Personal goal setting comes in two varieties. You have your short-term and your long-term goals. When you are ready to start achieving them, here’s what you should do.

Sit down and make a list. Be specific. “I want to lose weight” is not specific. “I want to lose three pounds this month” is specific. It is also measurable and attainable. In a month, you will be able to see that you have achieved it and you can come up with a new short-term desire.

Make a number of headings that include your long-term goals. For example, some common long-term goals are these:

• Buy a home in X number of years

• Pay off the credit cards in X number of years

• Start a business in X number of years

Underneath each heading you would list the steps necessary to achieve those goals and those steps typically become your short-term goals. You can use some very non-specific headings, such as “getting rich” or “being happily married”, as long as you have an idea of how to work towards those things. For example, under “being happily married”, you could list join ABC club in order to meet people, if you are single.

The next step for personal goal setting has to do with your thought processes and your beliefs. You need to learn how to attract the things that you want in your life.

Some people always seem to get what they want. Others never seem to take the first step towards fulfilling their dreams. If you sat down and talked to those people individually, there are a few things that you would notice.

First, you would notice that the people who always seem to get what they want are happy people, with a positive outlook on life. You might think that’s simply because they have some of the things that they want in life. You might also think that the reason the other person is negative is because he or she has had many failures.

If you asked them about personal goal setting, the positive person would likely tell you about some of the things that he or she is working on right now. The negative person…well, often they have just given up.

Here’s a secret that only a few people know. In order to attract positive things, you need positive thoughts. Your thoughts create a kind of vibration that goes out from you, bounces off of other things and comes back towards you. Thinking positively is a “must” for personal goal setting, if you want to really achieve those goals