With the New Year just around the corner, many people are setting new goals. Here’s some ideas to make your goal setting easier:
- Make short-term goals. They are easier to achieve and will help you feel more accomplished when you reach your goal!
- Make easy-to-reach goals. Making a goal to exercise 6 days a week for the entire year is a little tough. Things are bound to come up that will stop you from reaching your goal.
- Add a few items that you already know will probably happen. For example, if I was to make a New Year’s Resolutions list, I would add “Help my daughter learn to walk.” She is six months old and more than likely will walk this year. Once she does, I get to cross it off my list!
- Make general goals. When goals are too specific, it is really difficult to reach them. One really difficult goal that I’ve heard is “I will not eat any sugar and will lose at least one pound a week.” Instead, I would change this goal to say, “I will try to eat less sugar and lose a few pounds within 4 months.” It’s much broader, seems a lot easier, and is probably a lot more reasonable.
- Look back on past resolutions that you have made and decide whether they were good goals to make or not. It’s always a good thing to learn from the past. If your past goals have not been met, it might be a good idea to tweak them to make them easier to accomplish or to realize that past goals may have been unrealistic and change your upcoming goals to be ones you can definitely meet.
But the real question is, do this resolutions really help? Is it good on our self esteem to make these lists year after year, only to realize by the end of the year that we hardly did any of them and maybe don’t even remember what was on our list?
I still really enjoy the 101 things in 1001 days. Not only does it give you 32 months to complete the goals, but it helps create more of a habit than encouraging you to quit soon after you try to meet a goal on your resolutions list. Plus, with all of that time to complete the goals, if you fail once, it’s okay because you still have many more months to try to complete it. But this is only my opinion.
