New Year – new you?
I love goal setting and love writing down all my goals for the forthcoming year, before New Year’s Day. I don’t believe that I will become a new person each time I set the goals, but I like to believe I will become a better person. Surely this is what goals are for; why create something new, when you can improve and work on the amazing person you already are? Goals show that we are willing to examine our lives and seek to improve them, and even people who have a life of dreams can continue to accomplish more.
I love going to the shops and choosing a new diary for my annual journal and to track all my progress. I have shelves upon shelves of notebooks and diaries and am yet to find the perfect journal/ tracker so make my own version to suit me every year. I set aside time every day to write my diary, set my day up well, but I have always lacked focus on the goals that I set. This diary and tracker should be used to hold me accountable to the actions taken towards my goals every day. Small steps lead to big success. However, the goals I used to set were always unachievable!
The issue is that I never really set myself out to achieve my goals, I set myself up for failure every year by making goals that I would never take the actions towards achieving. You see, there are two types of goals: outcome goals and action goals. We need to decide the outcome of the goal (the final thing that make us feel like a success) AND set out 3-5 actions towards helping us achieve each one. This is the section I did not do, and, because of this, my goals remained wishes.
How to create your outcome goals
What I do is write down all the areas of my life and aim to make a goal for each area. For me they are; work, education, health, fitness, finance, relationships, family and creativity/ hobbies. Some people may prefer to focus on one area, and some may prefer to try to improve all areas in their life – we are all different. Almost everyone working in any job with a kind of performance management review or appraisal system, will be familiar with SMART goals (SPECIFIC, MEASURABLE, ACHIEVABLE, REALISTIC, TIMELY). The difference to the success of the goal, however, is adding the ‘C’ (COMMITMENT) to make it CSMART. Without the commitment to the actions (see below), the goals will never be achieved on their own. Quite simply, if it is something you are not willing to commit towards, then leave that goal off for the year until you have more desire to change. Even one goal will keep you driving towards self-improvement and will help you see that you are capable of great things, but daily commitment is essential to success.
How to create the action goals
These action goals are the small steps you plan to take in order to achieve the end goal. So, if your goal is to lose weight, and you have made it CSMART, ie. To lose 15kg by june 2021 in time for my holiday to Bali, you need to choose 3-5 small steps to do daily to achieve that goal. Some examples could be:
- To count/ track calories using My Fitness Pal
- To consume no more than 1800 calories a day
- To drink 1.5 litres of water every day
- To exercise for 30 minutes 3-5 times per week
These small actions can be tracked every single day and you can reflect upon them at the end of each day. Yes, there will be some days or weeks that you miss one of the actions, or struggle to commit to them, but consistency will bring about results and the more that you commit to the daily actions, the more you move towards your overall outcome.
New Year, new you?
The aim of making goals is not to become a new person, it is to become a better person. Those goals can be to say ‘no’ more, to read more, to do things you enjoy more often or to put more effort into a self-care routine but mostly, to do things that you will feel good about. No one wants you to become a new person, especially not you, so next time you see or hear someone say, ‘New year, New me’, tell them that they are really aiming for ‘New year, better me’.