Definition: Life Plan

Personal goals in your life plan

Individuals can have personal goals. A student may set a goal of a high mark in an exam. An athlete might walk five miles a day. A traveler might try to reach a destination-city within three hours.

Managing goals can give returns in all areas of personal life. Knowing precisely what one wants to achieve makes clear what to concentrate and improve on.

Goal setting and planning ("goalwork") promotes long-term vision and short-term motivation. It focuses acquisition of knowledge and helps to organize resources.

Efficient goalwork includes recognizing and resolving any guilt, inner conflict or limiting belief that might cause one to sabotage one's efforts. By setting clearly-defined goals, one can subsequently measure and take pride in the achievement of those goals. One can see progress in what might have seemed a long grind.

Cultural attitudes to the desirability and efficacy of personal goals may differ. For example, the idea of personal goals may clash with the trend of eliminating/transcending the personal self in some forms of Buddhist thought.

Achieving personal goals

Achieving complex and difficult goals requires focus, long-term diligence and effort. Success in any field will require foregoing blaming, excuses and justifications for poor performance or lack of adequate planning; in short, success requires emotional maturity. The measure of belief that people in their ability to achieve a personal goal also affects that achievement.

Long term achievements rely on short-term achievements. Emotional control over the small moments of the single day makes a big difference in the long term.

By accepting a degree of realism within one's own goals, one allows oneself not to change reality to match one's own dreams by one's own efforts alone, but to accept how it is until a certain degree. This degree of "laziness" can prevent one from falling into unhappiness by losing too much control of life by trying to specialize in a very small area and to become a top leader in that field. No matter what level of a layered society one may identify with, it is very likely that one will keep the above and below scheme.

On the other side, to put up personal goals does not necessarily mean merely to put up goals for one's own best. One does not need to put personal and non-personal in a binary opposition as in egoistic/altruistic, body/mind, cultural/natural etc. One[attribution needed] may say that there are elements in the making and realising personal goals that necessarily are transpersonal. In the interzone of the personal and transpersonal, the personal but also culturally dependent judgements of tastes and values will be challenged, and probably changed. In such personal processes, that might be termed "crisis", which often occurs in the processes of achieving personal goals, the hierarchised up-and-down, better-or-worse scheme can be altered.

One formula for achievement reads A=IM where A = achievement, I = intelligence, and M = motivation. When motivation equals zero, achievement will always equal zero, no matter the degree of intelligence. Similarly for intelligence: if intelligence equals zero, achievement will always equal zero. The higher the combination of both intelligence and the motivation, the higher the achievement.

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