Do you have conflicting goals?

Goal setting has the ability to make significant changes in your life with just a small amount of effort and a few simple changes. However, to do this, you need to set goals correctly and make sure you work on them every day. Without doing the things you need to do every day, your goals will not be achieved. The key is to be consistently persistent.

While goal setting has many aspects, one of the most important is not setting conflicting goals. The thinking behind this is pretty clear. If you set a goal that contradicts another goal, you will either not achieve either, or at best substantially reduce your effectiveness on a particular goal. This article looks at conflicting goals and shows you how to identify the contradictions and address them.

To determine if you have set conflicting goals, you must first have a thorough understanding of what it takes to achieve all of your goals and a detailed plan of how you will achieve them. Only when you know your goals thoroughly and know what it entails will you be able to determine if any of your goals contradict each other.

A good place to start is to look at all of your goals (we assume you have them in writing!) And then start comparing each one and see if something stands out. It should be quite clear whether there are major contradictions. The following two examples show you what some of the contradictions may be.

• Example 1: Let’s say you have a goal to be a competitive long distance runner. You can also have another goal to build muscle in the gym. These two goals contradict each other because to be a successful long-distance runner, you want to have a minimum of body muscle.
• Example 2: Another example might be that you want to live in a $ 1 million dollar mansion, but one of your other goals is to get a job that pays $ 60,000 a year. These two objectives contradict each other.

While the above step seems pretty simple and obvious, it’s amazing how many people don’t!

Another aspect of this process is at the very high level of goal setting. If you set high-level goals in the key areas of your life – health, finances, family / friends, and spiritual / cultural – and actively think about these four mutually supportive areas, then there will also be less chance of having conflicting goals.

While there is no exact science for this, if you have a deep understanding of your goals and what it takes to achieve them, you should be able to quickly tell if there are any contradictions in your goals. It is important to remove any contradictions as they will prevent you from achieving your goals. So set aside 10 minutes and review your goals to make sure they all work together.