Goal Setting Tips for 2020 Youth Program

These goal setting questions and worksheet will help both children and youth in the 2020 Youth Program to be able to set meaningful and productive goals. It will also help them to be successful in accomplishing them.

This past Sunday I had the chance to talk to a group of girls (ages 11-15) about setting goals. I didn’t want to focus on “new years resolutions” because those tend to have a stigmatism around them where you set a goal and a few weeks later you have completely forgotten what you even set.

I wanted to focus more on the reason for setting goals, and the steps that you can take to actually achieve them. Getting the young kids to make a habit of improving themself from a young age, can set them up for some great success later in life. Once they are in the habit of regularly setting goals for themself, they will be able to intentionally evaluate and improve themself for the rest of their life.

Intentionally…that was the main aspect I wanted to sink into their heads. You can’t set a goal just because it is a new year and expect it to stick. You can’t set a new goal on a whim without a plan of attack and expect it to stick.

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So, how do you accomplish your goals?

I’ve found that the best thing to do is to fully break down your goal. Don’t fall into the typical new years resolutions. Instead, start from scratch. Really discover what is going to be the best goal for you.

I took some of the questions for this worksheet from this guidebook.

Discovering what goals to make

• What do I need to change in my life?

• What new skill would I like to learn?

• Who can I serve?

• What habits do I need to make/change?

Now after you have figured out what your goal is going to be, you need to make an action plan. Just writing down your goal is not going to make you successful. Give yourself daily, weekly, monthly smaller actions that need to get done in order to accomplish the end goal.

These are questions you can ask yourself to make sure you reach that goal.

Planning ahead makes a successful road to accomplishment

• What actions do I need to take to reach my goal

• Do I need to split my goal into smaller goals or steps?

• What plans can I take now in order to overcome challenges that may arise in the future?

While thinking about your action plan, ask yourself some of the following questions based on previous accomplishments.

• What has worked?

• What else can I try?

• What has not worked and why not?

• How can I learn from my setbacks

Reflection is an important part of setting and accomplishing goals. You need to be able to evaluate the reasoning behind why you set it, the growth you have had because of the goal, and how you were able to overcome challenges that got in the way.

• How have I grown since setting the goal?

• How can I continue to grow in this area?

• What hiccups got in the way that I can learn from for next time?

Now I’ll walk you through a goal setting break down. I used these questions and goal breakdown while setting some of my goals for the 2020 children & youth program for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

I asked myself the above questions in the discovering section. I decided that I really wanted to improve my positivity. I want to focus on the happy. Focus on being content with my life, and not spending time and energy on the negative around me.

So I set a goal to write in a gratitude journal every day.

From there I thought of the things that could get in my way. The main one for me is time. Something like this could easily get pushed to the wayside because other things are “more important” or “come first”.

So once I have thought of the obstacles that I can foresee, I next find ways to combat those obstacles. Kinda like we are taught in elementary school; “if someone offers you drugs, what do you do”

I worked those into my action plan. My 3 actionable steps are:

•Wake up 10 minutes earlier every day (to combat the time obstacle)

•Set a daily alarm to remind myself to journal

•Get cute pens & stickers for the journal (because cute things make me want to use them!)

Now I can’t go any further than that now, because I just set this goal.

BUT – there’s still 2 more aspects to the goal breakdown to explain.

Accomplishment Date – If you have a date that you want to accomplish this by, there is more urgency to get it accomplished. But if it’s a goal like mine, where it is something I want to do every day, I set a goal that I want to make sure I’ve done it every day by. So I said January 31. I want to be able to not miss a day in that month. After that month, I will then set another date that I want to make sure to reach!

Accountability Partner – Things are always easier when you have some help. Whether it is someone doing the same goal as you, or just someone that can reach out to you, or you can reach out to them to make sure you stay on task. Assign yourself an accountability partner and ask them to keep you on track.

Download the goal breakdown worksheets that also come with the questions you should ask yourself while making goals. Keep these worksheets where you can see and read them often.

Analyze your goals every few weeks!!

You can do hard things.

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