Setting goals helps trigger new behaviors, helps guides your focus and helps you sustain that momentum in life. Goals also help align your focus and promote a sense of self-mastery. In the end, you can't manage what you don't measure and you can't improve upon something that you don't properly manage.

How often do you set goals? How often do you revisit your list? We all know that setting goals is important, but we often don’t realize how important they are as we continue to move through life.

Goal setting does not have to be boring. There are many benefits and advantages to having a set of goals to work towards.

Setting goals helps trigger new behaviors, helps guides your focus and helps you sustain that momentum in life.

Goals also help align your focus and promote a sense of self-mastery. In the end, you can’t manage what you don’t measure and you can’t improve upon something that you don’t properly manage. Setting goals can help you do all of that and more.

In this article, we will review the importance and value of goal setting as well as the many benefits.

We will also look at how goal setting can lead to greater success and performance. Setting goals not only motivates us, but can also improve our mental health and our level of personal and professional success.

Before you continue, we thought you might like to download our three Goal Achievement Exercises for free. These detailed, science-based exercises will help you or your clients create actionable goals and master techniques to create lasting behavior change.

Goal-setting theory (Locke & Latham, 1984) is based on the premise that conscious goals affect action (Ryan, 1970) and that conscious human behavior is purposeful and regulated by individual goals. Simply put, we must decide what is beneficial to our own welfare, and set goals to achieve it.

Why do some people perform better on tasks than others? The goal-setting theory approaches the issue of motivation from a first-level perspective; its emphasis is on an immediate level of explanation of individual differences in task performance. According to Ryan (1970), if individuals are equal in ability and knowledge, then the cause must be motivational.

The theory states that the simplest and most direct motivational explanation of why some people perform better than others is due to disparate performance goals, implying that setting and adjusting goals can significantly impact performance.