What are goals and why do we need them. Goals are targets for you to reach, things for you to aim for, obstacles for you to overcome or a destination for you to reach. Why are they important? Read on and find out.

How can you reach a destination if you don't know what or where it is. Imagine living in the USA and wanting to get to England but you have no idea where England is, you don't even know that you need to take a boat or a plane to get there because you've never even heard of England before.

How hard would it be to reach this destination? I'd say near to impossible wouldn't you? You may stumble on it through shear luck. Maybe you wondered into an airport one day and saw the flight information on the screen but the odds on this are slim to none. This is why goals are so important.

To have a real goal you must have a plan. You must know where you're going, how you're going to get there and most importantly why you want to reach the goal in the first place. We've already dealt with the first one, you can't reach a destination if you don't know where you're going.

The only part we haven't dealt with is how specific your goals need to be. 'I want to make lots of money' isn't good enough. 'I want to make 1 million dollars in the next five years'. Now that's the type of goal you want to be setting. It's specific, punchy and straight to the point.

Secondly you need a plan. This doesn't need to be too specific at first as it will constantly change throughout the process of reaching your goal. It's like a boat cruising across the open water. On it's way to it's destination it is off course about 90 percent of the time and it makes minuscule changes all the way to it's final port. Just like you'll make changes to your plan on the way to reaching your goal

You may even find that half way to reaching your goal the destination itself will change, either slightly or become an entirely different goal altogether.

Finally the most important part. You must know why you want to reach your goal. If you don't know this, if you don't have a strong enough reason for accomplishing your goal then your chances of success are greatly reduced. It needs to be a reason that only the thought of will elicit a strong emotional response.

Ideally you should have two reasons. One must involve all of the great things that will happen once you've achieved your goal, list all of these great things and give them a positive emotional strength. The other should involve all of the things that will happen if you don't achieve your goal, give all of those bad things a negative emotional strength so when you think of what will happen if you fail it instantly motivates you succeed.