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Intellect - Goal Setting

Goal-Setting: Making Your Goals Attainable and Relevant

by EVE · in LIFESTYLE

Goal-setting enables you to decide for yourself what you intend to achieve for your vegan lifestyle.

I discuss keeping goal-setting specific, measurable and time-bound in other posts. In this post, let’s take a look at setting attainable and relevant goals.

Attainable

It’s important in goal-setting to keep goals attainable so that we know we can actually achieve them. Otherwise, it can be easy to lose motivation for achieving the goal. If it’s completely out of reach, why even try?

The trick is finding the balance where the goal is challenging enough to stretch you and help you grow but not so challenging that it seems unlikely and causes you to lose your enthusiasm for achieving it.

For a brand new vegan, goal-setting to be the world’s foremost expert on vegan cooking by the end of the year may not seem attainable. A more attainable goal might be to learn 10 new recipes by the end of the year.

(I’m never one to say what is or isn’t actually attainable for anyone, as I think people generally underestimate what they are truly capable of.)

Relevant

By keeping goals relevant, we ensure that we are goal-setting toward objectives that really matter to us. What’s the point of goal-setting if it doesn’t even matter whether or not we achieve the goal?

At times, we can get so caught up in the process of goal-setting that we create goals just for the sake of having them. You see this in career goal-setting when a person sets a goal to earn a promotion for a position he or she didn’t really want in the first place.

Stephen Covey once said, “It’s incredibly easy to get caught up in an activity trap, in the busyness of life, to work harder and harder at climbing the ladder of success only to discover that it’s leaning against the wrong wall.”

In goal-setting for your vegan lifestyle, be sure your goals are really important to you and aren’t just goals you feel you “should” set. Ultimately, you are the person who will be putting in the effort and enjoying the results of achieving your goals, so you want to be sure they are relevant to you.
What is your approach to goal-setting?