New Years Eve is here! Time for some straight talk about setting new goals to help you set and achieve them.
It’s that time again – That time when we think about what we want to accomplish next year, and get a bit of motivation towards starting before the inertia of your habits take over. This is a time that is laughably seen as a time of half-hearted attempts at starting towards some goal. We start with good intentions and motivations towards something positive for ourselves, but we lack a real plan towards completion of that goal.
The fact of the matter is that a plan is needed to make any kind of lasting meaningful change in our lives. New years resolutions are often borne of emotions regarding wishes – what we would like to see in our lives. We don’t really want to get into the planning aspects of reaching our goals, but this is absolutely necessary if you are truly serious about making a change, because resistance will come. It can come from circumstances outside of us, but it often comes from ourselves. We get comfortable with ourselves as we were before we set out to achieve this. Changing involves a degree of pain that we put ourselves through, and without a clear plan and purpose for sticking with achieving the goal, falling off the wagon will be an ever-present temptation.
Examine your current life and figure out how to make it work with your goal(s).
Consider the goal of losing 100 pounds. Over the course of the last two years, I’ve lost about 70 pounds or so. This wasn’t easy, but it was achievable. I decided to make my goal work with my lifestyle, not as something that involved a lot of deprivation. I made lower-calorie versions of my favorite foods and made them healthier, and made time to regular exercise. Not only that, I also got into social dancing and hiking as activities that I enjoy and take part in regularly. I took something that was something that I had initially thought of as painful and made it enjoyable, as a way of overcoming the obstacles that came from within.
The first thing you need to do to realistically begin to plan for reaching a goal towards something that will benefit your life is to plan for those things that you know will derail you. How can you reduce the pain of change while keeping you motivated to keep going? What are some obstacles outside yourself that will prevent you from reaching your goals? For example, will home responsibilities such as childcare keep you from working out at the gym? Perhaps consider buying some equipment, watch some exercise YouTube videos and work out from home.
1 thought on “Goals: Realistically Approach Them to Ensure Success”
Thanks.