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When you achieve one of your goals, you create a manifestation of a certain belief or value. If you say you value family, your goals may be to get married, have children, raise them a certain way, or to stay close to your extended family. If you value financial security, your goals may be to find a better paid job, start your own business, make sounder investments, or to save a certain amount of money each month.

Once you have determined to value or uphold a certain principle, you can begin to ask yourself: “How do I intend to live up to this value?” Connecting our goals to our values is the best way to ensure that our actions match our principles and that we are not investing time and energy in something that ultimately compromises our beliefs

As with values, we face the same limitations with goals: time. We only have a certain amount of time in our lives and this means we need to seriously evaluate once and for all which goals we need to achieve to feel aligned with our values—and which goals are just dragging us down. This is especially important in terms of any long-term goals we may have. If there is something you have been wanting to achieve for a long time and find yourself never getting to, now may be the time to re-evaluate its importance to you.

Let’s say that your goal is to learn French. You may have wanted to learn the language for years, but find yourself only dabbling and never getting anywhere. Ask yourself if you find learning it really important (it may be aligned with valuing academics or travel) and if you say yes, then go after French actively. Schedule lessons or hire a tutor and set aside time for yourself to regularly study and practice. However, if you determine that it is actually not that important, it may be best to redirect that energy on a goal that interests you more, thus increasing your chances of achieving it.

Of course, our goals may not always be as singular as learning a language. Let’s say that you find “professionalism” important as a value. Imagine now that you are constantly late to work or appointments, and eventually realise that your chronic tardiness is chipping away at your image as a professional, dependable person. To maintain an important value, your goal may be to become more punctual. You may draw yourself up a little plan to make sure to go to sleep earlier, set your alarm clock earlier, set your watch five minutes fast, or make sure to not get distracted by all the little things that keep you from getting out the door on time every morning.

If you find “family“ important as a value, but are always overworked and have little chance to see them, you may try to increase the amount of time you get to spend with your family by setting yourself some goals. You may limit the amount of time you work on weekends, set several nights aside where you will eat together, or ban blackberries and laptops from your next family vacation.

A great exercise for seeing how our goals progress on a long-term basis is to write a year-end report to ourselves, looking at all the goals we had over the year and how well they were achieved or not achieved. This way, we can keep track of the goals we are progressing well on and monitor those that need improvement.

→ Related term at Wikipedia: Goals
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