With another Christmas come and gone, this is the time of year when most people are starting to think about making the annual New Year’s Resolution which traditionally only lasts about a week!
I’m not a great believer in the whole New Year’s Resolution thing for the precise reason that they are so temporary for most people. But I do believe in Goal Setting. The problem for most people is that the way we have been taught to do Goal Setting for so long is just plain wrong. So today I want to launch the first in a 2 part Blog on Goal Setting.
In the New Year, I’ll be following up with part 2 on why most of what you have learned about Goal Setting in the past is setting you up for failure and how you can instead use new POWERFUL methods of Goal Setting to almost guarantee your results.
But before all of that, I find that the best thing to do before you start to think about your Goals for 2016 and beyond is to think back on the year that HAS BEEN and do a Year in Review. I do a Year in Review every year, to look back on what has happened over the past year, the struggles that I’ve had, the wins that I’ve had, the things that I’ve learned and all the things that I’ve been grateful for throughout the year.
I find personally that taking inventory of the year that has been is a great way to build a solid foundation for the year ahead. The problem with most “New Year’s Resolutions” is that they tend to be more of an imaginary wish list for the coming year, usually based on what we feel we’ve failed to accomplish THIS year.
For example, if you feel you should have “lost more weight” during the year, you’ll be inclined to set a New Year’s Resolution to lose weight. This however doesn’t take into account all the reason why you failed to lose weight in the first place. So what happens is that you set the goal, from January 1 – 5 you’re on a diet, you start to exercise more. After about the first week, “LIFE” happens, you need a cheat day from your diet today, I’m a bit busy today to exercise. Before you know it, it’s February and you’ve completely lost sight of your Goal.
The reality is that LIFE is always going to happen and if you’re unprepared for it, then you’ll just keep on making the same mistakes over and over again. Instead, if you look back over the past 12 months and ask yourself the question, “What worked for you this year when you WERE eating right?” You might see patterns that enabled you to eat right at those times. So when you weren’t eating right, what was keeping you from doing that? If LIFE was keeping you “too busy” to be able to exercise, dig down to the core reasons for that. What were the “pressing” things that you had to attend to that kept you from working out?
Now you know in advance that all of those same struggles of LIFE are still going to be there for you in the New Year, you can pre-plan these things so that when LIFE happens you’ll already have a strategy in place to overcome these roadblocks and ensure that you don’t get off track with your Goals!
These kinds of tactics and strategies can be extremely useful when it comes to preventing any repeat of past bad habits, however what is even more effective is when you start to build on the successes of the past year. So few people do this. As we’ve discussed, most people are motivated by the frustration of past failures and totally ignore their past successes.
But if you think back over the past year and ask yourself what were all the things that went RIGHT for you? What were you doing when things worked out? How did that make you FEEL? As I always say, it’s what you are constantly FEELING that is going to keep showing up in your life.
Most people never allow themselves to FEEL the FEELINGS of having things go right and the FEELINGS of winning for long enough for them to take hold in their subconscious and so they don’t show up in their reality.
If you just think back over all the wins that you’ve had for the past year and how that made you FEEL. How would you like to feel that way all the time. The more you focus on how you felt when you were successful, the more you will allow that FEELING to take root in your subconscious. The more in alignment you are with those feelings and the more you will attract those into your reality.
So this Christmas, New Year period, take stock of your year. Do an inventory of all the wins and successes you’ve had and make a conscious decision as you move into 2016 to cultivate those FEELINGS into your daily routine and you will have more of those success show up in your daily reality.