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How to Choose Meaningful Life Goals



Achieving goals feels good – it is inherently satisfying to exercise your skills, talents, and abilities to get or accomplish what you desire in your life (Emmons, 1996). In addition, achieving goals that are consistent with your interests and core values, i.e., meaningful goals, enhances feelings of well-being and also satisfies your basic psychological needs of experiencing competence, autonomy, and relatedness (Sheldon & Elliot, 1999). Goal attainment also enhances well-being by positively influencing other facets of your life as described below (Sheldon et al., 2002):
  • Changes in your self-concept (e.g., you view yourself and your capabilities in a totally new way)
  • Changes in life circumstances (e.g., you gain valuable new opportunities or a new intimate relationship)
  • Changes in basic attitudes or philosophies regarding living, which may transform your general mood and well-being
  • Approval from others that enhances your global assessment of yourself
So how does one choose goals that are meaningful? The first step is to find out the areas in your life that you need to work on. More often than not, we tend to focus on one or two aspects of our lives such as work or relationships at the expense of other meaningful pursuits. This is because you may be erroneously defining your self-worth by successes in that particular realm of your life or using it as an escape because other areas in your life are faltering. In this context, the nine life domains described below will provide you a handy guide to balance your goals over all aspects of your life (McDermott & Snyder, 1999).
  1. Academic: Includes formal training, additional courses, seminars, workshops, or other means of continuing education.
  2. Family: Includes relationships with your spouse or life partner, children, parents, grandparents, and your extended family.
  3. Leisure: Includes time without duties or responsibilities, also called “spare time.”
  4. Personal growth and development: Includes self-knowledge and introspection.
  5. Health: Includes eating habits, physical exercise, monitoring alcohol and tobacco consumption, and getting enough rest.
  6. Romantic relationships: Includes relationships with significant others, which may or may not involve intimacy.
  7. Social: Includes relationships with others outside of family or romantic relationships.
  8. Spirituality: Relationship to God or a higher power, or spiritual relationship with nature.
  9. Work: Includes career.
For each domain, rate the importance of that life domain for you and also how satisfied your life is in each domain using the key below:
1 = Very dissatisfied/unimportant
2 = Somewhat dissatisfied/unimportant
3 = Neither
4 = Somewhat satisfied/important
5 = Very satisfied/important

Use the template in the table below to rate the importance and satisfaction for your life domains.

Life Domain
Importance (rate from 1-5)
Satisfaction (rate from 1-5)
Academic
Family
Leisure
Personal growth
Health
Romantic relationships
Social
Spirituality
Work

Once you have completed this exercise, it’s time to pay attention to two kinds of domains to choose your goals from. These are the domains with high importance, low satisfaction and those with low importance, low satisfaction. The former is self-explanatory whereas the latter may mean that you are unsatisfied with the low importance that domain has in your life (McDermott & Snyder, 1999). Try not to choose more than two life domains to work on at a time.  

Whether or not the goals you choose will actually enhance your well-being depends on several factors. These factors are listed below along with questions that you can ask yourself for each goal to understand how these factors influence your chosen goal (Emmons, 1986). For example, if your goal is to increase physical activity to improve your physical and mental health, then ask yourself the following questions regarding this goal:
  1. Value: “How much joy or happiness will I feel when I am successful in my goal?” and “How much sorrow or unhappiness will I feel if I fail to succeed in my goal?”
  2. Ambivalence: “How unhappy am I when I am successful in my goal?”
  3. Commitment: “How committed am I to my goal?”
  4. Importance: “How important is the goal to me in my life?”
  5. Effort: “How much energy and effort do I generally expend in trying to be successful in my goal?”
  6. Difficulty: “How difficult is it for me to succeed in my goal?”
  7. Clarity: “How clear an idea do I have of what I need to do to be successful in my goal?”
  8. Probability of success: “In the future, how likely is it that I will be successful in my goal?” (score this from 0% to 100%)
  9. Confidence: “How confident do I feel about the probability estimation?”
  10. Impact: “Does being successful in this goal have a helpful or harmful effect (or no effect at all) on other goals?”
These questions will help you pick and choose goals that have a greater chance of succeeding. To learn more about evidence-based self-management techniques that are proven to work for depression, check out Dr. Duggal's Author Page.

HARPREET S. DUGGAL, MD, FAPA

REFERENCES

Emmons, R. A. (1986). Personal strivings: an approach to personality and subjective well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51(5), 1058-1068.

Emmons, R. A. (1996). Striving and feeling: personal goals and subjective well-being. In P. M. Gollwitzer & J. A. Bargh (Eds.), The psychology of action: Linking cognition and motivation to behavior (pp. 313-337). New York, NY: Guilford Press.

McDermott, D & Snyder, C. R. (1999). Making hope happen: A workbook for turning possibilities into reality. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications, Inc.

Sheldon, K. M., & Elliot, A. (1999). Goal striving, need satisfaction, and longitudinal well-being: the self-concordance model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76(3), 482-497.

Sheldon, K. M., Kasser, T., Smith, K., & Share, T. (2002). Personal goals and psychological growth: testing an intervention to enhance goal attainment and personality integration. Journal of Personality, 70(1), 5-31.





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