Goal Setting
Who here has set a 2023 New Years goal, mantra, intention or something of the like?
Who has set them in the previous years?
What were some of these goals, mantras, intentions, etc., that worked in the past?
What has not worked in the past?
What patterns have you noticed within yourself from these experiences?
For those with 2023 goals, what are they? How has it been going so far?
What other types of goals do you set?
How do you stay accountable?
How can we improve our goal setting?
Why are these goals important to you?
When do you consider the goal achieved? Time frame?
Everyone makes some New Years resolution whether it be a goal , a mantra, an intention or a phrase. Some examples were setting personal boundaries, listening to oneself, a “Let’s Fucking Go” mantra, getting into a new hobby, or practicing time management. It’s the intentional thought that we put out each day that make achieving these goals possible. Say your goals out loud. It helps to solidify the thoughts that this goal is achievable and you are capable of reaching the goal.
Even when we set our intentions for the day and verbalize them out loud, why do we still sometimes let our goals slip through the cracks? First, life does happen. We have days where we might not always reach our goal. When these days occur, it is helpful to view these failures as opportunities rather than failures. So you missed a day. So what? 6/7 is better than 5/7. Every day is a new day and with that we always have the opportunity to improve ourselves from the previous day.
Other things we can do to help us reach our goals are to check-in with our goals, overlapping multiple goals, and having an accountability partner. By checking in on our goals often and intentionally, we are able to see tangible progress towards our goal over and over, engraining our goal into a habit in our brains. This can help us naturally complete or strive to our goal regularly to a point where we no longer need to remember to do it, because it is now a habit. When overlapping goals, such as brushing your teeth every time you sit on the toilet helps you remember to brush your teeth more often. And similarly, the more you do it, the more you will build a natural habit of doing it. Finally, having an accountability partner is a game changer. Someone to check in on how you did on your goals not only reminds us to work towards these goals but increases our motivation to do so as we have someone relying on us to update them with our progress and encourage us to keep going. Who could be your accountability partner for your goals?
Being able to do a self-analysis without harsh judgment can help you find where you are hesitant in completing your goals. For example, if you have a goal to stop eating sweets, recognizing when you want a sweet, why you want a sweet, and if having a sweet would satisfy your deeper rooted needs can help you learn to change behaviors. For this example, becoming aware that maybe it’s not the sweet your are really crazing but rather something to make you feel better when you are stressed at work or feel that your workload is never-ending can help you change that behavior to something more effective, like waling and stretching for a few minutes to briefly get your mind off work. Trusting the process of changing the unhelpful behaviors will in turn help you succeed in achieving your goals.
Have you ever thought about what motivational style you resonate the most with? Maybe it is a reward-based, attitude, fear-based, creative, achievement, competence, or power motivation that causes you to want to succeed in your goal. I encourage you to look more into these and think about which one relates to you and your current goal.
As one of our group members mentioned, “You cannot party on the roof, meaning you cannot celebrate your wins without having built a solid foundation.” What he meant by this comment is in order to be able to achieve your goals over and over, it takes a strong foundation of self-awareness, what the goal is, practice and repetition, and where, when, why, and how you are going to achieve this goal in order to reap the benefits of achieving this goal, or in other words partying on the roof.
That being said, it is not always easy to trust the process to obtain these goals. For a goal without pain is a wish. Although it might be hard to reach your goals, know that every little step you take, you are one step closer to achieving your goals. Its not about the destination but rather all about the journey. Through striving towards these goals, what can you learn about yourself? Where have you grown? What are smaller goals you’ve completed along the way? As you start to break down your big goal into smaller goals, success is all around you. It only makes the bigger goal that much easier to achieve.
