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Goal Planning Strategies

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Goals are extremely important. They give people direction and give purpose and meaning to their lives. However, goals can often be the source of stress and anxiety. They can lead to depression if you fail to accomplish them, and they can lead to a life of imbalance if you become too obsessed. So how do you aggressively pursue your goals without becoming unhappy, stressed out, and depressed? The best approach is to focus on short-term goals. While it's good to have your long-term goals in the back of your mind, your focus should always be on the short-term immediate goal, between one and six weeks at the most. This is the reason why goal planning strategies often involve breaking a large goal into smaller sub-goals. Here are six benefits of …show more content…

Increase Happiness

People are happiest when they are making progress, and they usually feel depressed when they're stuck in a rut and not moving forward in life. It's much easier to see your progress when you're closing in on a short-term goal than it is when you're focusing on a long-term goal.

2. Sustain …show more content…

People tend to start with a high level of motivation, but after a few weeks that motivation starts to diminish. Short-term goals allow you to sustain your initial level of motivation through to the completion of the goal.

3. Manage Stress

Focusing on the short term makes it much easier to manage the stress that comes with pursuing goals. Stress is part of what motivates people and keeps them moving forward, and it can be a good thing for a short period of time. It's when that stress is prolonged that it becomes a problem. Prolonged stress leads to depletion of willpower and burnout and eventually to giving up. When you accomplish your short-term goal, you can take a break, relax, and recover before pursuing the next goal.

4. Maintain Balance

Carving out time to pursue goals often means giving up or cutting back on other important aspects of your life. For example, you may need to sacrifice some of the time you spend with friends and family or time you spend going to the gym. With short-term goals, you only need to make these sacrifices for short periods at a time, allowing you to maintain balance in your

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