With the turn of the new year, we collectively get a blank slate to restart from. The world as a whole is setting goals and is resetting their approach to life. It makes it a wonderful time for you to reset, refresh, and revise your outlook on life as well. The biggest challenge is not setting goals, but sticking to them.
Here is how you can stick to your goals in 2024!
Setting Goals
When setting your goals make sure they are SMART goals. Do not set goals that require you to move a mountain in a year. You will burn out, become frustrated yourself, and will lose self confidence. Instead set actionable goals that can be broken down into smaller steps that can be implemented in your daily routine!
This way you are working towards your goals bit by bit, each day. This will increase your self-trust and motivate you to turn that goal into a habit.
For instance, if your ultimate goal is to have a dramatic weight loss transformation, set goals for eating healthier, or working out x times per week, or getting x steps in per day. Be specific and actionable. If you choose to eat healthier, come up with a meal plan and determine what your frequent meals would be. If you set a goal to workout, pick an exercise routine and select the days of the week you will workout.
Setting a goal for losing x pounds in a year will lead to frustration, self-doubt, and can launch one into a vicious cycle of unhealthy behaviors.
Track Yourself
Keep physical record of your goals to hold yourself accountable. You can use a planner, a small notebook, or even habit tracking sheets. Seeing the visual representation of your goals each day will compel you to keep trying to fill out all the check boxes. If you find yourself slacking and procrastinating, you need to scale back your goal.
A visual representation will also show you how much you are actually doing. Sometimes, it may feel as if you are investing a lot of time into your goal, but when you look back at your planner or habit tracker, you'll see that it is far less.
Let's say your goal is to market your business on Linkedin by commenting on 50 posts in your niche. After a few days, you find yourself slacking. You are even starting to avoid being on Linkedin. It is then time to break the resistance by scaling back your goal. Set the goal to commenting on 20 posts per day. Start doing that for a few days and let it become a habit. You can turn the dial up as you acclimate.
Reward Yourself
We can often get into a rut of pushing and pushing ourselves. We tell ourselves that we will be happy and reward ourselves once the goal is achieved. This is a sure recipe for burnout and disaster. Doing and doing without enjoying or awarding your behavior goes against our most dopaminergic system and our more primitive innerworkings.
Stagger your goal into levels. Doing your goal for x many days and achieving x result, warrants x reward. For instance, you started an online shop. After the first 20 sales, award yourself with something nice. It can be a fun day out, a treat, an indulgence, or even a little something you have wanted to buy for some time. After rewarding yourself, work towards the next level of your goal. Reward yourself after 40 more subsequent sales on your online shop.
Set these achievable check posts with rewards to keep your brain invested and motivated.
Reflect On The Process
We often lose sight of our goal, abandon it, or forget about it early on in the new year, because we forget to reflect on our progress. Halfway through the year, you may realize that you completely forgot about your resolution as a whole. Achieving goals is largely a mental task than it is physical. Keeping your vision clear and motivation bolstered, can help you go farther. Simply taking haphazard physical actions can lead to confusion.
Use a journal, physical or virtual, to document your progress. You do not have to be a chronic writer. Simply jot down a few sentences describing your mindset, intentions, and progress at the end of each week. This helps you organize and reorient your mental state. It pushes you towards clarity of thought. This will make it easier to plan your next steps and make modifications on your journey towards your goal.
Organizing your thoughts will help you see patterns of behavior that are working and patterns of behavior that are not working. You can then adjust accordingly.
Address Inner Turmoil
Many of us can struggle to follow through with our resolutions, not because of laziness, but because of deeper rooted mental struggles. Depression, anxiety, burnout, and self-sabotaging behaviors are common causes standing between many people and their goals. Oftentimes, to achieve any journey of progress, you must first address the demons plaguing your mind. This means going to therapy, fixing your lifestyle and nutrition, taking supplements, meditating, fixing your sleep cycle, and letting go of toxic people and toxic situations. You must first cleanse your life and mind, before you can push yourself towards greatness. Oftentimes, addressing the dark corners of our mind is an uphill battle that can take a year or even years.
Curate your goals to work in conjunction with your mental blockages. This can mean making easier and smaller goals until you achieve the level of mental clarity needed for chasing robust goals. It also means altering one's inner dialogue, releasing perfectionism, and practicing positive affirmations.
Wrapping Up
There is no shortage of resources on the web and in books for personal development and self improvement. The answers are there as long as one has motivation to go seeking them. In short, you have a better chance at sticking to your goals by breaking them down into small, actionable steps, tracking your progress, reflecting on your progress, rewarding small wins, adjusting your strategies along the way, and by reinforcing a positive inner dialogue to upkeep motivation.
What are your goals for 2024?
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