At ALRA, we don’t really like the concept of the ‘New Year’s Resolution’. Not because we don’t like goals, we LOVE goals, but because we find they’re made spontaneously, in the spirit of the moment and then are rarely followed through.
Don’t get us wrong, if you make a NYR and can stick to it, then we applaud you! We have a full article on How to Make your New Years Resolutions Stick. But to be perfectly honest, we just like to approach goal setting it a different way.
These are some of our favourite techniques.
Setting Goals
Set goals in layers. Long, Medium and Short term. Have a clear image of where you want to be by the end of these times.
For example: if your long term goal is to buy a property, your short term goals might involve how much money you want to have saved for a deposit in a month, 6 months and a year’s time.
Then set sub-goals. What do you need to do weekly or even daily to achieve this?
Write them down!
You might think, “but I have them in my head, that’s good enough”. But studies have consistently found that people that write their goals down are far more likely to achieve them than those that don’t.
A Forbes study of Harvard MBA Graduates conducted over 10 years found that the 3% of Graduates that had written goals down, earned on average 10x as much as the 97% of the class that didn’t.
Connect to your Goals
It’s not enough to simply say, “I want to achieve this”. You have to understand why you want to achieve it.
Establishing an emotional connection to your goals is vital to establishing that personal drive to achieve them. You need to feel the passion to achieve your goals in every fibre of your being.
Your goal has to mean something to you or you may as well be throwing darts at a board full of ‘pie in the sky’ dreams and hoping that you hit one.
Celebrate Successes
Even if it’s only the little wins it’s important to recognise and celebrate success. It doesn’t matter how you celebrate it (it could be a literal pat on the back or treating yourself to something), but do it.
Business, like life, is full of ups and downs but it can feel a hell of a lot easier emotionally if you focus on the ups. That doesn’t mean you should completely ignore the downs, but use them as a tool for guidance.
Think Wolf of Wall Street mentality – if you say, “Yes” every day instead of “No” your brain will think of ways it can achieve something rather than excuses for why it can’t.
Don’t Sweat the Failures
Guess what? EVERYBODY fails. Every single major entrepreneur in the world has failed before they’ve experienced success.
So don’t beat yourself up if you don’t quite achieve a goal in the time frame that you wanted.
Instead, think positive and deconstruct. Figure out why you didn’t get there, what didn’t work, what might have gone wrong and create a new plan for achieving your goal that addresses these issues.
Cross them off that List
Not sure of the psychology behind it, but damn does it feel good when you physically strike a line through an achieved goal on your list.
So cross them off! It will leave you feeling empowered and ready to tackle a whole new goal.