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SET YOUR GOALS TO CONQUER STRESS

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SET YOUR GOALS TO CONQUER STRESS

Pramod Batra

What is your goal in life? When I ask this simple question in training courses, I get different answers. I look at life and have come to the conclusion that my goal in life is to make myself happy first. If I am happy, I can make others happy. To remain happy, my goals are: to do my best in my job and to keep busy when I am not working. To reach this goal I have cut out all inessentials in life. It is like this: in our work and social life there are two types of tasks-essential and inessential. We can survive by doing what is essential only. For this reason, you will notice that many of us are successful and happy even when we work for less hours or earn less money. To sift the essential from the inessential, you have to be smart.

I focus on one thing at a time. Earlier, I used to do many things at the same time to achieve more goals or to reach the goals faster. It used to become stressful. I learnt the lesson from driving to Faridabad daily for twenty long years. At stressfree speeds, it took me thirty-five minutes to reach Escorts. At stressful speeds, it took twenty-eight minutes. I realized that it was foolish trying to save seven minutes everyday! Moreover, during a stressfree drive, I was able to think and occasionally excellent ideas popped up!

Very often, by prioritizing, you are able to fix and refix goals and this reduces stress. Here is a good story for you: The first-ever employees to make a million dollars a year were Walter Chrysler and Charles Schwab in the USA. Schwab once asked a consultant to suggest how he could get more done in a day. The consultant, after spending a week with him, suggested the following: “Every morning, write down what are the six most important things you want to do on that day. And start doing the first one first. And then the second and third. And if by then the day is gone, next day add three more. Do it for one month and if it works, send me your payment.”

Schwab sent him $ 25,000.
Well, what do you and many of us do? We think that we are very smart. So we do several things at the same time. This “cocktail” of activities only confuse us and we forget that 20 per cent of what we do will yield 80 per cent of the results and vice versa.

Be effective…do the right things now. And then try to become efficient by doing these the right way. Very often, we spend considerable energy working the other way round — doing unnecessary things with great gusto.
Success often comes to those who set their goals and then do all they can to achieve them. Have you ever imagined life without goals? For example, in hockey or in football, what would the game be like if there were no goals? And if there were no watch or timetable, the game would be meaningless and stupid.
Very often you will see many of us working without goals and without time limits for achieving these non-goals. Isn’t it meaningless? A goal must have a meaningful end and an action plan with dates to achieve it.

Years ago, I asked my son why he went jogging all the way to India Gate (6 km away) and why he did not jog in the lawn next to our house by taking 30 rounds of the lawn? He said that when he kept India Gate as his goal, he ran up to that point and on reaching there had to come back, but if he were running around in the lawn, it would be too tempting to give up after taking only a few rounds.
Do not be oversensitive to failure. Mistakes and failures are the best teachers. After a failure, reset your goal.

Another aspect of goal setting is the basis. Should goals be need-based or greed-based? My colleague Ajay Raman rightly said, “Needs can be met, greeds never.”

Of course, I don’t mean that you should be satisfied. Keep on achieving more and more till you are satisfied, happy and content. All say is that while setting your goals, don’t be overambitious. Set realistic goals and once you have achieved them, review them and set higher goals the next time.

In every step towards your goal, you overcome short-term problems. When you aim for perfection, you are moving towards your goal realization. You may be miles away, but you will be leading in the right direction. A goal is nothing more than a dream with a time limit.

Take small, small steps to achieve your goals. Many people fail to arrive at their goals because they try and take steps, which are too big, too quickly. Let us learn from a high jumper. If the goal of a high jumper is 6 feet, he does not start 6 feet. He may start at 4, 4½, 4 ¼ … right!! 

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