Goal Setting
Jan 24th, 2012 by usfclce
[R] = Ryan
[J] = Joey
Goal Setting
[R]:
Good morning everyone and welcome to another CLCE podcast. I am Ryan Newton, Graduate Assistant at the Center for Leadership and Civic Engagement and I have with me another very special guest this week.
[J]:
Alright, my name is Joey Montahand I’m a coordinator in the Center for Student Involvement and also an instructor in the leadership studies program here at USF
[R]:
Well, we’re really excited to have Joey. Not only does he contribute like he said in the Leadership Studies Program, but he does some amazing work up at the Center for Student Involvement and we really hope that if you haven’t been up there before you’ll definitely go up and check out some of the programs that they put on. some weekend events and things like that! But today we’re going to talk about Goal Setting. It’s that time of year again. It is the season to start thinking about where you want to be at the end of the school year and what do you want your grades to look like. what’s your future path and how do you want to get there? And so, we’ve asked Joey to come in and chat with us a little bit about goal setting and some ideas he’s got.
[J]:
Right and goal setting is just incredibly important. not just for college students, but also as working professionals that all of us will be one day. It’s really important because otherwise without goal setting we’re living a life just kind of in default mode. We’re kind of reacting to everything that’s happening and we don’t have anyone really to blame but ourselves if we’re not setting goals. So, goal setting just becomes really important because then those that set goals are really much more proactive and kind of have a greater influence in life in general.
[R]:
You know what Joey? I really like the concept of setting goals. I think it is really important as you just illustrated, but I think an important piece of it that some people don’t know about it is the how. You know, how do you set your goals? How do you make sure that you know you’re successful and things like that?
[J]:
Yeah, well setting goals is really all about creating short term goals as well as long term goals. So, short term goals maybe “this semester, I want to have better grades” and even going, putting the short term goals under the microscope, it can make them measurable. So, instead of “oh, I just want to have better grades this semester, I want to have a 3.5 this semester. A long term goals: “I want to, I want to have a successful career. Yeah that’s great, but how do you make that measurable? And that’s really a place where to start and the cool thing about setting goals in general is that it really often leads to an examination of values. I remember I set a goal one time and was like “I want to make $100,000 by the time I am 35 years old!” Well, it, it really makes me think about what’s important in life. It’s not just about like the salary at this point, and kind of examining my values really led me to that realization.
[R]:
I think that’s a beautiful point to because when you set those goals, you kind of find out what’s important to you. You don’t maybe think about it consciously all the time, but subconsciously when you sit down and you put that goal down to get a 3.5 you say “look, my academics are important to me; they’re core to the fact that I’m a student at this university and I want to be successful and really defining that success like you just mentioned is a crucial piece of it. How do you define success? Because to some people, success is a 3.5 to others it’s a 2.5, and still to others it just means having a great core friends around them and just graduating college, even if that means they have to get a 2.0 to do it.
[J]:
Absolutely, and really finding that vision that you want, , either short-term or long-term is really going to create a gravitational pull toward what you really want out of life.
[R]:
I think the question is, when you are setting these goals, when you look at these values, I think the question is, why? You know? Why are you doing these things and why are they important and that goes back to those values?
[J]:
Yeah and I like to think of setting goals sometimes as an analogy to a car. , sometimes we, well often times we fill up our cars with gas and we spend a lot of money taking care of the car, washing the car, changing the tires, rotating the tires, changing the oil, this and that, and for what? Why do we spend all this money on a car? Well, if we know where we’re going, if we’re going on a trip or we’re going to class this car has got to get me to campus every day. This car has got to get me to my work every day. You know? It makes it a little more worth it you knowing that you have got to upkeep it to take care of the car, but if you’re just driving around “I’m just going to drive around, just going to drive around” the short term daily tasks that are tedious to us become less important and we kind of lose that motivation to really, keep the upkeep going.
[R]:
Absolutely, I remember a story from Disney’s Alice in Wonderland the original cartoon, where Alice is wondering through the forest and the Cheshire cat runs into her and she says, well can you tell me where to go? And he says well where do you want to be? Well, I don’t really care, I don’t really know. And he says, well then you can go any which way you like and it just kind of illustrates that point further that you know if you don’t have a destination you’re just kind of driving around in that car aimlessly; it’s a waste of time. It’s a waste of your, of your resources and your energy. And so, we really want to encourage you to think about your purpose and think about your final destination. What is it that you want to get to? What is your vision? And how are you going to challenge yourself and hold yourself accountable to getting there. Setting measureable goals, things that you can look back on and say look, I did this. It will build a little momentum and before the end of the year, you know, it will have a snow ball effect and you’ll start feeling really good about some of the things you’ve been able to accomplish. So with that we’d like to thank Joey again for coming on today, I hope you enjoyed and hopefully learned something or gained some insight from this podcast about goal setting. , I definitely want to encourage you to visit Joey up in the Center for Student Involvement. Swing by the CLCE anytime, we’re always happy to have you and as usual thank you again; we hope you tune in next week and go bulls!
[J]:
Go bulls!
