Personal Goals: The Key to Self-Direction in Adulthood

This chapter describes some specific propositions about personal goals and goal hierarchies as a means of explicating a living systems view of phenomena related to self-directed functioning. Professionally, psychotherapy treatments often attempt to cultivate aspects of self-direction. Based on a host of literature on topics related to self-direction, it was hypothesized in this study that people who have clear goals in life would experience more personal effectiveness and satisfaction. Attention to personal goals is a way of focusing on the importance of self-direction for effective and happy living. A personal goal hierarchy was presented as the key feature of self-direction. The living systems framework is an exceptionally useful tool for conceptualizing and investigating such influences because of its unique emphasis on the importance of self-direction and self-regulation in human functioning and the central role it gives to self-organizing and self-constructing processes in human development.