As 2018 commences, that perfect time for making New Year’s resolutions begins. The classic time when we all set good intentions with positive thoughts, only to find that a few months/weeks/days down the line we realise our resolutions were a little unrealistic or we’ve only seen them as a ‘January thing’.
I’m happy to say that 2017 was a really great year for me and I didn’t set a single new year’s resolution. Instead I set goals. I believe that setting goals really helped me to achieve success in many different areas of my life, and has really catapulted me into 2018 and all of the success that I hope this next year will bring too.
Resolutions are typically seen as something that you want to stop doing, whereas goals are more associated with something that you want to start…thereby adding to your knowledge, skills and successes.
From personal experience, I think that by aiming to do things better or start new things instead of stopping things or cutting things out, these things are made more achievable because you are looking at them in a positive mindset right from the word go. For example, instead of saying that you are not going to eat unhealthy food, or you’re going to cut out chocolate, crisps and/or biscuits, how about instead aiming to eat more vegetables. Or instead of saying that you are going to spend less time on your phone/social media, how about aiming to learn to play the guitar or spend more time outdoors. It’s through doing these new things that you find you’re subconsciously spending less time on your phone or eating less unhealthy foods because you’re busy with your goals.
Although these goals perhaps seem ‘bigger’ than merely stopping doing something, they could be in fact more achievable because there isn’t really a point in which you’ve ‘failed’. If you set a resolution of cutting out unhealthy food, the moment you take that first bite of pizza you’ll think you’ve broken it and simply wait until next January to start that one again because you think you can’t do it. However, by eating more healthy food, just by eating one extra piece of fruit/veg a day, you are already eating more healthily.
Although you may then think that these goals perhaps need to be bigger (which is okay to set too) I’ve found that the goals that I set I actually exceeded because there was no real point of success/failure and simply the act of doing these new things made me want to do them more. At the end of April (a turning point in my life) I decided that I wanted to read more books, and I’m happy to say that in that eight month period I read 15 (and a half) books. This wasn’t so much because I wanted to say that I’d achieved my goal, but more because having that loose goal in the back of my mind made me fall in love with reading again; escaping into that world which therefore made me want to do it more, as much as I could.
This was the same with my goal of making progress with certain yoga poses, again realising how much better it makes me feel to simply practice yoga, which then further leads to more improvements.
A final important top tip to note, according to studies, you’re more likely to achieve a goal if you keep it to yourself. So don’t be busy talking about it, spend that time actually working to do it.
Good luck! #Goals
According to Jess 