Targets versus goals

 

Lately I have been thinking about things that I would like to achieve in 2023, and I kept saying that they are my goals, but now I am thinking that they should be considered my targets. What is the different between the two terms for me.

Goals – something that you want/need to achieve and if you don’t, you can get upset with yourself because you didn’t achieve them.

Targets – things that are you are going to strive to achieve and even if you don’t reach the target but made progress towards it, you will be happy.

Now what I have come to realize is that if I say that I am going to have these goals for a year and I don’t reach them, I am very disappointed in myself for not reaching them. What I don’t normally do is think about the reasons why the goal wasn’t reached. There are times when the goal was just out of reach from the beginning, and then there are times when the goal couldn’t be reached because of things that happened during the year to impact the achievement.

This coming year I am going to be aiming for targets and if I reach them, I will be very happy but if I don’t, and I can identify the reason or reasons why they weren’t achieved I will be happy. I know for some f the different things that I want to aim for I am going to be pushing myself, so maybe just having the target is a better idea. In some ways I think we put too much pressure on ourselves when we set either goals or resolutions because you don’t know what the year is going to be like and some of these things can be impacted by things outside your control. For example, did any of us think about how Covid was coming to impact us and our goals in 2020, probably not but did we beat ourselves up because some of the goals weren’t met, we may have.  Now to figure out how to change our mindset to be aiming for targets instead of goals.

It might be very similar for a lot of people, but at least being able to figure out something that you would like to achieve instead of I have to achieve it may help move things forward.  I am now going to work on getting some targets that I would like to achieve in 2023 and then at the end of the year I will be how things went. I will also track things that impact me during the year to determine if it helped me reach the target or not reach it. No matter what I am looking forward to seeing how things go in 2023, and I will see what I achieve and what I don’t, but I am not going to put that additional stress on myself saying that I have to achieve goals, next year I will be aiming for targets.

Hope everyone can figure out what works best for them because knowing if a goal or a target works best can help you see how to achieve things that you want to achieve.