Let's Talk Goals, Not Resolutions

There's a reason people have an issue with realizing their resolutions every year.

Sometimes, the resolution is vague or generic. There are many of those who want to lose weight, or be more active, maybe eat healthier. The issue with such a vague resolution is the lack of a recognizable goal. Let's take weight loss as an example. How much weight would you want to shed? As much as possible is not exactly a great metric to measure your success against.

Other times, there are those who do specify their goals but the expectation ends up unrealistic. If you've never been to the gym and you resolve yourself to start showing up five, maybe even seven days of the week, that's an excellent goal. The moment you don't make your self-imposed quota for the week however (because sometimes life just happens) your enthusiasm will slow down and eventually you'll find reasons to not continue your goal.

So, how do we take a different approach?

First, I'm going to start referring to my resolutions as goals. When you think about your resolutions, you want give them a form in a desired result. You also want to be specific in your goal - if your goal is large and lofty, you may want to separate them into multiple smaller goals that will lead into an ultimate end result.

For example, let's say that my goal is to live a healthier lifestyle.

This is very vague, but we can break down this into a lot of smaller key objectives that would indicate a healtheir lifestyle. These could include the following;

• Being more active.
• Eating more vegetables.
• Drinking more water.
• Sleeping earlier or waking up earlier.
• Drinking less alcohol.
• Smoking less.

I encourage you to make your own list of things you would want to work on, as an exercise.

Now let's include some psychology as well.

We're going to utilize the pleasure principle, a concept explained by Sigmund Freud.

To put it simply, the pleasure principle is a force inside each individual which seeks immediate gratification. If you want to know more, I suggest reading this verywellmind.com article.

In order to utilize this, we're going to take an item from the previous list and break it into smaller steps, goals that we can reach immediately or in the near future.

Let's take this point:

Being more active.

We can start by expanding this into smaller steps and adding a very clear and reachable goal. Any of the following variations could work, depending on how quickly you want to clear your goal and your discipline;

• Do five pushups today.
• Jog around your neighbourd today.
• Go to the gym today.
• Go to the gym three times this week.
• Be active two hours this week.

By giving ourselves metrics that we can achieve within the same day or same week, we can receive gratification that we are staying on track with our goals, which will motivate us to be consistent.

Overtime as you consciously meet these small metrics, you will begin developing lifestyle habits that will allow you to keep your new years goals consistent.

Keep building on these.

The concept of New Year's Resolutions is also one of the main problems, in that it makes many of us think that we only create our resolutions in the beginning of the year for the rest of the year.

The truth is, there is never a wrong time to want to keep improving yourself and there is no need to have it all planned out in the beginning of the year. As long as you keep on building upon your goals as you reach them, it doesn''t matter how far into the year you start.

You also shouldn't need to worry about creating new goals year over year, as your goals from the past year should always carry over if you haven't met them yet. There should never be a limit to your own self improvement.

I know 2020 has been a hard year for most of us.

If you've made it this far, thank you for reading. I sincerely hope that this read may have given you some inspiration into starting your own goals. I've been using these methods to improve myself over the years and even given how bizarre the last year has, I won't be changing how I plan to approach my goals as we get into the future.