By setting good, realistic goals for ourselves help us to reduce stress and anxiety. By setting good realistic goals gives us direction to our lives, gives us a feeling of accomplishment when we achieve these goals, and helps us be successful, productive and a happy person and most importantly, to have a less stressful life.
What Is Long Range And Short Range Goals
In order to set good realistic goals, we must first understand the process of setting goals. In goals setting, we need to
understand that there are long range and short range goals.
Long-range goals refer to major things we want to accomplish eventually in our lives. It can take us 10 years, 20 years or even our whole life to achieve this goal.
Whereas, short range goals refer to the things we have to do more or less immediately. They are the tasks that we set for ourselves to accomplish each day. A well planned short range goals will eventually lead to the achievement of our long range goals.
For example, if we want to be earn our first million by the age of 35, this is a long-range goal. Short-range goals towards this long term goal would include passing tests and completing assignments in the necessary courses in college, obtaining our college degree, and finding a job that will pay us well. We will also need to have a specific realistic income targets each year and project it to see whether it is realistic to earn a million dollar by the age of 35. If not, we will need to review our goals.
Set Realistic Short Term Goals To Reduce Stress
A good set of realistic goals is not simply putting down what you want. We also need to consider our capabilities whether we can achieve those short term goals in order to get to our long term goals. Otherwise, we will create unnecessary stress and anxiety to ourselves when we fail to achieve our short term goals. Goals and targets should be reviewed every year and modification should be made accordingly.