Goal Attainment, New Year's Resolutions Series, Success Habits

The New Year has been here for about 10 day’s now so if you’re still working on your New Year’s resolutions – Congratulations! You’re already doing better than most people who started the year with the same enthusiasm and dreams.

And here’s the challenging part. Now that all the excitement and the holidays are gone, life starts to get in the way of new goals and habits.

You see most of the people I have talked to tell me that they always find it easier to set a new goal and create a roadmap to achieve that goal. They also find it quite easy to start on a new goal but what most of them tell me is that somewhere down the road the motivation fades away, life gets in the way and the goals start getting pushed aside just a little more everyday.

You know what this leads to? It would all went down to sense of defeat, stress and probably would leave you a horrible feeling.

It’s that awful feeling that we want to avoid, plus we also want to achieve our goals…that’s why we chose to set them right?

Yes, there are a few very important things you can do right at the beginning when you set your goals to make sure they motivate you and help you get through challenges (and we’ll talk more about that over the coming weeks), but what I want to talk about right now is something you can do exactly now without going back to goal setting mode again.

This step is very easy to do but has a huge payoff. Please do not skip it! Alright, here’s what you need to do:

1. You need to create a good support system

Basically, your support system is something that can keep you going when all you want to do is throw in the towel. It needs to have the ability to keep you from giving up and should be able to help you stay on track.

Your support system can be as simple as a group of friends who call you to check up on how you’re doing with your goals every once in a while or a simple reward system you set up for yourself.

Here are a few examples:

1. Your buddies: If you have a friend (or a few friends) you can share everything with: a. you’re very lucky and b. you can ask them to help you out with your goals by checking up on you. Tell your friend what your goals for the week are and ask them to check in a week later, this really works for people who need a little outside push to keep going. Having a real person on the other side ask me about my goals really gives me an extra push so this is something I use regularly for a lot of the rather challenging goals and projects.
2. Progress tracking for habits: The thing with habits is that once you do something repeatedly for more than 30 days it becomes a part of your routine. Of course, those 30 days are the hardest. You can use anything from a complex software to simple pen and paper matrix to track your habits and stay motivated. I prefer the simplistic approach. Of course, you can use excel or an online service to do the same thing but I’ve found that the print method works much better for me and for a lot of people because remembering to look into excel or go to the goal tracking website is quite hard itself but when it’s pen and paper, it’s on your desk so that makes it easier to remember.
3. Journals/Good notes:If you are someone who really likes to spend sometime clearly writing everything down and reflecting everyday this could be your best support system. For those of you who find journaling a chore (including myself), try using a different approach. Personally, I use a time log (yes, those horrible time logs that’s been used by most companies. But hey, they work even if you are just working for yourself) and a  simple system to deal with daily input, goals and projects and everything else (this is where most people get stuck because they get overwhelmed with everything they have to do, everything that’s blowing up and everything they want to do. Journaling can help you a little here but creating a system that works for you is a much more effective and rewarding approach here. You can learn how to do that here) You can also try experimenting with journaling a little (it doesn’t have to be structured) and see how that works for you.
4. Mentors and coaches: Mentors and coaches are just amazing in helping you reach your goals. You just need to find the right one and we’ll talk more about that later but what I want you to remember for now is that your mentor or coach can be a friend or someone in the family as well. It doesn’t have to be a structured setting with a certified coach or anything too complex.

Alright, that should give you a couple starting points in creating your own support system. The next step is to decide which ones you want to use and set it up! You’re going to need it very soon, trust me on that!

1. photo credit: Ed Battle1