This is How You Can Stay on Track with Your Goals

I bet you set yourself some New Year’s resolutions back in December. I bet they were awesome. I bet you told yourself that this year, you were going to accomplish them. No matter what. And that you were going to stay on track with your goals. This time for sure!

So how is it going now? Are you still working on your goals? Or have you completely forgotten about them? Have they gone back to their usual “maybe-next-year” status?

Does it help if I tell you that you’re not the only one who forgets about her goals? Actually, around mid-January, most of us begin to forget those goals we set at the beginning of the year. Why? Because we’re back to getting up early to go to work, take the children to the school and we’re back to trying to keep all the pieces together. We’re back to letting our routine take control of our lives. And that means that by the end of the month, we’ve already talked ourselves out of the things we’d love to do. Our goals. Our dreams.

But do you really want to give up again on yourself just because most people do? Or would you like to actually change your mindset and take action… ‘Cause you can if you want to!!

3 ways to stay on track with your goals

♥ Adapt your goals to shorter periods of time – Setting yourself goals for a whole year lets the whole planning look too intangible once the New Year’s bells and whistles are forgotten. You’ve probably heard about how convenient it is to make plans in bite-sized chunks. That is, instead of setting yourself that incredibly unreachable goal which should take the whole year, you’d rather think in quarterly periods of time. Otherwise, you’re probably gonna end up frustrated and will forget all the good stuff you had planned to achieve. Think one step after another.
Brian P. Moran, author of The 12 Week Year, wants us to “redefine” our year to be 12 weeks long – with smaller goals to reach. And once this new 12-week “year” is gone, a new one begins. With the whole planning enthusiasm that a New Year brings!

♥ Make some plans beforehand – Ironically enough, the first weeks after a break are a bit counterproductive: we have to catch up with everything we stopped doing before the break. So, before getting to work, we have to remember what we were doing. What we wanted to achieve. And how we wanted to do it. We convince ourselves that – this time – it will be different. That once we catch up, we’re going to work toward achieving those goals which now seem so far in the past.
So how can we avoid this? Before taking your well-deserved break, make a list of everything you want to do when you come back. Write everything down as if it were for another person – otherwise, you’ll forget what you meant. And, above all, be kind to yourself, you don’t want to end that positive energy too quick!

♥ Get a big vision board – I always thought it was a bit of a waste of time… But it does help having your goal in front of you every single day. Otherwise, you may forget what our vision was. And life happens. We forget. We may have a high-dreamy-goal-setting-time again after the summer break, but this one disappears even quicker than the New Year resolutions.