As an instructor and school owner, you are very familiar with the topic of goal setting. Often, the Black Belt is a metaphor for excellence and a worthy goal. This is a critical lesson that must translate into you and your students’ lives.
The ability to set goals and make plans to accomplish those goals is the master skill of success. It is the single most important skill that you can learn and perfect. You must absolutely become an expert at goal setting if you wish to fulfill your potential as a human being.
Goals enable you to do the work you want to do, live where you want to live, be with the people you enjoy and become the kind of person you want to become. There is no limit to the financial rewards you can obtain. All you must do is to set a goal for financial success, make a plan, and then work the plan until you succeed.
The payoff for setting goals and making plans is being able to choose the kind of life you want to live, so why do so few people set goals? According to the best research, less than three percent of Americans have written goals, and less than one percent review and rewrite their goals daily.
The reasons why people don’t set goals have been of considerable interest to me. I think that there are five basic reasons why people don’t set goals.
The first reason is that they are simply not serious. Whenever I speak with a man or woman who has achieved a remarkable goal, I learn that the achievement occurred after that person decided to “be serious.” Until you become completely serious and totally determined about your goals, nothing happens.
The second reason why people don’t set goals is that they don’t understand the importance of goals. Young men and women who begin setting goals very early in life invariably come from families in which the importance of goals is emphasized.
The discussion that takes place around the family dinner table is one of the most powerful, formative influences in your life. If your parents didn’t have goals, didn’t talk about goals, didn’t encourage you to set goals, and didn’t talk about people outside the family circle who had goals and were moving toward a higher level of achievement, then you very likely learned that goals are not even a part of normal existence.
This is the case with most people. For many years, it was the case with me.
The third reason why people don’t set goals is because they don’t know how to do it. One of the greatest tragedies of our educational system is that you can receive 12 to 16 years of education and never once receive a single hour of instruction on how to set goals.
Yet, in certain schools where goal-setting programs have been introduced since first grade, young people become excited about goal setting-even if the goal is only to improve their grades by five or ten percent during the course of the semester or to be on time every day for a month.
Children become so excited about achieving goals that by the third or fourth grade, they love to go to school. They achieve the best grades. They are seldom absent. They are excited about themselves and their lives. This is why your work, teaching goal setting in your martial arts school, is so important. Most of your students would never be exposed to it otherwise!
The fourth reason why people don’t set goals is fear of rejection. The fear of rejection is caused by destructive criticism during early childhood, and it is manifested in adulthood in the fear of criticism from others.
Many people are reluctant to set worthwhile goals because they have found that every time they do set a goal, someone tells them they can’t achieve it. The old, negative, military style of teaching can actually be very damaging to a child’s esteem, and create the fear of rejection that restrains so many from setting worthwhile goals.
The fifth reason why people don’t set goals is the fear of failure. The fear of failure is probably the greatest single obstacle to success in an adult’s life. It can stop you more than any other psychological problem. What’s incredible is that you can’t achieve success without failure. It’s an indispensable prerequisite for success.
All great success is preceded by great failure. Indeed, one maxim for success is, “Double your failure rate.” You must try, fall and learn, and then try again. It’s important to realize that to succeed through goal setting, temporary setbacks and challenges are inevitable parts of the goal-achieving process.
