Whether it’s writing your bucket list, looking after your physical fitness or simply getting those important jobs out of the way, setting goals is a vital component in planning for the future and ensuring that life meets your expectations.
This is particularly true as you get older. Not only do you have to think about the ways you would like to spend your retirement, there’s your health to maintain and important financial decisions, such as taking out a funeral plan to make. By setting goals in all aspects of your life, you give yourself a clearly defined objective to work towards and make achieving it that much easier. Here, we take a look at a few more reasons why it can be a good idea to set goals as you get older.
Fresh perspective
Though most people focus on the benefits of working hard towards their goals, it’s also important to note the positive aspects inherent in the actual goal-setting process. By sitting down and taking the time to think about the areas of your life on which you would like to focus, where you would like to improve yourself and what things are important to you as an individual, you can often get a fresh perspective on how you’re living life and what can be changed. It’s all too easy to go through life without asking these difficult questions of yourself, so any opportunity to do so should be embraced.
Looking after your health
Whether you’re setting physical fitness goals or more general lifestyle goals, having a plan of action and knowing how you want to spend your time is incredibly important to remaining fit and healthy. While all physical exercise, no matter how gentle or intermittent it is, helps maintain healthy body functions, other hobbies, activities and excursions also help to ensure your mind gets a workout too.
Keep learning
As you get older, there’s often a tendency to slow down and begin to drop or stop activities and hobbies that you have maintained for many years. While there’s no problem with slowing down -it’s only natural as you age- it’s important to ensure that life doesn’t become a matter of sitting back and simply observing and reminiscing.
Such an attitude can often lead to a type of mentality that considers life already lived, with there being nothing left to strive for. No matter your age, this simply isn’t true. By setting goals and keeping motivated, you can stave off these unhelpful sensations and continue to live a fulfilling and purposeful life, and keep learning new things.
Making the most of your time
Setting goals in later life is all about making the most of your time and ensuring you do things that you feel are important and valuable.
For many people, retirement offers freedom from the 9-5 commitments of professional life and the opportunity to live a largely pressure-free and enjoyable life. Most of us will have worked hard for the majority of our lives in expectation of a comfortable retirement. Consequently, setting goals to ensure you remain active not only makes the most of your free time, but also makes the most of all those years working hard to earn such a retirement. Planning ahead and prioritising certain goals allows you to justify all of those years spent working by ensuring you enjoy those yet to come.
The reward
Finally, setting goals is important in later life because of the incredible amount of satisfaction achieving them brings about. Although this is true of setting and achieving goals in any stage of your life, the feeling is oftened amplified as we got older and begin to think of ourselves as less able or less likely to do the things that are important to us.
By setting goals and working hard to achieve them, we give ourselves the opportunity to feel that satisfaction time and time again, whether it’s something as simple as redecorating the house or as life-changing as learning a new language.
If you need some goal inspiration, check out our bucket list ideas article.
