on other times, it seems to be dragging. You often hear people complaining how their time at school or work is dragging, while the holidays just pass by all too quickly.
These illusions are merely the effect of how a person reacts to different emotions and environments because whether you like it or not, nothing will change the fact that one day is always composed of 24 hours, no more, no less.
According to research, once the human brain is engaged in numerous activities, it experiences a reduction in the ability to notice how time passes. Conversely, when your brain has less stimulation, it tends to focus on keeping tab on time passing.
Time management is almost as good as safeguarding your money. You protect your money, aiming to use this in the wisest way possible and avoiding any waste. You budget. You balance the money you earn with the money you spend. And just like money, your time is also a limited but valuable resource. This means that the skills that you will need for managing your time is the same with those required for money management to be successful – planning, management, as well as self-control.
By learning good skills in time management, you will have better chances of controlling your time, with the primary goal of improving your life. Furthermore, this improvement must reduce the levels of stress in your system and heighten your energy levels. Through proper time management, you can maintain or come up with the perfect balance between your family, personal and work life while still possessing the flexibility of responding to new opportunities or surprises.
Everyone Has Their Strengths
Saying that everyone has some kind of unique strength might sound like the sort of soppy nonsense you’d get on a motivational poster but it also just so happens to be true.
While we can all feel a little useless at times, no one is in fact completely without unique talents or abilities that set them apart from the pack and it’s important to realize this so that you can go about maximizing your own abilities and using them to your advantage.
Strength as a Strength
A good way to demonstrate this reality is with an analogy. In this case that analogy is going to be particularly apt – we’re going to look at strength as being a strength.
So imagine the biggest and strongest person you can think of – perhaps Arnold Schwarzenegger in his heyday, or maybe Ronnie Coleman if you know your bodybuilders. Now imagine how big and powerful that person would look standing next to Woody Allen… No contest right?
Except it may in fact be that in some ways Woody Allen is stronger than Arnold Schwarzenegger. Let’s say for instance that Woody can wiggle his ears whereas Arnold can’t. Or perhaps another example might be that Woody is a faster talker… and as such has a stronger tongue.
These are muscles – and even though it might not seem it this means that in at least one area someone smaller can be physically stronger than someone massive.
What This Means
So what does all this mean from the perspective of strengths as abilities and skills? Well put simply, it means that even when you don’t feel like you have any clear strengths above your colleagues, friends or the average Joe, you probably in fact do.
Even if that strength is something that you’re good at simply because you have such a unique blend of other skills and abilities. Maybe you’re a little bit good at a random selection of things, or perhaps you have some very unique experience when you combine your school career with what you did in your second job.
All of us are a unique melting pot of different skills, experiences, interests and hobbies… and as a result we all have completely unique sets of abilities and strengths that we bring to the table. Even if you don’t think your skill or strength is something ‘conventional’, that’s still something that just you have and that you shouldn’t underestimate the value of!
Goals Can Give You Purpose And Direction pt2
The next time you feel like you’re in a rut, try setting and pursuing some goals. They don’t have to be outlandish, and you want them to be obtainable. Keep working on them until you complete them. Create a journal to track your progress and get whatever help you can to motivate you. Once you see what is possible by setting goals, you will find you can accomplish just about anything.
You can’t stop the situation of getting into a rut, but you now have a way of getting out of it. You just have to figure out what you want to pursue and set up a plan to make it happen. Then, it’s simply a matter of following that plan.
And don’t give up on the plan; in fact having a well defined plan with pre-determined goals will ensure you have the best chance of success in your endeavours so go NOW and take some action!
Clearing Your Internal Clutter AKA Lets’s Get More Productive!
Do you ever find yourself frozen in time, having spent hours in front of your computer and not being able to account for anything that you have actually done! C’mon be honest 
If you have found yourself spinning your wheels, it could be for numerous reasons. Either you were trying to do too many things at once, or you were concentrating on insignificant tasks and putting off the work you really need to do. Often, as entrepreneurs, we take on too many things, and since we are only accountable to ourselves in the short-term, many times we don’t finish any of them.
What’s your routine? When you get to your computer, what you do first? Do you check your e-mail, Skype, log into messenger, or answer calls? Unless there’s something urgent that you know is pending, this is probably a waste of your best time. The problem is first, these all seem like natural things to do. You want to know what’s going on. Second, these have
probably become habits, and they feel comfortable and even make you think that you’re accomplishing something.
But to quote Dr. Phil, “How’s that been working for you”?
If you’re like most people, you might not be as successful and productive as you’d like to be. The first step to changing that is to admit it, but unfortunately it can also be the hardest.
But be brutally honest with yourself; are you where you want to be? If the answer is no, why not? You need to take the actions daily that move you towards your goals and one way to gain (and keep momentum) is to be productive when you are working on your goals and not wasting time.