How to set goals you actually achieve!

The turn of the new year is always a good opportunity to set some new goals for the year ahead. I’m a massive planner and love to set yearly goals, hide them away and return to them in December to see how well I have done and I will be doing the same this year. 

However as well as having yearly goals, I also like to set myself monthly and weekly targets to keep myself on track. These go in my diary each week and I reflect on them every Sunday when I write my new goals. 

Incase you wanted some help with planning and goal setting yourself, I though I would take you through the goal setting exercise I complete every Sunday so that you can use it too. 

1. Categorise

I like to categorise my goals so that I can stay focused and feel like I am achieving more. I will always have a work goal, this is usually something to do with the NET membership, or someone I’m looking to connect with that week. Then I will always have a fitness goal, I might use my game reflections for this, or reflect on my general mood towards exercise and nutrition the week before. Finally I will have a personal goal, this is always something I promise to do for myself to give myself a break, a bit of me time or time to reconnect and spend with loved ones. 

2. One goal ONLY

It’s really easy to set lots of intentions and goals for the week. But 7 days is not long enough to commit to everything you want to achieve. So I limit each category to one goal for the week. I make sure that it is realistic and achievable taking into consideration how busy I am that week too. 

3. Plan the week

When I know what goals I have, I can then go onto booking them into my diary to keep myself accountable. If my personal goal is to see my nieces and nephews, I will book in a time to go and see them to make sure that it happens. If I have planned to improve my cardio, I will plan a run at a time I know I can stick to and achieve. Once it’s in the diary, I find it really hard to cancel it so this helps me stay accountable to myself. 

4. Reflect

I like to reflect after I’ve set my goals for the next week as I don’t like my past goals to influence the week ahead. If I have had a bad week and haven’t managed to stick to my intentions for that week, the worst thing would be for me to feel like I need to play catch up and set the same goals again. There’s a reason why I didn’t reach them, whether I got busy, needed more time to myself, felt unwell or anything else – so there is no use beating myself up and getting stuck in a cycle of setting goals I can’t achieve. Instead I reflect on them, find reasons why they were unachievable and move on. Chances are they were either unnecessary goals, or will become new goals in the future anyway. 

Remember you don’t need any fancy equipment for this. I like to use my diary as a daily reflection journal and use the ‘Sunday’ section to write my goals for the week so that they can be hidden away and not too much of a reminder. You might like to have them on show to keep them accountable so you could write them on a post-it notes or a document on your computer that opens up automatically when you switch on for the day. 

Whatever method you choose, remember that goals are there to help you to feel good so don’t be hard on yourself or beat yourself up if you don’t reach them. Reflect, reassess and move on!