Resolutions and Goal Setting
Whether or not you’re someone who likes to make New Year’s resolutions and set goals every year OR you recoil at the pressure you feel from everyone’s excitement around January 1st; reflecting on your life and how you’ve spent your time is a healthy practice any time of the year. Giving time and attention to your daily habits and thinking through your long-term goals and aspirations perpetuates growth and increased self-awareness.
Most New Year’s resolutions revolve around diet and exercise. In fact, the top three resolutions are exercise more, lose weight, be more organized. However regardless of what you’ve resolved, less than half of the people who make resolutions are successful and most who fail, fail by the third week of January.
So how can you ensure you reach your goals successfully? The short answer is, in order to get a new and different result, you have to be willing to do something different. This is an exercise in being honest with yourself. For example, if you’ve resolved to exercise more, you must be honest with yourself about whether you’re willing to go to the gym? If the answer is ‘No’ pick a new goal!
Ask yourself, what have I done in the past to achieve my goals? Do I know why I was unsuccessful? What am I willing to do differently, if anything?
Here are five things I encourage everyone to do to set yourself up for success:
- Review your goals often. Write them down and keep them in a place you can see them every day. Review them quarterly and evaluate your approach. Our circumstances and situations can change throughout the year, it’s important to recalibrate our goals to be the most successful.
- Create an evening routine. Limit screen time, say no to late night activities and events. Perhaps even go to bed earlier to ensure a full 8 hours of sleep. A good day starts the night before.
- Commit at least one hour a day to work on your goal. One hour may not seem like a lot, but over the course of a year that’s 365 hours devoted towards your goal. Imagine how much you can accomplish in that amount of time?
- Be intentional about your friend group. This is a hard one, but so critical to your overall success and growth. Are your friends encouraging you to work towards your goals, or do they regularly pull you away and discourage you from your focus?
- Limit your social media consumption. Aside from being a huge time suck, social media has proven to have a negative effect on focus, productivity, and general happiness in life. Evaluate your screen time and set some healthy boundaries for yourself.
Goal setting is a powerful process for planning your ideal future, and for motivating you to level up and turn this vision into a reality. No matter your goals, big or small, taking action to work towards a better version of yourself is an investment that never fails!
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