Imagine you are a tourist in a foreign land and you want to move around and visit all the beautiful places in that particular country. What is the one thing that you will need to have to find out where all the places are? You will probably be carrying a map! This map that you will be carrying will not be like an ordinary, basic map. It will be probably highly detailed on giving you instructions on what types of buses or public transport to take you to your destination. It may even give you an estimated figure on how long you should be walking before reaching your destination from the point that you are at. Can you then imagine going around an unfamiliar place without any maps whatsoever?

Life is almost identical to the scenario that we have written above. We navigate each day in our lives, encountering different types of situations and challenges. However, not a lot of us actually have a map of where we want to go and what we want to do. The scary part of it all is, some people actually live their entire lives like that, going round in circles and they are not even aware of it until its too late.

People always say life is short. The statement is true to some extent. Our time on this earth is relatively short. To live a fulfilling life, all we have to do is to give ourselves a direction to go, but before that can happen, we have to know where we are right now. Only then, we can plan where we want to go and how we shall go about doing that.

At this point, some people may argue that setting goals will surely take out the spontaneity in everyday life. This statement, to a large extend, is untrue. The fact is, if you don't have a goal of what you want to do, you will never have the room to be spontaneous.Why is this so ? Well, if you don't have a goal in life and everyday you are just doing whatever comes up, the greater challenges will probably slip by you because you are too busy working on mundane things. However, if you already have a fixed goal of what to accomplish in a certain time frame, you can handle anything life throws at you because you can be flexible with your goal schedule. Building flexibility in goal schedule is an important part of goal setting. Sometimes when we are trying to attain our personal goals, we may take a wrong turn. If we don't have a detailed map telling us how to get back on track, then we may be lost.

Hence, the most important thing in the personal goal setting process is the drawup of a detailed map and plan what is it that you want to do, where is it that you want to go, how is it that you want to reach there.