Goal setting is clarifying your needs and desires and then converting them into special and measurable goals. One of the strategies a student can employ to overcome poor academic performance is to set goals that will unleash your subconscious mind’s power to achieve them.
Andrew Carnegie said, “If you want to be happy, set a goal that commands your thoughts, liberates your energy, and inspires your hope.” This wonderful statement answers the question, “Why goal setting is important in life, especially for students.”
For any student to be successful academically, he/she needs to take a smart and strategic approach. You can’t get to the peak of academic success without you consciously calculating your way toward it.
In his book “The Success Principle”, Jack Canfield says goals represent incremental life improvements. They are like plays that gain you 4 yards in the football. But what if you could come out on the game’s first play and throw a 50-yard pass? That would be a quantum leap in your progress. Just as there are plays in football that move you far up the field in one move, there are plays in life that will do the same thing.
Benefits
Improve students’ learning and motivation: When students set their own goals, they take responsibility and ownership of their learning goals. Motivation is the psychological feature that arouses an organism to action toward a desired goal, the reason for the action, that which gives purpose and direction to behaviour. Setting a goal as a student helps you get motivated to take action that will aid your learning process.
Personal development: One of the benefits of setting a goal is that it helps you gain mastery, learn new things, and become a better person in the process of achieving your goals. To achieve a big goal academically, you will become a bigger person. Also, you will have developed new skills, attitudes, and capabilities, i.e. you would have been stretched in so doing. Students who invest in their goals also demonstrate greater persistence, creativity, and risk-taking in achieving those goals.
Increased “structural tension”: increases your brain’s structural tension. The brain is a goal-setting organism. Whatever you give to your subconscious mind, it will work night and day to achieve. Your brain wants to close the gap between your current reality and the vision of your goal.
Setback awareness: It helps you know what has been subconsciously stopping you. The moment you set a goal as a student, some thoughts will start to crop up in your mind, like I can’t read for that long, learning that subject may not be easy, it isn’t possible or achievable, etc. This is about why achieving that goal won’t be possible. The good news is that goal setting will bring those fears and considerations into your conscious awareness so that you can deal with them, confront them, and move past them.
Time management and ability to stay focused: It enables you to organize and plan how much time you spend on specific activities and helps you maintain concentration during the period you set aside.
Measures your progress: For instance, if you say I will read two pages of a history textbook daily around 10 pm – 12 am and on June 2, I should have finished the whole text. The time you have set will enable you to measure the goal of reading a whole textbook within the 2 months you set.
Last, on goal setting, if you are bored with life and don’t get up every morning with a burning desire to do things – you don’t have enough goals.
