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.
