Know Your Priorities and Supporting Goals
Good decisions are essential for success

Overview

• Know Your Priorities and Supporting Goals

• Supporting Goals

When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that is in itself a choice.

William James

Know Your Priorities and Supporting Goals

Life is filled with choices. Where you go, what you do, and who you become are the result of daily decisions you make.

Decision making usually focuses on the choice between alternatives.
Indeed, it is common to characterize a decision problem by the alternatives available. It seems as if the alternatives present themselves and the decision problem begins when at least two alternatives have appeared.

I think this represents almost all decision scenarios and it should be possible to make good decisions in all cases.
Values are more fundamental to a decision problem than are alternatives.

We should spend more of our decision making time concentrating on what is really important: articulating and understanding our values and using these values to select meaningful decisions to ponder, to create better alternatives than those already identified, and to evaluate more carefully the desirability of the alternatives.
When we know our priorities we are more easily able to choose the best supporting goals.

Priorities are the handful of things in your life, career or business that are important to you.
Priorities are broad elements of life, and they often become misplaced somewhere amongst life's daily routine.

It is wise to have only a few priorities. If you have too many, you’re not likely to respect each of them adequately.
At some point, too many priorities become paradoxical because only a few concerns can be of priority. Goals support priorities.
A single priority may have one or more goals associated with it.
For example, if becoming CEO is a priority in your life, you might set goals to get the necessary education and network.

The choices confronting most individuals are often similar: career advancement versus a happy home life; income goals versus income needs; and group or employment-induced priorities versus individual wants or needs.

A goal is a statement that is specific to what you intend to accomplish, and when you intend accomplishing it.
All the goal setting and attainment you ever fantasized or hoped for, however, won’t be fulfilling if your goals don’t support your carefully chosen priorities.

Of course, your goals can change as previous ones are accomplished and if some of your life priorities change.

Each goal has to support a priority, and each priority is supported by at least one goal.

Decision-making, goals, priorities, result, values, alternatives, decisions, type, definition, challenges, problem-solving, decision making, experiences, problems, solutions, techniques, choices, work, job, private life, mistakes, emotional, rational

Copyright

© 1998 - 2012 Karsten Noack: Consulting, Coaching & Training Berlin
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Updated 05/10/12 - LBR