95% of all New Years Resolutions are broken by about… right now.
One of the biggest challenges to accomplishing goals is setting the right ones in the first place. In fact setting goals is not hard, selecting the goals that will actually stick- is the trick. Anyone who has ever set a goal before and has failed to achieve it has a natural resistance to setting new goals in the future. In fact, right about now – there is a whole world of people feeling worse about themselves because their new years resolutions did not survive the month. They went where all good dreams go to die – to the land of “I can’t do-it-ville”, whose neighbour is “I-don’t-care-land”.
What simple steps can you use to set goals that really stick?
These ones:
- Step 1 to Setting Goals that Stick: List the top 10 goals you want to do/have/become this year. The trick to setting these goals is to ensure they are risky (so you are actually excited about hitting them – they are not uninspiring), measurable (you must be able to track your progress in order to course correct when you need to) and they have a deadline (goals that are “one-day” or “some day” goals are promises we aren’t ready to make to ourselves yet). Take 20 minutes alone to really think this through. Do not write down anything that “would be nice if…” Write down what you want to actually get done in the next 12 months, period.
- Step 2 to Setting Goals that Stick: Close your eyes and imagine what achieving each of these individual goals will make you feel. Write down beside each goal what these feelings are – all of them in detail – how will you feel once this goal is accomplished and how will you feel as you make progress towards it. Hold onto those feelings, wake them up completely so that the next step allows you to “feel clearly” what you really want the most.
- Step 3 to Setting Goals that Stick: Rate each response you had on a scale from 1 – 10 of your true hearts desire intensity scale (each number is 100 times greater intensity than the last). Put 1 – 10 on the left side of the page, and put the goals you have along the bottom numbered 1 – 10. Now – feel the first goal, talk about how you will feel out loud to yourself if it helps and experience on a scale from 1 -10 of intensity – how important does it feel to you to accomplish this? Now do the same for the second goal, and so on. Take your time. Maybe you feel excited to get to a certain goal that is farther down the list – notice this. Which ones do you maybe realize actually simply are “would be nice” goals, but the feelings of accomplishing others far overpower some of the rest. Most people will only have a few that are 10’s… Select the top few for you, the ones that make you feel the way you want to feel over all others and move to the next step.
- Step 4 to Setting Goals that Stick: Create a plan for the ones that ranked the highest. Who cares if you set the wrong goals before, or if you did not meet the ones you set the last time you tried – build a plan and get busy. The only way that you are going to feel the way you want to feel in your life is to actually feel that way in your life. (Or by using alcohol, drugs, escapism, sex, and all of the other distractions we can get lost in to make us feel something “temporarily”. But choosing that is like allowing yourself to become the sleazy car sales man of your future who’s selling you a lemon of a vehicle that will not get you much farther than out of his lot before your vehicle breaks down. Don’t do it, build a plan to actually get what you want.) You can… and you deserve to.
Setting goals that you are passionate about determines the energy you have to chase them.
