New Year, New Goals!
With the new year, we are setting up new goals that we want to accomplish within the next twelve months. Sometimes, we might decide to carry over the goals that weren’t completed last year or things that we wanted to accomplish years prior but never found the right time to make a priority.
Have you ever felt you can’t wait to set goals at the beginning of the year? Could you feel the new year's energy that opens the doors to endless opportunities and possibilities? As if the ball that drops in New York Times Square, as a symbol of the start of the new year, hits the reset button at midnight.
Whether your goal is to find a new job, enroll in university, start a new career, strengthen a relationship, lose extra pounds, or want to become a better person, better leader, or a better parent - whatever that is for you, I applaud you for taking the first step and creating the goals to help you with creating the life you love.
But the new year's energy fades with time, and we often lose interest or put our goals aside within the first few weeks for different reasons. Sometimes it’s too hard to work toward the goals. Other times we lose motivation, start seeing it as a chore, convince ourselves we don’t have time to work on that, or we might not have the right support to encourage us to keep going.
I used to not believe in setting personal goals, not formally. I saw them as chores that I couldn’t get away from fast enough, weren’t fun to do, or were too hard to accomplish. I had all this great intention of setting them up in my mind, goals that would be nice to get around - finish the book or start exercising regularly, implement a more balanced diet, spend more time with my family, and learn new leadership tricks. I often justified my lack of actions with a simple statement “goals are just statements written on a piece of paper designed to make me feel bad about myself if I don’t fulfill them by the end of the year.”
Sounds familiar?
But something changed a couple of years ago when I got my first journal. As I went through the internal transformation, I decided not only to record my activities, thoughts, feelings, and events but also to set goals for the new year. Finally, I was ready to reinvent myself and my life. I started small. During the first year, I came up with three goals that I wanted to accomplish. I purposefully designed them to be manageable but with a bit of a stretch that would take me out of my comfort zone but not so far that I would want to run away and hide again. I decided to break down each goal into a set of small steps, the biggest, smallest steps that would make an impact and take me out of my comfort zone (biggest) but were doable and manageable (smallest, I knew I couldn’t fail). Being able to break them down like this removed the fear and the sense of being overwhelmed, lost or confused. Instead, it brought clarity, a sense of ownership, accomplishment, and fun!
If you are ready to try something new this year, you can go for it and create a few goals you want to set for yourself. And don’t forget to bring some playfulness to the goal-setting process and then again as you work towards accomplishing them before the end of the year. Remember, goals don’t have to be serious; they don’t have to be big and audacious. You are not entering the competition; nobody says “And The Oscar Goes To…” based on who accomplished the most goals in the year; you are not competing against anyone. You are doing this for your benefit! So design your personal or professional goals for your own sake, health, and love for yourself and your life.
I’m curious, what goals will you create for this year? What steps will you take to continue to work towards accomplishing them before the end of the year? What actions will you take to make this journey playful yet challenging? Who are you going to ask to be your supporter, your cheerleader when things get tough?
From the bottom of my heart, I wish you all the best in the New Year and your new journey to Creating the Life you Love!
