GOAL SETTING || 3-Step Process to Create New Year Resolutions You Will Actually Complete
When you think of goal setting, does your mind immediately go to career goals? Other aspects of your life are essential, and judging from the prevailing work less to make more sentiment on social media, more people are shifting their focus from working on their career to other facets of life like health, relationships, and personal growth.
I've set many New Year resolutions in the past, some of which I achieved and others I didn't. I've had to refine how I develop, execute, monitor and optimize my goals. Through my years of disciplined goal-setting, here are three universal steps in an easy-to-follow process to ensure you reach your goals in all facets of life in 2024.
1 | Set Daily or Weekly Wins
You're writing down your Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal (aka BHAG), and you're very pleased with yourself for creating such a fantastic goal. Pat yourself on the back. Now what? Most people stop at putting pen to paper and fall short when it comes to taking the action required each and every day to get closer to the goal.
Depending on your schedule, you can fit in daily or weekly goals. Having daily or weekly tasks to complete allows you to break down your annual goal into bite-sized wins. Why is it easier to do this than to fixate on the ultimate goal? It’s because the goal to run a 25-kilometre marathon might sound insane for someone who usually runs 5-kilometre routes. It would help if you separated it into bite-sized, attainable wins to build your momentum. For the first month, your goal might be to get up to a 7-kilometre run. By month 6, you could aim for a 15-kilometre path once per week.
Your New Year resolutions should be more than ONE check-in at the end of the year to see if you did it. There needs to be observable progress milestones along the way to let you know if you’re on the right trajectory. At the very minimum, it should be a weekly check-in. If you didn't do what you said you would that week...move on to number 2.
2 | Let there be consequences
From my years of training myself and others, what has always proven right is that there needs to be consequences in order for people to stick to their goals. If they lose nothing by not completing a task, you better brace yourself that they won't get it done.
If it's a health goal and you cheated and had a pastry, you don't get to watch your favourite show this week and must wait a week. If you have a savings goal and you go over budget in one month, the punishment is that you can only spend money on groceries until you save double the original amount you were supposed to put into the bank account in month 1. You have to make it hard for yourself if you break a promise. Or else straying off-course would be a more attractive option.
3 | Don’t be THE judge
Have someone else enforce the rewards and punishment. Being the judge of whether you accomplished your goals tends to make it too easy for you to cheat or justify your actions (and inactions). I recommend an accountability buddy to keep you accountable. You will need this person to be someone you're close to and with whom you can share your goals. They also don't care about being nice and will call you out if you fall short of the goals you set that week. This buddy also gets to enforce the consequences. My accountability buddy is a close girlfriend of mine who will tell me the cold, hard truth. I simply text my weekly goals to my accountability buddy to let her know I've done my part for the week, and she does the same.
Most people fail to follow through with their New Year resolutions because they fear how gargantuan the end goal seems; there’s no one to hold them accountable, and if they cheat, there are no consequences. If you remove these key barriers to your goals, you are much more likely to move in the right direction.
