Not Just for Show: Why Goal Worksheets Work

It’s time to ask yourself a big question that has stopped many a doctor or business professional in his or her tracks: what are your goals for your life? The question is deceptively simple. A handful of people know right off the bat, but if you were to walk up to the majority of your family and friends to ask them this question right now, odds are high they wouldn’t have an answer for you. The problem with this for you, doctor, is that in order to achieve success, you really need to know what you’re aiming for.

Without Goals, You Live and Work Aimlessly

When you don’t have goals for your life or your work, you don’t have anything that is pulling you forward and giving you direction. You’re living and practicing medicine aimlessly. Now, this does not mean your life or your work doesn’t have purpose. It most definitely does. What is does mean, however, is that you’re never going to do all of the things you want or hope to do with your life.

This is because it’s so easy to get caught up in the day-to-day, immediate tasks. Your to-do list is overwhelming. If you’re completely honest with yourself, you don’t get to cross very much off that list, since you’re too busy taking care of the needs and problems that popped up today. Sometimes the important things on your “to achieve” list will appear into your mind, screaming to be addressed and giving you guilt for a while, until something else pushes them out of your head.

Setting Goals Gives You Focus and Drive

Goals provide you with the focus you need to accomplish exactly what you want for your life, enabling you to take control. They do this by focusing your efforts, inspiring you to keep going, and helping you invest in what you actually value. When you have goals to work toward, you cut out the unhealthy and unnecessary things that will get in the way of achieving exactly what you want in your life. Sure, it takes work, but having goals allows you to get there.

The key, however, is that you have to actually write them down.

This is absolutely critical. You can’t just think about them. You need to plan them out and break them down from lofty ideas into achievable aims for your life. You can’t write them on a piece of paper and forget about them, either. You need to have them constantly in front of you where you can review and adjust them as you succeed.

Time to Organize Your Goals to Achieve Them

So you understand the importance of having goals and of writing them down. You could easily just create a list of all your personal, business, financial, health, and fun goals on a sheet of paper. Be as big and ambitious as you can. However, we realize that looking at that big list of goals that might seem impossible to accomplish right now can still be pretty daunting. Rather than short-changing your goals for something easier or giving up before you get started, though, it’s time to organize them.

There are plenty of ways to do this—but at Top Practices, we’ve found a few ways that work better than others. This is where the Top Practices Goal Worksheets come into play.

If you’ve spent any time around Top Practices at all, you may have heard of these worksheets before. They are something we use ourselves and work through on a regular basis with our Mastermind members. They go through a process of taking your big list of everything you want to achieve in your life and turning each thing into smaller tasks you can actually accomplish over time. They also help you put a laser-like focus on why you do everything that you do.

When you fill out your goal worksheets, don’t take any section for granted. You might think that one area isn’t quite as important as the others. That’s fine—but don’t neglect it. When you look at all of your goals together, across every area of life, it enables to you to make the changes you need to make in everything so that you can live the life you want to live.