Each new year many of us attempt to commit to a New Years Resolution – usually giving up something we like.  This more often than not results in failure to achieve your goal – or more accurately, failure to achieve the punishing regime that you’ve set yourself.

If you remove a cup of water from the ocean, the rest of the ocean immediately rearranges itself to fill that space.  A cup-shaped hole is never left behind.  Your life goals should work in exactly the same way.

Why do New Years Resolutions rarely work?

New Years Resolutions are simply not compelling enough to make you want to stick to them.  Ask someone what their New Years Resolutoin is and you’ll more often than not hear one of the following:

• I’m going to stop smoking
• I’m going to give up alcohol
• I’m going to stop going shopping as much
• I’m going to stop eating fatty food

I’ve taken the liberty of highlighting the important words in each of the statements above.  These are important because all of them – whilst describing the action you’re going to take – are inducing of negative actions.  Of course they are all meant with positive intentions, but the mere thought of preventing yourself from doing something that you take pleasure in can often be enough to breed resentment and negativity towards your goal.

If you’re constantly telling yourself “I’m going to stop doing this thing that I like”, you’ll often face inner resistance no matter how much you believe in what you’re trying to achieve.

How can you create a more compelling New Years Resolution?

If you’re going to have a New Years Resolution, immediately stop thinking about what you’re going to stop doing, and begin thinking, talking, and acting like what you actually do want to do.  For example, here’s a more compelling and desirable way of rewriting the previous resolutions:

• I’m going to stop smoking become a healthy non-smoker
• I’m going to give up alcohol drink more water and fruit juices and look after my body
• I’m going to stop going shopping save money to improve my standard of life for the future
• I’m going to stop eating fatty food eat more healthy foods and cut down on the things that are bad for my health

As you can see, the above goals are now more constructive and working towards an achievement rather than focussing on changing something.  You’re now working towards a replacement for the original thing which gave you pleasure.

For everything in your life that you want to remove, you must replace it with something else, and the best way to achieve your resolutions is to replace that thing with something that drives and motivates you more.

If you remove a cup of water from the ocean, the rest of the ocean immediately rearranges itself to fill that space.  A cup-shaped hole is never left behind.  Your life goals should work in exactly the same way.

How can I improve my chances / How can I set my goals?

We released an article about goal setting, which we would recommend you to follow rather than setting a simple New Years Resolution.  Goal setting can help to transform your entire life in a miriad of ways, ranging from your physical condition to your career goals and relationship goals.  The goal setting exercise allows you to really get creative and work out what you want more than anything else, and then whittle down your desires into manageable action-driven goals.  By setting yourself compelling bite-sized actions, you’re more likely to achieve, by firstly working on the small goals to gather momentum, then using that momentum to achieve the greater goals.

The original goal setting article can be found by following this link.

Good luck with your New Years Resolution and achieving your goals.  Remember, if you create compelling and desirable goals, you’ll stand a much greater chance of achieving them.

Are you looking to make a change in your life?  You might be embarking on a new career, an exciting new project, or maybe setting a New Year’s Resolution.  Whatever your aims, you can improve your chances of succeeding by doing a great goal setting exercise…

If you ask any successful person how they achieved the things they have, you’ll usually always hear about their vision and idea for something.  An idea for success, maybe… An idea for happiness… possibly.  An idea that compelled them to act and make sure it became a reality… most definitely!

Success can be measured in a number of ways and criteria dependant on your own goals in life, and your own set of beliefs.  Success to you might be losing a little bit of weight, it might be buying a new car, or having a top level executive job.  Success might even be something which benefits other people.  It could be doing work for charity, raising awareness of a condition, or providing a valuable service to your community.

Whatever your goals and ideas for success are, you can achieve them with a few easy – yet important – steps.  This article will help you to set your goals for the year ahead and begin creating the future that you really want.

The Technique

We will break your goals down into a few key (and easily digestibe) parts.  This will help you to set specific goals in all areas of your life, and to avoid falling into the trap of spending too much time and energy in one or two areas, and neglecting the rest of your life progression.

Step 1 – Establishing what you really want

For all of the following categories, write down anything that you would like to change.  It doesn’t matter how trivial, or grand that these objectives are.  The important thing is that you write them down.  Don’t worry, we won’t need to achieve all these just yet, and you’re not binding yourself to a personal development contract quite yet!  Don’t think about how attainable these goals are, or what’s stopping you from getting them.  Just be creative and excitable and naive about it.  Write down what you would really want if you could have anything, but don’t forget the trivial things too – those can be the most rewarding and fun to achieve.

• Relationship/Family Goals – How do you want your love life to change?  If you are single, do you want to find a partner?  If newly married do you want to start a family? Whatever your age, maybe you want to devote more time to your parents, grandparents, or siblings?
• Financial Goals – How would you like your financial position to alter?  How much do you want to earn, and when?  Do you want to invest in anything?
• Career Goals – What do you want to be doing?  Do you want to carry on as you are?  Do you want to progress in your current job?  Do you want to change jobs/career?  Do you want to set up your own business?
• Creative Goals – Is there anything artistic or creative that you want to achieve?  Do you want to paint?  Do you like photography? Is there anything else you wish to achieve that’s fun and new to you?
• Contribution Goals – Do you contribute to charity or the community?  If so, what else do you want to do?  If not, do you want to help in your community with anything?  Can you help raise awareness of something worthwhile?
• Physical Goals – How do you want your body to look?  Do you need to put on some weight?  Would you like to lose some weight?  Do you want to start going to the gym, or eating more healthy foods?
• Emotional Goals – Where would you like to be emotionally?  What is happening in your life that makes you happy, and what would make you feel even better?  What’s not going so well, and what would you like to change about it?
• Educational Goals – What do you want to learn?
• Social Goals – How do you feel about your social life, and relationships with friends?  How would you like this to be different?

Step 2 – Working out what you need to do to achieve your goals

For each of the items that you listed in the first step, go through and write down what actions you would need to do to achieve the goals.  For example if one of your physical goals was “drink less alcohol”, then your action could be “Limit myself to two alcoholic drinks, twice a week”.  If your goal was “Do some painting”, then your actions might be “Join an art group.  Take painting lessons.  Visit the Richard Goodall Gallery.”  By doing this, you start to become more attuned to solving the problems that would have previously stunted your thought process.

Step 3 – Prioritisig your compelling goals

Now you should have a pretty big list of goals and actions.  Go through the list of goals and write a number next to the goal, representing how important it is that you achieve that goal.  This will help you to prioritise what you really want.  The scale should be 1 to 5, with 1 being the highest priority, and 5 being the lowest priority.

Step 4 – Being practical about your actions

Go through each of the actions that are required to achieve your goals, and label each one according to its difficulty to achieve.  Write a number between 1 and 5, with 1 being the easiest, and 5 being the most difficult.

Step 5 – Working out how long you need in order to achieve your goals

Compare your list of goals and actions, and estimate how long you’ll need to put into action.  You should label the goals in the number of years they would take to achieve, starting from 1 year upwards.  If the goal is “Eat more healthily” and your action is “eat an apple a day”, this would only take a matter of minutes to put into action, however we class this as a “Year One Goal”

Step 6 – Shortlisting and organising your goals for the year ahead

Work through each of your goals and actions that you’ve labelled as “One Year”, and start to organise them in a way that motivates you to start working towards them.  A good way to do this is to use the numbers we assigned earlier to make a priority list.

Firstly, organise your goals in numerical importance order – All the goals with a “1″ should go at the top, and the ones with a “5″ should be at the bottom.

For each of the actions, start to list them under each of your shortlisted goals in difficulty order, with the easiest at the top of the list.

This process will help you to organise things in a way that helps you build up momentum and determination throughout your year.  You will be able to see things progressing and moving in the right direction in an organic manner by tacking some of the easier action points first.  It’s like getting up a staircase – you need to start by walking up the lower steps so that you can easily reach the higher ones – If you removed teh low steps, you’ll struggle to get the momentum to reach the higher ones.

Step 7 – Review your goals

Have a look through your list of goals for this year.  Does it make you feel good and determined to succeed?  Are you happy with everything in the list?  Is there anything missing?  If you’re not entirely satisfied, work back and see what you can change.

Step 8 – Take action

You’ve got your action plan in front of you now.  You have a set of goals, and a list of things you need to do to achieve them.

• Copy the list onto a chart or large piece of paper.
• Stick the list to your wardrobe, bathroom cabinet, front door, fridge, or anywhere else for you to see each and every morning, day, and night.  This will help you to commit to the goals and keep them fresh in your mind.
• Find photos of what you want to achieve and print them, keeping them wherever you’ve stuck your list.  This will give you a visual cue to achieve your goals.  If you’ve not got photos, do a quick search of Google Images and find something similar.
• Do something each and every day to work towards your goals.
• When you put something into action, highlight it on the list.
• When you complete an action, tick it off.
• When you achieve a goal, circle it.

Good luck with your goals in life.  If you would like further information or support, contact us by email, subscribe to our Twitter and Facebook channels, follow the RSS feed, email us, or leave a comment in the area below.  We’d love to hear from you.