Personal and Professional Goals: What’s The Difference And How To Set Them

Written By: Taylor Rao

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Goal setting is an important part of life. Even when you’re trying to “live in the moment”, it’s totally natural to think about where you’re going in the months and years to come. 

And as we reach different milestones, we start to think about the life we want to build and how we plan to get there, and we typically start by setting a variety of short and long-term goals that we hope to check off along the way.

But here’s the thing --as you’re making that list, do you find it filled with work aspirations but light on the home side? Or vice versa? It’s easy to become consumed with making improvements in one part of your life or another, but it’s important to make sure your list is balanced by including both personal and professional goals. There is a difference, and there’s a lot of reasons why making that distinction is important in setting yourself up for future success.

What’s the difference between personal and professional goals?

Professional goals are related to what you want to accomplish with your education and your career. While personal goals are generally more connected with your health, happiness, relationships, and well-being.

What Are Professional Goals?

Professional goals are usually aspirations that will help you realize your version of “success” in the working world, and they can be tied to things like qualifications, degrees, or achievements that are already commonly respected in education or business. For example, one of your professional goals might be to finish a master’s degree in your field or to get a promotion with your current employer. 

These types of goals can often be closely associated with a timetable that, for the most part, you can control --especially when it comes to educational things like obtaining an advanced degree or certification on a schedule that works for you.

Professional goals are important because, while money doesn’t equal happiness, the average person will spend 90,000 hours at work over a lifetime. If you’re spending all of those hours doing something you hate, it may feel like three lifetimes. But making a good living and being fulfilled in your job can make a huge difference in your overall happiness and make other life goals possible.

Professional goals can also have a ripple effect on other parts of your life. If you strive to be the first person in your family to reach a certain level of higher education, reaching that goal may make you feel more fulfilled, while also inspiring the next generation of your family.

What Are Personal Goals?

Now personal goals, those can be a little more loose --especially when it comes to creating a timeline. Personal goals are often a bit more feeling-based or emotional, yet they may present achievable milestones that can happen in a clear step-by-step path --or they may not. Personal goals could be related to your physical health, such as weight loss or completing a half marathon, or they could apply to your mental health, like teaching yourself yoga or maintaining a journal, or they could simply be lifelong goals, like wanting to get married and have a family someday.

Personal goals, in some ways, may be harder to set and achieve than professional goals. When it comes to work, achieving goals often means higher pay, a better position, or a new job. Those outcomes alone can be enough of an incentive to keep you pushing forward. Whereas with personal goals, the benefits aren’t necessarily monetized so they can often take a backseat to goals that have more tangible results. They are also frequently forgotten - because who’s got time for personal goals when you’re just trying to survive?

That’s fair. But without those touchy-feely goals, it can be difficult to quantify personal growth and if you’re not growing - you’re stagnating. Even if you don’t realize it immediately, eventually, a lack of forward motion in your personal life can lead to a lot of unhappiness.

So now that we’ve covered the difference, how can we set realistic personal and professional goals?

Focus your goals around your #1 (you)

This is important. It’s easy to tie our personal goals to the idea that we need someone else in our lives to make them happen for us, particularly as it relates to finding a life partner. (Which is an extremely common, realistic goal, by the way.) But to set realistic, achievable goals from Day 1 --you really only need one person on your team, and that’s you.

For example, a personal goal could be to travel more and plan small vacations throughout the year. Maybe it’s checking a new country off your bucket list or taking one road trip a month. And while sure, you can use the excuse that it would be better to have someone to go with, solo travel has become more popular and more socially acceptable.

Social media has created a bursting forum for sharing stories about adventuring out on your own. It’s a fulfilling, rewarding experience in a totally unique way and doesn’t need to depend on anyone but you.

You are the one in control of your future, despite what unpredictable things happen along the way. So, one way to make sure you’re staying on track is to not rely on others --whether it’s a partner or a BFF - to make sure your dreams become a reality.

Understand which goals are timeline-driven

Timing is easily the most difficult part of goal setting because it’s something you often can’t control, and one of the biggest things to make you feel set back when something doesn’t happen exactly on time. If you’re the type of person who gets bummed out easily when something doesn’t happen according to a schedule, try to build at least some of your goals around time-related factors that are within your control.

Sometimes professional goals can be more easily attached to a timeline because you can look into the future and recognize where you want certain moves to take place. Sure, you can’t control when you’ll get a promotion, but you can plan ahead when it comes to setting deadlines for completing an advanced degree or certification or being in a certain position for X number of years and even having some idea of how long you want to stay at a job before moving onto the next.

Personal goals that are timeline-driven might have to do with planning to save money to make them happen. If one of your goals is to move to a city where the rent is higher, you can set a goal for when you want that to happen, and set up realistic savings goals along the way to help you afford your security deposit when the time comes. 

And listen, it doesn’t have to be something as big as a new apartment or a down payment on a house. What if you want to treat yourself with a designer bag or new furniture? That’s a personal goal that you can also put some savings towards, and using an app like Acorn, that invests your spare change on a daily basis, can help you do that without even thinking about it.

Other goals, like settling down, developing a 6-pack, or mastering a complex recipe may not have as clearly defined schedules. When you can separate the goals that benefit from timelines from the ones that are undermined by a deadline, you’ll be able to avoid a lot of disappointment that can come from unrealistic expectations.

Make Your Goals Measurable

Some goals are easy to quantify. If you want to learn a new language to become eligible for a different position at work, or if you want to become certified in Google Analytics there are courses you can follow that usually culminate with the completion of levels or a certificate of attainment. A personal goal, like losing weight, can be tied to a number, or exercise can be associated with running a five-minute mile, or working out four times a week.

But if your goal is to be more social, get healthier, or get better at your job, the sheer ambiguity of those goals can make them almost impossible to achieve. Make sure you’re framing your goals in ways that you can measure. So rather than deciding to “be more social” a measurable goal is to spend time with friends at least twice a month.

Improving your health is an incredibly broad goal that requires a more specific direction like eating two meatless meals a week, meditating daily, beginning a relationship with a therapist, or even going to bed earlier.

A goal to “get better at your job” should focus on the refinement of a certain skill set like learning a new software program or reading five business-related books in the next twelve months.

Even getting married and having children is a goal you can make measurable. Sort of. No one can predict when they’ll meet someone, fall in love, and start a family. But you can set actionable objectives to download and use dating apps or attend local singles events so that you can exert some control over your capacity to meet new people. If you want children, but aren’t quite there yet, a reasonable goal might be to check your reproductive health with ovarian reserve testing. None of these actions will ensure you get married and have kids by 35, but they will make you feel like you are being proactive about your future relationships.

In general, avoid words like “more” and “better” altogether in favor of goals that are specific and quantifiable. Not only does it make them more accessible, but you’ll also have discrete accomplishments to celebrate, and success often spurs us forward to achieve more.

Make sure your goals are truly yours --not society’s or social media’s

For better or worse, we live in a world where it’s easy to compare ourselves to others --largely thanks to social media. And while in some ways, seeing what other people are up to can be inspiring, it can also bring you down in the form of FOMO or just plain old jealousy.

And long before social media, there have always been societal pressures that have made us feel like we need to be married by a certain age, pregnant by a certain age, and more. But everyone is different (we know that) and things can happen at different times for everyone. Seeing what stage of life other people are in doesn’t mean there’s a right or wrong way to go about achieving those milestones. It certainly doesn’t mean that if something hasn’t happened for you just yet, that it never will.

What you can do with social media instead, is find a way to use it as a way to check in with yourself and get inspired by others. Empower yourself to share your fitness or weight loss journey, for example, to hold yourself accountable, but also to share the story (if you’re comfortable) with others that could be in the same position as you.

Most of us treat our personal social pages as a highlight reel for all the good stuff. We want to share the happiest moments --from promotions to big moves, to engagements and other announcements that warrant a “Congratulations!” from your followers and friends. And while we will all continue to do that, just remember to take those posts with a grain of salt and to understand there’s always a bigger picture outside of the square Instagram frame.

Everyone can benefit from having a list of both personal and professional goals. If you only have one or the other you may find yourself moving forward in one part of your life while feeling “stuck” in another. But when you have both, and when they are measurable, attached to a timeline and focused on what you truly want for yourself, they become real. The fact is, even if you don’t reach all of your goals, just setting them is growth, and revisiting them can become the ongoing motivation you need to demand more for and from yourself.

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