It’s freezing cold, you’ve run out of Christmas chocolates and it’s still dark at 4pm... ahhhh that can only mean one thing…JANUARY.
January doesn’t have to be a gloomy time where we all regret how many roast potatoes we ate in that nebulous week between Christmas and New year (Seriously, how many days are there in that week?!) instead it can be a time of new beginnings and inspiration. It can be a month filled with making goals and drawing up action plans to ensure that 2022 is your best year yet! To help you on your way here are my top 3 tips on goal setting this New Year.
1) Action Plans are your new best friend.
Once you have a goal in mind, the work doesn’t stop there… you need a plan of how you are going to achieve it. You need to reverse engineer what you want. Start at the moment you achieve your goal and think backwards about the steps required to get you there. Put a clear action plan in place to tackle each milestone. 2) Alls well that ends well.
Once you’ve created your action plan, choosing a date by which you want to achieve your goal is the next task. It’s easy to delay and put off your plans when there isn’t an end date in sight. At University, I became an expert in procrastination but thankfully never missed a deadline. I realised fairly quickly that having a deadline in place helped keep me focused and gave me a kick when I felt unmotivated. Perhaps your goal can be achieved in a month or maybe it requires a little more planning and might be achievable by the end of the year. Whatever the time frame you choose, just make sure you have one. 3) Maybe this goes without saying but WRITE THEM DOWN.
Getting them out of your brain and onto paper works as a kind of external storage. Think of your mood board, goal diary or list as a mind memory stick. You can revisit it at any time, daily if you like, to make sure that you are working towards your goals on a regular basis. Now I’m no scientist but according to actual neuropsychologists, writing your goals down helps with a process called encoding - we have a higher chance of remembering things we’ve created and written down ourselves than things we’ve simply read.
BONUS TIP: If you set goals regularly and have achieved every goal you’ve ever set with ease…You aren’t aiming high enough.
