“If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail”
Happy New Year Bodylogix community! Beginnings are a great time to start fresh
- Mondays: the start of a new week
- Birthdays: the start of a new stage of your life
- In this case, the temporal landmark we’re celebrating is the beginning of 2022: the start of a new year.
Psychologists have studied the phenomenon of setting goals during temporal landmarks extensively. Not only did they find that people are more motivated to pursue their goals on certain dates, but they coined the term “the fresh start effect” to describe our tendency to attribute negative traits and failures to our past selves, while maintaining a positive image of our current selves as we look to the future.
They also explained that people are more motivated to pursue their goals at time periods when they feel like their past failures and who they “used to be” are behind them, and their future successes and selves – the “new year, new me” – is ahead of them.
And a fresh start sounds really good right about now, doesn’t it?
However, unsurprisingly, you may know many who have failed to follow through with their new goals.
Here are our top three tips on how you can better adhere to your goals to achieve success:
- Goal Tracking – Accomplishing a large goal becomes easier when you have established a road map to get there.
Break down your large, long-term goal into smaller goals you must achieve along the way. If you have a yearly goal, break it down into what you can accomplish each month, then break that down further into what you can accomplish each week, and you can even break it down further into daily goals. This way, you can also track your progress in a measurable way, which can provide a visual of just how much you have accomplished at each time period. Adding those up and seeing the progression and your accomplishments will motivate you to keep killing it!
- Accountability – Holding yourself accountable to your goals will help you stay on track and the best way to do that is with someone you trust.
Find a friend or two who can help you stay on track and keep you accountable. You can meet up for coffee once a month and all talk about the progress you’ve made, the challenges and failures, and if you need to evaluate your goals and adjust them. Some people find tracking apps help them to stay on track and the online community on them helps hold them accountable and gets them excited to share their progress every time they log. The consistent support you can receive from your friend, family, co-workers, or online community is invaluable when it comes to helping you achieve your goals.
- Visuals – Having a visual display of your goals and your progress is one of the best and most efficient ways to remember your status and see where you can improve.
As mentioned above, I can't tell you enough how helpful and encouraging it is to see ourselves progressing, and the best way to see that is through visuals. Our brains process images differently than lists and bullet points. The best example of this is the large thermometer we often see non-profits use to visually demonstrate how much money they’ve raised. Images are a quick, clear display of how we are doing, and they can be fun to make. If you and a couple friends are each other’s accountability partners, you could even make a fun night out of creating some kind of visual trackers together.
Remember, goal setting is fun and it can move you forward in life, but you have to have a solid follow-through strategy.
So, Happy New Year and let’s achieve our goals this year together!
