“Goals are dreams with deadlines,” says Hal Urban, author of Life’s Greatest Lessons: 20 Things I Want My Kids to Know. Urban stresses the fact that when you set goals for yourself and continue to work towards your goals, you feel a true sense of accomplishment and success in your life.
Goals, whether they are personal, academic or extracurricular related, are important to guide you in the direction you want your life to go. Many times we work harder and more diligently when we know that we are working towards a specific goal, not just a thought about something we’d like to accomplish someday.
In Character Development, we talk about goals and how to set them. Goal setting can be tricky, though. We teach our students that goal setting is not just saying, “Oh, I want to do better in school.” We teach them more critical questions in order to create a true goal. For example, what does “better” look like? What does that mean to you? How can you ensure that you reach your goals?
In order to make sure our students set goals that are reachable, we stress that every goal must have 5 characteristics for it to be, what we call a S.M.A.R.T. goal. Here are the guidelines that we encourage them to follow:
S - specific
M - measureable
A - attainable
R - realistic
T - time-bound
Without these 5 characteristics, your goal is simply a dream, like Hal Urban describes. In order for it to be a true goal, it needs to meet these criteria. With these guidelines in place, it makes it a lot easier for students to work towards their goals and know exactly what and how they are going to reach them.
We want our students to feel good about themselves and the things they have accomplished. So, if they are always working towards something and continually reaching goals, it is our hope that they are gaining a sense of motivation, independence, direction, fulfillment and enjoyment out of this process.
We also want our students to remember that setting goals should not only be done throughout the school year, but throughout the idle days of summer as well. It certainly is nice when you get back from summer vacation and everyone is asking you what you did over the summer and you can tell them all of the great things you accomplished!
