Whether its health and fitness plans, business plans or personal spending plans – everyone starts the year with the very best of intentions. But the brutal reality is that most of us who set goals for January will have already failed by now. In fact, statistics indicate around 80% of people who set New Year goals won’t deliver on them.
Start by reflecting. Use the beginning of February to review why you failed. More often than not people struggle to hit their goals in January because they are looking for a quick fix. We don’t want to wait for the results, we want instant gratification and when we don’t get that, we give up.”
“But another reason so many of us don’t hit our goals is that people try to do too much, too soon. We do dry January, we give up smoking, we go on diets, we try to switch up our finances to save money because we’ve overspent at Christmas, we outline transformational business plans. All this just creates a huge mountain which is far too daunting for most people to address, so we give up. But just because you’ve failed in January, doesn’t mean you should write off setting goals again so soon.”
Don’t think of it as failing, think of January as a crash course in learning what worked and, of course, what didn’t work.” But to make sure you do succeed with your February reset, it’s important you ask yourself three questions:
- Firstly, what do you really want? Digging down to find the driving factor behind your goals allows you to have real clarity on what it is you want to achieve. Do you want to lose a few pounds because that’s what people do in January, or do you want to make a long-lasting improvement to your health or feel better about yourself?
- The second question is, how much do you want it? Because if it’s just a half-hearted ‘nice to have’, then the motivation which gets you through those challenges and temptations won’t be there. Ask yourself on a scale of one to ten, how much do you really want this? Ten is, ‘I’m desperate to get this’ whereas one is ‘I’m not really that bothered, to be honest.’ If you’re closer to one than ten, find a different goal
- Finally ask yourself, how much are you willing to sacrifice? What are you willing to give up to go up to achieve this? If the answer is, ‘not much’ then you’ve learned pretty quickly why you didn’t succeed in January
“We should always live our life with purpose, regardless of what that purpose is. That’s the difference between letting things happen and making things happen. After all, you don’t get in your car without knowing where you are going so why should your life be any different?”
“And if you do succeed? My advice is to celebrate success. I don’t think we do that nearly enough but we’re very keen on pointing out failures. But just as it’s useful to learn from failure, it’s also important we learn from success. People talk about going again after they’ve met their goals, but we don’t talk enough about going again smarter. It’s about understanding what we’ve learned from our achievements, celebrating the ones that we’ve met and understanding the ones where it didn’t go to plan. If we strive to learn from each and every experience, when we go again, we do it that little bit smarter.”
