How are you going with your New Years resolutions? We’re almost 3 weeks into the new year, which means your goals have either become habits by now or you’ve just about given up on them. If you fall into the latter category, it’s important to ask yourself “Why?” and examine your goal setting methodology. When done correctly, goal setting is an exceptionally powerful motivational tool. It’ll keep you focused, motivated and hungry for more. When done badly, it works in just the opposite manner and becomes incredibly demoralising. Having set your goals and followed the steps outlined in the first post, you might find that you still aren’t getting the results you wanted. This will inevitably lead to some frustration, which will leave you demoralised and unwilling to try again. Here’s some common mistakes people make when setting goals and ways to overcome them.
Setting too many goals
The new year is a chance to start afresh but that doesn’t mean you should change everything at once. Too often people say “I’m going to exercise more, eat healthily, study harder, get out of the house more, spend more time with friends, get up earlier, sleep later, spend less time on Facebook, read more books, learn a new skill, drink less…” and so many more. This is a sure fire way to ensure you don’t achieve any of these things. When setting goals, you have to be selective. It is far better to achieve many smaller things over a long period of time than to achieve nothing all at once. Rome was not built in a day.
Setting goals too high
This fits with the first point very nicely. In addition to wanting to do everything at once, people often take things to the extreme. “Last year I slept in to 9am every day. This year I’m going to be super productive and get up at 4am everyday and get stuff done!” This is a fantastic sentiment, but how realistic is it? Anyone who’s visited another country can tell you that jetlag is a bitch and changing your body clock is extremely difficult at best. Getting up 5 hours earlier then you’re used to will just leave you exhausted, tired and cranky. The trick is to take small steps. Start by getting up at 7am for a week, then 6am, 5am and then 4am. By this method, it’ll take you 4 weeks to reach your goal and this may seem like a long time, but it means that in 4 weeks you’ll be in the habit of getting up at 4am and feeling fresh. If you try to go from 9am – 4am in one night, you might succeed the first day, but you’ll be pretty tired the next night are unlikely to want to do it again. Give your body a chance to adapt slowly, rather than going all out and having numerous stops and starts. The same goes for starting a new diet, doing more exercise or any other goal. Don’t force yourself to eat nothing but salad, vegetables and chia seeds if you’ve spent all of 2014 eating fast food. You’re going to start resenting meal times and quickly give up. Start instead by introducing one salad a day into your regime and make the change gradually.
Give and take
This fits in with the point above. Your life is a balancing act and changing one thing might mean you have to change another. If you want to start getting up earlier at 4am then you can say goodbye to those midnight movie marathons. Best start changing your routine to aim to be in bed by 10pm. Eating healthier and making your own food? Make sure you set time aside on Sunday afternoon to cook your meals for the week, or do it the night before. If you don’t plan ahead to make time, you’ll eventually run out of time to make that salad and end up making that trip to the McDonalds next to your office instead.
Quitting too early
Depending on who you ask, many people will tell you it takes at least 3 weeks to build a habit. If you’re going to commit to achieving a goal make sure you are prepared to give it at least a month before you start looking for results. A prime example is people who want to lose weight. These people often take a “Before” shot, which is a great idea and can a fantastic motivational tool if used properly. By this I mean taking the picture, printing it and locking it in a cupboard and forgetting about it for a month. At least. Then (and only then), if you can honestly say you’ve worked hard and stuck to your diet, can you open the cupboard and look at the photo of what you once were. What tends to happen is that people take a before shot and look at it every 10 minutes, after every salad and training session, eyes searching desperately for any signs of change. Every time you don’t see the results you expect you lose a little motivation, and checking that before shot or flexing into the mirror every 10 minutes is a sure way to make yourself never want to get in shape.
In all the examples above I’ve discussed lifestyle changes. Lifestyle changes should be long-lasting, permanent changes and not quick fixes. That means you need to take time to implement them, make gradual changes and give them time to pay off. The results will come, but not by rushing into it hoping for immediate changes. If you’ve already given up on your New Years resolutions until 2016, I urge you to reconsider. Revisit your goals, assess them to see if they were really realistic, examine the reasons why they didn’t work, change them accordingly and then give them another go. If at first you don’t succeed, try try again!
