I spent an hour in my car driving with my fifteen year old daughter talking about goals. I asked her about her goals. She is a on a swim team which she loves. We discussed one of her goals which was to achieve a time of 115 in the 100 meter breaststroke. I asked her what her plan was to accomplish this. She said she would join 2 different swim clubs that ran consecutively so that she would be practicing for several months before swim team started again. Next she was going to work on turns and starts because she knew that was where she lost a lot of time. We also discussed how to compete in a race by listening to her teammates cheering to let her know where she stood in the race. I was very intrigued by how she instinctively new how to accomplish a goal. She also had good reasons for wanting to attain this objective. She wanted not only to be cause she wants the personal victory but because she wanted to help her team.
When we discussed this article over dinner my 13 year old son wanted in. His goals involves baseball. He had many goals for this. One was catching more fly balls.. His strategy involved practicing daily by throwing a baseball off a wall and catching it. He decided to do this 30 to 90 minutes a day till the little league season began. His ultimate desire was to be good at the sport and get to a higher level in his league.
Goals without a plan are just wishes for the future. While wishes do sometimes come true a clearly written plan with action steps have a much bigger chance of success and a clear vision for what you want to achieve with a back up plan when things go wrong and a formula for a New Years Resolution that you can say accomplished when the next New Years comes around.
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