It can be filled with opportunities for anyone who is willing to seek and achieve success in the interior design profession. When the economy is good, there are many opportunities; when there is an economic downturn, opportunities might evaporate in any particular geographic area.
Whether the general economy in your area is doing very well or in a decline, the interior design profession offers students and professionals numerous options and directions for career opportunities. An effective way of helping to determine career options is through determining and setting personal goals.
Goal success does not just suddenly materialize. It is achieved through hard work, determination, and planning. Yet for many, sometimes these goals are never reached because many individuals do not actually set their own goals for the future. Sometimes family, friends, children—all of these and others—may enter the picture and delay or prevent an individual from reaching personal and professional goals. But in most cases, the inability to achieve a goal or a dream is not due to other individuals or job responsibilities; rather, it is usually due to a lack of planning and failure to set goals—or maybe setting the wrong goals.
Why Are Goals Important?
Without some kind of direction, your personal and professional life can be very frustrating and unfulfilling. There is nothing wrong with just experiencing life—letting it happen. However, according to Brian Tracy, “Success is goals, and all else is commentary. All successful people are intensely goal oriented.”2 Setting goals may seem tedious. There are numerous applications available to help you set goals. However, it will be far easier to achieve success—however you wish to define that—by taking the time to set goals.
Let's start by defining goals. Goals are broad statements that help a person define what it is she wishes to achieve. They are concrete ideas that represent something a person wants to achieve. Philosophically, goals are brief stops along the way of life that mark achievement in an individual's personal and professional life. Owning your own studio someday is not an end in itself, even though it may have been the goal. Once you achieve that milestone, you must be ready to create new goals related to the success and growth of the studio. “A goal is the ongoing pursuit of a worthy objective until accomplished.”3
Whether an individual is a student who is still negotiating his or her way through design classes or a professional who has been actively practicing in interior design for several years, personal and professional goal setting is important. When tighter job markets limit choices, students must have a clearer idea of the types of jobs they are interested in pursuing, while remaining open to any reasonable opportunity. The professional who feels unfulfilled needs to take stock of what he has accomplished and the skills that he possesses.
Even though you may have some general idea about what you want out of your personal and professional life, without some kind of concrete plan, you will find yourself reacting to what happens to you rather than having some control over events in your life. Take control. Develop goals that are meaningful for your professional and personal life and watch those goals help you achieve the vision of what you want for your life!
Risks in Goal Setting
Setting a goal requires commitment of time, energy, and mental processes. Some people do not wish to really make a commitment of any kind beyond their immediate physiological needs. In setting goals, a person runs the risk of failure, that is, of not achieving the goal. But not achieving the goal does not automatically mean failure. The goal may be unattainable at the present time for one reason or another.
Not accomplishing a goal should never be thought of as failure because there can be many reasons that the goal was not accomplished. Chief among these is that the goal may have been set so high that it was unattainable in any reasonable length of time. Maybe the goal was set too high based on the experience level of the individual. Designing high‐end residences right after graduation is a great goal, but not attainable for someone straight out of college.
Another reason people do not set goals is because of the risk of feeling the pain of failure. It is emotionally difficult to admit that you have not achieved some goal that you would like to have accomplished. Of course, it is painful to “fail,” but not trying is also emotionally painful. Everyone fails occasionally, and learning from the failure and resolving to fix the issue, or try harder, or do whatever is needed to succeed the next time is very important for successful people.
Here are a few worthwhile thoughts to keep in mind when setting goals:
Set goals that satisfy you—not parents, a boyfriend or girlfriend, a spouse, or peers. Goals that are set to please others or because they expect it of you will rarely satisfy you.
Clarify your purpose in setting a particular goal. You have to know what you want and why it is important in order to work at achieving the goal.
Some goals are unattainable without the proper experience, so certain goals take time to achieve. Be prepared to “pay your dues” in the process of achieving some of your goals.
Be sure you are honest with yourself in setting goals. Sometimes our temperament, habits, or behavior interfere with achievement of goals.
Do not be afraid to change goals or change direction. Life is not perfect, and reality usually does not match fantasy. Be flexible in goal setting.
Unexpected circumstances and a lack of understanding of career requirements are just a few things that can affect your ability to reach your goals.
There is one indisputable fact about life: Life will change. For most, change means growth. So don't be afraid to grow. Being open to a change of plans may offer you an opportunity for personal and professional growth that you had not even considered.
Setting Personal Goals
Whether or not you write a personal mission statement, the best way to set goals is to try to look at yourself in terms of the future. Steven Covey calls it “beginning with the end in mind.”4 In many ways, a similar approach is to write your own obituary today—a rather jarring thought at the age of 21 or at any age. This exercise in goal setting was required by an instructor whom I had in college. The idea was to focus on long‐range goal setting. Occasionally, we all need to look at what we want to be remembered for—what we hope we will be able to accomplish by the time we pass away. Writing that obituary, or at least beginning with the end in mind, has helped many to more clearly see a focus for future actions.
Understandably, writing your own obituary is an unsettling thing to do. It may be easier to start thinking about what you want to accomplish by the time you are 30, 40, 50, and at retirement age. And, if you find that too difficult to do, just try to figure out where you want to be in your professional and personal life during the next five years. Be sure that you include considerations for your personal life as well as professional life. Let me be one of the first to tell you that your professional life should not be your life.
If you are unsure of what you want to accomplish, it might help if you use Tables 5‐1 and 5‐2 to get started. Find a quiet place where you can think undisturbed. Be brutally honest with yourself as you answer the questions in these two tables.
Once you have some idea of where you want to be, you can start looking at goals in terms of the concrete things that you need to accomplish in order
