I used to be a person who set goals in January and then a few weeks later when I fell off my plan for whatever reason, I would absolutely tear myself to shreds over my failing. There were several things happening here that I want you to think about as you’re setting goals for the new year. First, the most powerful type of motivation is something called Intrinsic Motivation. Meaning, a motivation that is derived from your own internal wants and needs and is actually meaningful to you. Make sure the goals you are attempting to achieve are not based in shame, guilt, or shoulds. It’s so easy for us to build these goals based on what we see around us, what we think we should look like or feel like or have. But this is not the powerful motivator we think it is. No amount of celebrity bikini pics on your fridge will get you to the ideal body (something I actually did at the height of my eating disorder). You have to choose your goals based on what feels good to you, not what you’ve been coerced or influenced into wanting. Second, check your timeline. The farther away you are from something, the less likely you are able to predict where you will end up. So, rather than set a goal that has a timeline of a year, break it down into something shorter like a quarter, a month, or a couple of weeks. I talk about SMART goals all the time, but often the actionable and the timebound parts aren’t considered together. We think of something actionable, but the time boundaries on it are too long or too short. So when you’re thinking of your timeline, think about what you can realistically achieve in a time you can manage. For example, my health is always on my list of January goals because it’s an area of constant refinement. Rather than give myself huge year-long goals or even vague things like “work out 3x a week,” I started with a 7-week plan that gets me to the first day of my son’s ski lessons. I want to ski with him, so I made a plan that only goes this far. And it’s super tempting to generalize this beyond that time, and I find myself thinking about how I can continue this after 7 weeks. But I pause and remind myself that this is not the time for figuring out the forever. This is the time to collect data on what has and hasn’t worked for me. Which brings me to my third point, you have to allow for experimentation. To actually be successful, you need self-awareness and permission around experimentation, especially with goals you’ve never accomplished before. If you set out with the standard advice or guidance from the internet, you have to build in a chance to examine how you’re feeling and how the process is fitting into your overall life. Curiosity is key here. Think about this process like a scientist. You are examining yourself and your realities. Rather than shaming yourself for not meeting the plan you set out to do, you see, “Ah, yes, I notice that I didn’t do my workout on Tuesday. Why didn’t I do this? Oh, I had so much going on that day and didn’t really give myself the necessary time or reward to make it easy and enticing to do it.” Then you have something actionable to work on, making room in your schedule (in whatever way that needs to happen), and giving yourself some reward at the end for doing it. For me, I’m really enjoying the ridiculously good feeling I get when I color in the little box of a completed workout in my journal. But it can be as big or as small as you need to get the dopamine flowing. And don’t be afraid to reward yourself while you’re doing the hard thing. I tell folks all the time to get some chocolate and your favorite drink when you sit down to call customer service. What’s your equivalent to this in whatever your goal is? Next, setting and achieving goals are a huge learning process. And you know how people learn best when they’re doing something new? By studying their successes more than their failures. People learn more with “success feedback” rather than “failure feedback.” So if you focus more on what helped you get something right than what caused you to get something wrong, then you can focus on replicating those results and learning from them. I’m going to use fitness as one more example just because it’s so ubiquitous this time of year. I have learned over time that I am more successful in this current stage of life if my workouts can be achieved in 20 minutes or less. The longer ones, the ones I have to leave the house for, the ones that don’t have good music, or I have to craft myself, all of those lead to failure. I learned this because, instead of saying “Ugh, I didn’t get that workout in again. Why can’t I be more motivated?” I would say, “Wow, that happened. What did I like about it? I liked that I didn’t have to think about it, an instructor told me what to do. I liked that I had a big full cup of ice water. I liked that I could watch a live class on my laptop but still be in my own home.” Boom. Found the formula. And you know what? It’s been replicated dozens of times at this point, so I know I found some of the key variables here. But learning was only possible because I looked at what made me successful as opposed to the failure. (Quick asterisk, the one exception to this is an expert getting feedback about their expertise. They learn more through pointing out failures than successes, but for most of us, we’re setting goals to accomplish something new, so this paradigm rarely applies because we have fewer things we can be experts at in our lives.) Finally, use your emotions to guide your goals, but not create a story about yourself. So if you’re feeling disappointed, sad, afraid, or joyful, all of that provides data about what is and isn’t working for you. But we don’t let the story stop at the emotions. If we feel guilty about something, rather than sitting in the guilt, use it to show you what isn’t working and then use one of the above strategies to help you find something that does. Your internal self-talk matters. So if you dwell on “I’m such a failure,” it can easily get you stuck in the feeling and the narrative. This is when having a friend to talk about this stuff is so helpful. When my boyfriend says something like “Ugh, why did I do it that way? I’m such an idiot, I should have done it this other way,” I’ll reply “Can you please not talk about my boyfriend that way?” It makes a difference when we have the mirroring and support to hear how we talk to ourselves and how unkind we can be. And how these unkind words can get us stuck in not actually solving the problem. All of this, the gentle mirroring, the support, the experimentation, the setting realistic goals and creating successful ways to achieve them, all of that is done in my Group Strategic Planning. We’re starting our next cohort on February 18th. You get a deep dive session, quarterly check-ins, access to an exclusive Voxer group chat, and a chance to get help directly from me through Voxer. Sign up now and use code LEARNING to get 15% off until January 31st. |