Resolutions vs Goals
Most people, if they even bother to set New Years Resolutions, rarely fulfill them. Their intentions are good, but their process is flawed. They are overly ambitious, vaguely defined, incorrectly chosen and even forgotten. The trick is to set Goals, not Resolutions, for the year. ‘Goals’ are what you are actually trying to achieve, and ‘resolution’ is only one component of fulfilling goals.
Why ‘New Years’?
Setting annual goals around the New Year is more for psychological reasons than for logistical reasons. You can achieve a lot in a year, so an annual check-in is a good time to set some ambitious goals. And New Years Resolutions are already a strong tradition so consider this to be an improvement upon that tradition.
What do you really want?
Create a list of things that you want. This should be a fun exercise, but it often triggers your inner critic that tells you you can’t have it all. Don’t worry whether the things you come up with are achievable within a year or even in a lifetime. Aim for the stars. Think of things big and small that you would like or might like. Use brainstorming and freewriting techniques to come up with 100 ideas, or 1000 ideas. Go for quantity, and give yourself permission to put ridiculous things on this list.
Here are some good questions to ask yourself: What do you want to accomplish? What do you want to be? What do you want to learn? What experiences would you like to have? What kind of change do you want to make in the world? What kind of lifestyle do you want to live? What things would you like to have? What kind of people do you want in your life and what kind of relationships do you want to have?
This list is the primordial soup from which you can pick out a few choice morsels that will become your goals for this year. Keep this list around and let it grow and shrink over time, as you think of new ideas and discard things that you’re sure that you don’t want. (But never discard anything from this list because you “can’t”. Never discard your dreams.)
Wants vs Needs
There are a lot of “need to”s, “have to”s, “should”s, and “supposed to”s in the world, and most of them are illusory. You don’t need to climb the corporate ladder. You don’t really need to go to school. You don’t even need to stay the gender anymore. The only thing you really have to do is die. Everything else begins with choice.
Needs come from wants. If you want to write a best-selling novel, you need to sit down and write. You need to find a publisher (or find a way to publish it yourself). You need to figure out what exactly “best-selling” means and how your anonymous novel can get there. If your first novel doesn’t become a best-seller, youneed to write another novel then, don’ you? So the next time you complain about needing to do something, ask yourself what the ‘want’ is that is being served by that ‘need’.
Go for the Gold
When setting goals, most people tend to focus on what they don’t have and what they don’t want (e.g. making money, losing weight). In setting your goals, I invite you to reach beyond this negative mindset. Try on for a moment that those aren’t really your goals. We all know that it is possible to turn your life around, lose weight and/or make a million dollars within 1 year, but one of the reasons that people don’t achieve those goals is because that’s not what they really want. They want the freedom that these goals make possible, but they are unable to look beyond the roadblock to figure out where they really want to go. Once you lose that weight, make that money, what are you going to do with it?. Bless you if you know the answer to this question already. Most people don’t. Most people just want to be comfortable, to eliminate discomfort, but don’t have anything to really strive for once they reach that goal. Most people are not truly motivated to change, because they are aiming for a plateau instead of aiming for the stars.
Imagine that you get everything that you want. What then? What’s next? What do you really want??? Ask yourself this every day. You may come up with temporary answers. Some of them will feel right, some of theme will feel like cop-outs. Sometimes the answers that feel right will also seem hopeless abstract (e.g. when you can sum up your life purpose in one word). Keep on asking. Keep on adjusting and rewording. As you keep asking yourself what you really want, your answers will become stronger and so will your motivation.
From this place, choose goals that provide concrete progress towards your dreams. If you want to write a novel, you could commit to a writing group (and never missing a single meeting), or filling five notebooks with freewriting and journaling. Choose constructive goals: things gained and achieved. Instead of setting a goal for a ‘4-hour workweek’, set goals for what you want to do with all that other time.
Perspective
To make your goals more tangible phrase them in the past tense, as if you have already achieved them. This encourages concrete wording of your goals and trains your mind to believe that the goal is achievable.
Phrase goals as positive actions. (“I did” instead of “I didn’t”.) Focus on what you want, not what you don’t want. Instead of “I lost 30 pounds,” say “I look great in a swimsuit.”
Bottom-Up and Top-Down
One good way to set goals is to identify something that you already have or are achieving now that you want more of. Project into the future and set a higher bar. E.g. growing your business, exercising more, reading more.
Another technique is to identify a highly ambitious want (e.g. winning an Oscar) and then work backwards to find concrete goals that manifest what you want.
These are both valid ways to set goals, and I recommend a mix of both of them. Be mindful if most of your goals are one type or another; it might be a sign that you’re being too ambitious/scattered, or not ambitious enough.
Make Your Goals Concrete
Well-defined goals are outcomes that can be completed and checked off as “done.” There can be no question as to whether a goal has been accomplished or not. And when possible, make your goals measurable. “What gets measured gets done.”
When things get tough you might try to fudge your way around a goal; anticipate this and keep rewording your goal until it is rock-solid. “Pray like a lawyer.” You’ll probably get exactly what you ask for, so be as specific as possible about what you want.
Practices
Some goals might take the form of practices, rather than accomplishments. E.g. yoga almost every day, or a 3+ mile hike every week. This is a good, concrete way to improve a part of your life (e.g. your health), especially those that tend to slip. If you do yoga almost every day or hike every week you’re pretty much guaranteed to improve your health.
Lean towards achievable practices rather than rigorous disciplines here, because when you set a regular practice it is likely to become a lot more. (E.g. I’m committing to “doing yoga almost every day” this year. Even if that means only 1 sun salutation 5 days out of the week, I know that it’s a promise I can keep and that I will develop my practice a lot more than if I set an outcome-based goal.) Avoid becoming your own drill sergeant, unless of course you find that that actually works for you.
Commitment
Whether a goal is something to be maintained (e.g. I attended yoga class 3 times every week) or something to be achieved (e.g. 10,000 people subscribed to my newsletter), it is still a promise to yourself. A commitment that cannot be broken. Once you set and truly commit to a goal, your personal integrity is on the line.
If you aren’t very good at keeping promises to yourself already, try out this simple exercise: write out 3 very simple tasks that you want to achieve today. E.g. e-mailing a friend back, washing the dishes, paying a bill. Keep them very simple, and DO them. Do this every day, keeping the tasks very simple. Avoid the temptation to keep making bigger promises until you can’t keep them. The point of this exercise is to build trust, not achievement or ambition. Keep making small promises to yourself and fulfilling them. Over time, you will learn to trust yourself again.
Quit Early
Start with a long list of goals and review them every morning, gradually removing less important goals from the list. When it comes to renegotiating, the earlier the better–it’s far better to know what is important and what isn’t long before it gets difficult. Quit early, or don’t quit at all.
If you’re not sure whether you can fully commit to a goal, don’t. It’s better to set just one goal or even no goals for the year than to set goals that you haven’t fully committed to. Ask yourself honestly how far will you go for this goal if it gets hard. And if it’s a worthwhile goal, it will get hard. If you’re not willing to go through the challenges involved with this goal, drop it or revise it into a goal that you will commit to.
Prioritization
Resist the temptation to prioritize your goals. (Which one is the most important? Which should you tackle first, in case you don’t complete all of them?) This is self-defeating and is a sign of lack of commitment. Whatever goals you select you are committed to. If some are more important than others, discard the less-important goals and focus on what is important. If you reduce your list to just one goal, good for you. If you achieve that goal early in the year, then you can set new goals.
How ambitious should your goals be?
The answer to this will vary from person to person, depending on how ambitious they already are and how mindful they are of their potential. Inevitably many people will aim too high and be disappointed, and many other people will aim too low and be disappointing. Whichever end of this spectrum you are on, lean in the opposite direction.
Include some easy, very achievable yet important goals in your list. Not everything that is important needs to be hard. These easy goals should be present both because they are important and because their presence makes your annual goals feel a lot more achievable as a whole.
Tactics
Goals should be detached from tactics. Don’t worry about howyou’re going to achieve a goal, as long as you have a gut instinct that it can be achieved within a year, alongside your other goals. The How of achieving a goal is the Plan for that goal, and plans are subject to change. Individual tactics might fail, and by avoiding attaching a tactic to your goal you get to keep trying to achieve that goal with new tactics. E.g. if you plan on making a specific sum of money from a new venture, you could make the sum of money into your goal and if the new venture fails the goal remains (and it’s time for you to get creative about making that money a different way!)
Faith
Achieving great goals, where you don’t know how you’re going to get from here to there, requires faith–a perhaps irrational belief that even though you don’t see how you still know that it will happen. Faith makes you willing to be lucky, which is how one becomes lucky.
Accountability
Share your goals with a close friend, group of friends, men’s/women’s circle, or therapist or life coach. Have them check in with you and hold you accountable to achieve your goals. Here’s a place in your life where pride, insecurity, social proof and guilt can actually be used for good! It’s easier to give up quietly when no one knows you’re giving up, but if someone out there is watching and supporting you it’s much easier to keep on track.
Review
Review your list of goals for this year every day. You don’t need a spreadsheet or an elaborate review process; a handwritten list at your bedside is enough. Take in each goal and do a gut check whether you are making progress towards that goal. (This can be done quickly, but must be done mindfully. If you catch yourself just ‘reading’ go back and focus your attention.)
Execute!
The purpose of a goal is to provide clarity, motivation, inspiration and the desire to follow through with the goal. Without setting a goal, nothing happens. But a goal alone does not achieve itself. To achieve the goal, you must plan and act! (All of that is well beyond the context of this article.) The value of a future goal is the present change it fosters.