Goals are beautiful dreams. There are thousands of books dedicated to providing you compelling lessons and advice on goals and the ways to go about attaining them. There isn't a problem in those books, at least not more than the problem in the readers themselves. People read them, try to enforce them in their lives and only a handful succeed. One of the problems I see is how people overlook themselves in the pursuit of their goals. So, my attempt here is to simply make people rethink about the role their personality plays in goal orientation, which is your motivation towards achieving your goals.

It is understood that setting challenging goals and adhering to it is the way to go about the business. However, not every type of goal and not every approach to those goals might be feasible for your personality type. Of course, there are other determinants of goal achievement such as one's competence, perceived value of the goal, ability to self-regulate, however, even if you are consciously considering these factors you might as well start reconsidering the role that your personality can play. This is because personality precedes all other factors in determining your motivation towards your goal. Your perception is modelled by your personality and you must understand lenses through which you make sense of the world.Oftentimes we are busy trying to find ways to change ourselves that we become oblivious about the possibilities and opportunities presented by the very personality we embody.

One of the most widely discussed, or perhaps, the most discussed categorization of personality traits is the Big 5 personality traits, the traits being Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism. So, let's go through each of these personalities and examine what researchers have to say how your personality predicts your motivation in goal achievement.

Let's begin with openness. Openness means the degree to which you are willing to engage in new ideas and activities that requires application of vivid imagination and creativity. To put it simply, they are aesthetic, creative, imaginative, broad minded about new experiences and unconventional perspectives (George & Zhou, 2001, p. 514). So, what does openness tell you about goals you should set. Open people are receptive to new ideas and approaches and they like setting goals that help them, learn new information and develop new competence. Thus, it is also expected that openness is positively related to learning goal orientation, (Klein and Lee (1992). Goals that help you create order out of the unknown, or to put is more simply goals that challenges you to push your boundaries. But we cannot always understand openness on its virtuous ground. Sometimes being high in openness can have a contradictory effect. Someone who is high in openness can be unpredictable, lack organization and display a lack of focus which is counterproductive to achieving goals.

Conscientiousness: If there is one part of your personality that you want to make the best out of, it should be your conscientiousness. Correlation of conscientiousness and goal achievement is significantly high (Chamorro-Premuzic & Furnham, 2003; Conrad, 2006; O & Paunonen, 2007;) and understandably so as people who are conscientious are well organized, diligent, responsible, disciplined and focused and it does not even take scientific conclusions to deduce why conscientious people are successful in achieving goals. If we look around people in our lives, we can observe people who materialize their possibilities are those who are conscientious. Conscientious people display high commitment towards goals ((Barrick, Mount, & Strauss, 1993). They set high performance goals and believe their hard work can help them realize their goal. Conscientiousness even prevails in front of whether one likes or dislikes the goal they need to complete. If you have a conscientious personality then you are like to find a way to persevere despite any ordeals. Thus, conscientiousness is a powerful determinant of completing the goals.

Neuroticism: Neuroticism is the degree of emotional stability. In order to understand the relationship between neurotic people and their motivation towards achieving goals, we need first to segregate goals by its nature. Some goals are self-motivated and these goals represent one's willingness to expand one's competency through acquisition of knowledge and skills. This is typically called learning goal orientation. On the other hand, some goals are provided to us and these needs to be completed

Neurotic people are occasionally motivated towards avoiding negative judgement, which is a reasonable coping mechanism. Thus, in order to avoid negative criticism, neurotic people are found to be motivated to achieve goals they are assigned to them (Elliot & Thrash, 2002). Strangely enough, neurotic people are found to have performed well at their jobs as achieving goals can be a coping mechanism for those who feel nervous about their tasks. Thus, the motivation to avoid failure is stronger than the idea of confronting challenges and experiencing the satisfaction of growing and overcoming them. The idea is, if you don't set goals, you cannot fail, right? On the other hand, Numerous researchers have found neuroticism is negative related to goal setting (Judge & Ilies, 2002). Meaning, neurotic people are infatuated with the idea of avoiding self-motivated goals. This is largely due to emotional challenges that come along with setting and trying to achieve challenging goals.

Agreeableness: Agreeableness is how people treat relationships with other individuals. Agreeable people are sympathetic, abiding, cooperative. In comparison, disagreeable people are unsympathetic, suspicious, critical, uncooperative. Agreeableness is positively associated with self-motivation to learning and particularly favorable in academic achievement ((Bidjerano & Dai, 2007; Fayyaz & Kamal, 2011; Komarraju et al., 2009; Larsen & Buss, 2008;). However, when it comes to progressing in your career research have indicated that being agreeable might come at a significant cost. The reason being, agreeable people are likely to sacrifice their professional goals in order not to hurt others sentiments. The literature on this is pretty clear. Agreeable people are likely to earn less than their disagreeable colleagues (Ng et al., 2005; Mueller & Plug, 2006; Nyhus & Pons, 2005; & Rode et. Al., 2008). Men tend to be more disagreeable than women (Feingold, 1994; Costa et al., 2001) and thus, are likely to earn more than their female counterparts. This provides an interesting perspective on gender pay gap. Uncritically associating pay gap as a consequence of unfair gender hierarchy may be just a gross ignorance to the reality beneath.

Lastly, we will discuss extroversion and goals that are appropriate from extrovert people. Extrovert people tend to constantly set high performance goals that improve their competency (Dweck (1986)). Also, (Elliot & Harackiewicz, 1996; VandeWalle, 1997) shows that extrovert people like setting challenging and specific goals and display strong belief in their capacity to achieve them. People who score high in extroversion are ambitious (Hogan, 1986) and have desire obtaining rewards (Stewart, 1996). Thus, extrovert people find ways to put their competency into practice so that they can reap the benefits from achieving ambitious goals. Although literature is not quite clear on this, extroversion may negatively be associated with discipline as their discipline can be easily overshadowed by impulse to socialize and have fun.

I am not trying to advocate someone to change their personality in pursuit of their goal, rather my focus is to provide brief information on how a particular personality trait in itself can be successfully maneuvered to your strength. In fact, personality is more or less given throughout life and thus, attempt in itself will likely end up in futility. So, before shopping around what you want to achieve, know thyself.

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