Forget Goal Setting. Set Dreams

"If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams

, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours," Henry David Thoreau once said.

Goal setting may sound dreary to some people because it is associated with too much seriousness and toiling. Student who are taught goal setting the wrong way get a bad impression of this worthwhile exercise. 'Dream setting', conversely, is associated with stronger and more positive sentiments.

Dreams are exciting. They put a smile on our faces. We yearn to achieve dreams and some people even dream about them. Accomplished people like Jesse Jackson, Christopher Reeve, Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey have openly declared the power of dreams in helping them succeed. There is no doubt that dreams work for children as well. Parents and educators can point out the various academic achievements that the student should score to get nearer to their dreams.

Many children would ever have the dream to be pilots or astronauts. Adults should not only immediate acknowledge such dreams, but direct children towards achieving them. Tell them that to be a pilot or astronaut, they will have to do well enough for college. Ask a commitment of academic results from them. Let it come from the child himself so that he owns his dream and his commitment.

As featured in The Secret, dreams of individuals become extremely achievable when they are translated into visuals. Help your students or children come up with A4 posters with a visual of their dreams. Such personalized posters take less than 10 minutes to make with Google images and Microsoft PowerPoint today. Have the child put up this poster in their bedroom, or somewhere they can see it everyday. Inspiring learning and achieving dreams may be as simple as this.

As parents or educators, we regularly get caught up with work and fail to recognize the importance of acknowledging the dreams of our children. Let us not forget the way in which some of us managed to make it through high school and college. It could have been the dream of a better life through higher education, or the dream of earning a place at a prestigious college or a place at a Multinational Corporation, or a dream to be like Barack Obama some day.

Of greater importance is that children have a reliable source of motivation that guide them in their daily decision making. Their worthy dreams are such a source. With a vivid image of LeBron James or Tiger Woods blazing in the subconscious mind of children, they are less likely to pick up that packet of junk food or idle in front of the computer the entire day. The dream of becoming a teacher may awaken a keen interest to school subjects or to people management, skills that they would otherwise not have bothered with at all.

As Eleanor Roosevelt very elegantly put, "The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams - it makes you stretch."

by: Justin Lee

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