Set New Year Resolutions at Your Peril!

It’s that time of year again – you know, that time when you are supposed to be setting goals for the next 12 months. It’s the time when you make New Year Resolutions! And, you know that they will almost certainly be broken within a few weeks, if not within a few days.

How can you ensure that your resolutions stick in 2016?

Don’t Make New Year Resolutions!

Yes, you heard me right – DO NOT MAKE NEW YEAR RESOLUTIONS!

If you feel under pressure to make a resolution on 1^st January but your heart is not in it, it is unlikely that you will have the passion and drive to see it through, so you are setting yourself up for failure. We don’t talk about failure in coaching and NLP, we understand that everyone learns something from a situation, even when it doesn’t come out the way they planned.

One of the NLP Presuppositions is ‘There is no failure, only feedback’.   So, you’ve make your resolution and it crashed and burned – what did you learn from that? Maybe one of the things was that you shouldn’t make New Year Resolutions and you may also have learned that you weren’t being true to yourself when you made it and you didn’t really want that outcome at all.

Take Your Time

There is no rush to do this on 1^st January. You can set goals and make your plans to achieve these goals at any time, any day of the year. Do it when it is right for you.

Plan Your Goals Carefully

If you take your time, you can create more effective, focussed goals that you know you have the passion and drive to achieve. The simplest way to know if your goal is truly what you want is to follow the SMART method.

S is for SIMPLE and SPECIFIC
M is for MEASURABLE
A is for ACHIEVABLE
R is for REALISTIC
T is for TIMED

I’ll briefly explain what each step means:

S = is your goal clear and simply explained?
M = how will you know when you have achieved it and if you are on the right track?
A = do you have the resources you need to achieve this?
R = Is this realistic (eg: you can’t lose 2 stone in weight in a week!).
T = when specifically do you want to achieve this (day, date, year, time)?

Help Is At Hand

It’s not always easy to know what you want and what goals you actually want to set for the next year, or even month or quarter. I know personally as I have set goals which I didn’t really want to achieve but thought I should and I have also been unclear about what I want, and I mean ‘I’ because too much of me was focussed on what I thought others wanted and what I should do. If you want some help setting your goals and visions for 2016, please get in touch with us and we can help you through one to one coaching or our Evolve Your World workshop.