Achieve your goals!

Have you ever dreamed of doing something different in the future?

And then, after thinking about it, deciding that it’s all too hard; that you’d never be able to do it; that there are too many things to stop you and so on and so on.

Well, that’s OK. Because just about everybody does this at some time in their life - you’re not the only one. Sometimes there are good reasons for not being able to make a change, but often it’s the way we think that is actually stopping us. We think about it so much that it goes around and around, making us dizzy!

If you want to try something different, goal-setting could open lots of doors for you and help you to manage your thoughts.

Take a moment to quickly write down some goals you would like to achieve. Don’t think too much about whether you would actually be able to achieve them or not - just write whatever comes into your head. We’ll come back to them later.

Let’s look at the health care setting. You might already be working in an organisation or you might be studying with the aim, or goal, of finding work in a health care organisation.

When you first start your job, you will do some induction training. This is training that will give you the knowledge and skills to carry out your duties properly. You will most likely also find that there is a lot of training that you are required to do on an ongoing basis so as to maintain your skill levels.

There might also be training that you are interested in doing to improve your skill level or career prospects. While you might think about doing something like this, actually doing it can be difficult if you don’t do some planning around it.

Setting goals

Setting goals will help give you focus and direction. By setting a broad goal you can then work out the smaller steps or strategies by which you can achieve that goal. You can set a long term goal or a short term goal. You can make a 25 year plan, a 10 year plan, a 5 year plan or a one year plan. Even a 3 or 6 month plan is a great way to start.

Example:Kristina has decided that she would like to have completed a Certificate IV in Ambulance Communications in the next five years - this is her long term goal. At the moment, she is working in general transport and has just started some training to become qualified at Certificate I level. Her short term goal is to successfully finish this initial training by the end of the year.

Working out your goals is not always as easy as it sounds. If you set yourself unrealistic goals, you’re also setting yourself up for potential failure. When this happens, you might feel that you have failed, and lose confidence in yourself.

However, there’s also nothing wrong with trying something that you think will be very difficult or that you think you would never be able to do. Sometimes, it’s only because you think you can’t do something that you don’t do it - even though you are capable of doing it!

That’s why it is important to:

• spend time thinking through all the options - are these goals really what YOU want?
• know what barriers there might be to achieving your goals and look at ways to work around them - do you have other personal goals that might affect your career goals: you’re getting married, going travelling?
• talk to people about what you want to do, get ideas that you might not have thought of - family, professional development officer and careers advice centres offer different perspectives.

To help you get started, here are some strategies to think about when working out your goals:

• Write your goals down. Go back to them and re-write them until you feel that it’s all there. Write them in the positive rather than the negative.
  Not -- "I don’t want to still be doing the same job in five years"
  But -- "In five years I will be doing such and such".
• Make realistic goals. There is no point in setting yourself a goal that is going to be impossible to meet. This doesn’t mean that it can’t be difficult.
• Make the goal clear so you will know if you have met it.
  Not -- "I will understand more".
  How will you know that? How can you measure it?
  But -- "I will be able to list three problems and four ways to overcome these issues". You will be able to see whether you have met your goal.
• List the possible barriers to achieving your goal. But don’t let them put you off necessarily. You may just need to re-write the goal, taking any barriers into consideration.
• Give your goal a time frame. If you don’t decide on a time and date by which the goal is to be achieved they have a tendency to never be completed. So set a time for completion. Make it realistic.

When you feel comfortable and confident about the goal you have set for yourself, it’s time to work out the steps to meet the goal. This is when you ask yourself what you have to do to get there. But remember to break these up into small, measurable, achievable steps so that each time you complete a step you can cross it off the list. This way, you will really feel as if you are making progress.

Example
After asking yourself what you need to do to achieve your goal, you decide that you need to do some further training. But don’t just leave it at that. You can break it down further. For example you could write steps like these:

• Find out where I can do the training.
• Find out where and when it is. Decide if I can manage this.
• If a cost is involved, can I afford it? If so, do I need to budget? If not, are there any alternatives?
• Book or register for the training.
• Plan study time.
• Start the training.

Prioritising your goals

Prioritising is all about working out which are the most important strategies or duties to complete and in which order. Do they need to be worked out on a timeline basis? This is where things that may take a longer time to achieve will need to be started earlier than another task that may be completed a lot quicker.

Are they being worked out on a priority basis, this is where one thing needs to be completed first as the other tasks cannot be undertaken until this is completed.

Now’s the time to have another look at the goals you wrote down earlier on. Take one that you really feel capable of achieving and develop it further using the guidelines we just covered. Then go achieve it!